Europe could die. Or it could fight...
Macron's Sorbonne speech is a challenge the incoming Labour government must heed
“Europe could die,” Emmanuel Macron told a gathering in Sorbonne. The strategy for survival he spelled out last week deserves careful scrutiny here, above all by the likely incoming Labour government.
First, because if successful, Macron’s vision for the European continent, not just the European Union, will condition the geopolitics of the Labour government. Second, because the speech – ranging from war to economics to climate – was a consummate exercise in the discipline of Grand Strategy.
In this edition of Conflict & Democracy I will summarise Macron’s logic, outline its implications for British foreign policy and suggest ways that Labour might adapt and emulate it.
The Sorbonne Speech
This was Macron’s second big Sorbonne speech. The first, seven years ago, was an upbeat plea for the EU to exercise sovereignty through co-ordinated security, defence, border and industrial policy.
Today’s conditions are much darker, as Macron acknowledged:
“At the end of the World War I, Paul Valéry remarked that we now know our civilizations are mortal. We must be clear about the fact that today, our Europe is mortal. It can die. It can die, and it all depends on our choices. These choices have to be made now.”
For Macron, “Europe” is not simply a collection of transnational institutions but a set of values which, he asserts, have “won the Gramscian battle” against populist nationalism (ie achieved the hegemonic status of common sense):
“To be European is not simply to inhabit a land, from the Baltic to the Mediterranean, or from the Atlantic to the Black Sea. It means defending a certain idea of man that places the free, rational and enlightened individual above all else. And it means realizing that from Paris to Warsaw, from Lisbon to Odessa, we have a unique relationship with freedom and justice.”
“We have always chosen to put Man, in the generic sense, above all else. And from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment to the fall of totalitarianism, this is what Europe is all about. It’s a choice that’s constantly reiterated and that sets us apart from the rest of the world.”
What threatens Europe, then, is a threefold disintegration of the circumstances in which the EU originally flourished:
the rules-based order governing globalised finance, digital technologies and free trade is disintegrating, leaving the EU as the only major player sticking to the rules;
the rules based governance of inter-state conflicts has collapsed, with the Ukraine war signalling major danger on Europe’s doorstep, because the defence of Europe is no longer the strategic priority of the USA;
the European values of humanism, universalism and democracy are not only being rejected by major powers, but coming under hybrid attack in Europe itself.
And because all this is happening in the context of exogenous shocks to the system, coming from climate change, the refugee crisis and the development of artificial intelligence, the EU’s systems are changing too slowly to meet the challenge.
Europe is at risk of collapse because its trade and industrial rivals – the USA and China – outcompete it, while its own rules prioritise internal competition; because its military solidarity, expressed through NATO and the EU, could disintegrate under an attack by Russia; and because the values of Chinese totalitarianism and American ethno-nationalism – promoted through digital disinformation – could triumph over the liberal, Enlightenment culture that the Sorbonne itself represents.
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