Mere days into his new
presidency, Emmanuel Macron is already demonstrating he has lost none of his
towering ambition.
Speaking to the European Parliament in Strasbourg,
Macron – in the midst of a vast war on the European continent, do not forget –
proposed a new political community for the continent, to sit alongside the EU. A community, he said, that “would adhere to our values to find
a new space for political cooperation”, and would be open to those not yet in
the EU and those who had left.
اضافة اعلان
It is no surprise who he was talking about: Ukraine,
a country desperate to be let into the EU, and the UK, which recently stormed
out. To difficult questions, Macron had big answers. The only trouble is that
they are answers no one wants. France’s philosopher king is a grand thinker,
but one doomed to live in an age of pragmatism. The issues that plague Europe
today are big – but they have already existing solutions.
The trouble for Macron is that the Russian war
against Ukraine has ushered in a new age for Europe, one where grand ideas and
theories are little match for the desperate urgency of solving wars and
economic crises. He ought to be familiar with this from his own bruising
election, which turned the cost of living crises and other domestic issues
inside France. But with the election over, Macron has turned his gaze outward,
and is already offering grand ideas, unaware the world has shifted.
Far from NATO being “brain dead” – as the French president once declared – most of Europe now sees it as both alive and essential to their survival.
For all of Macron’s talk about a new “structure” for
Europe, the structure that Europe has is working well, and few appear to be
inclined to change it. On the contrary, Finland and Sweden, far from seeking a
new way of relating to their neighbors, are actually giving up their old way of
relating and tying themselves to the continent’s existing security structures.
Both Finland and Sweden are expected to make the
crucial decision to join NATO within days, something long thought unlikely
until the Russian invasion. The same is true of France’s long-running argument
for greater European “independence” – by which Macron means from the US. Macron
has always been Europe’s most forceful advocate for the continent being in charge
of its own security, and not reliant on the superpower across the Atlantic.
Again, the Russian war has shattered that notion.
Most European countries are more convinced than ever before that NATO is the
security architecture of their future. It may be hard for a nuclear-armed
country like France to recognize, but for smaller countries along Russia’s
border, their situation suddenly feels more precarious, and they want the
military heft of an American-backed NATO to feel comfortable. Far from NATO being
“brain dead” – as the French president once declared – most of Europe now sees
it as both alive and essential to their survival.
This is especially the case since the war has shown
starkly that the “hard power West” – meaning the US and the handful of European
countries able to defend themselves with advanced weapons, fighter jets and
nuclear deterrents – are extremely selective to whom they offer that umbrella.
For all the warm words about Ukraine being a European country, not a single
American, British or French soldier has been put in harms way to defend
Ukraine. Other smaller countries will have seen and understood that message
perfectly. They will expend their political energies to get inside that
existing club, not to create a brand new club whose rules of engagement have
never been tested.
The same is also true of EU accession. By proposing
a new Europe-wide group, the French president is trying to solve a very
particular and thorny problem, namely that, as he admitted, Ukraine is perhaps
decades away from sufficient reform to join the EU. The same is true of
countries in the Western Balkans, or even Turkey, none of which are likely to
reform sufficiently for the EU in the coming years.
For those countries, however, an EU-lite is not the
answer. They want EU accession. Meeting Macron in Berlin this week, even the
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz stressed that Macron’s “interesting approach”
would not change the basic reality of the accession process for the Balkans.
The same is even true for the suggestion that
members who have left – rather obvious code for the UK – could join this new
community. But again, there already is an answer. Those within the UK who still
hanker for the EU do not want a replacement – they want to return to the EU.
And those still vehemently opposed to the EU are hardly going to start the
process of rejoining some other, EU-lite community.
The Ukraine war has even buried the most
forward-thinking ideology for which Macron was an advocate, the idea that
Russia could be part of Europe’s security architecture.
During Macron’s first term, while Britain was
profoundly suspicious of Russian intentions and Germany was locked in an
unhappy embrace, it was France that championed the idea that Russia could have
a new relationship with Europe.
All that has gone, burned away in the war zone
around Ukraine. Instead, the old idea has resurfaced – that Russia is a threat
first and last, and only a determined military build-up can keep Moscow at bay.
Macron has always vaunted his intellectual credentials,
believing that gravitas could build a new world, even without Germanic money or
American arms. But the war in Ukraine has shown the limits of this new world,
where the answers are already known and the only unknown is the political will
to achieve them.
The writer is currently writing a book on the Middle East
and is a frequent commentator on international TV news networks. He worked for
news outlets such as The Guardian and the BBC, and reported on the Middle East,
Eastern Europe, Asia and Africa.
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