Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” was the soundtrack for Emmanuel Macron’s victory rally in front of the Eiffel Tower on Sunday. And fittingly so, for he is now the leader of Europe. His decisive re-election places him in pole position to take the helm not only of the European Union but of a wider European Project, embracing resistance to Putin’s Russia and reimagining relations with China and the US.
There is a big difference in politics—and in life—between being domineering and dominant. The EU was initially a French project in the Schuman Plan of 1950, and France has been domineering in the EU since its foundation as a comprehensive economic union in the Treaty of Rome of 1957, the year before de Gaulle assumed power in Paris. But France has not always been dominant. Its economy and population are far smaller than Germany’s, on a par with Britain’s.
British and German ambitions to liberalise and expand the EU in the 1990s and 2000s were largely successful, despite French unease. The single European currency, although a keen French project to tie Germany even more into Europe, was carried through on German terms, with the European Central Bank physically as well as symbolically located in the German financial capital of Frankfurt. The currency union owed as much to Kohl as to Mitterrand.
Britain’s decision to keep out of the euro paved the way for Brexit. The latest LSE study of UK-EU trade shows a precipitate decline in the number of small- and medium-sized UK companies trading with Europe, because of new red tape and customs and migration barriers. London remains far and away Europe’s biggest financial and business services centre, and that isn’t changing any time soon. But the opportunity is there for France to replace us as the second European economic power, if Macron can carry through his manifesto programme of economic modernisation and enable France to grow faster and harness a larger share of European trade. This is one great opportunity for Macron to project European leadership.
The second is defence. Hitherto, France has not dominated the European arm of Nato. Britain has generally been closer to the US than France has, and British “hard power” and its nuclear arsenal match the French. Britain remains a substantial European defence power despite Brexit, and in the Ukraine war Britain is more engaged in the continent’s military security than at any time since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
The potential expansion of Nato to include Sweden and Finland signifies a strengthening of US-European solidarity in the dimension of hard military power, with rising defence budgets and stronger military partnerships likely across the continent. It is another opportunity for Macron to lead in Europe.
Maybe a new European identity will be formed in Britain out of all those Ukrainian flags on people’s windows, cars and buttonholes, inspired by the struggle to free the country’s people from Putin’s clutches. However, it will take time. In the here and now, re-elected Macron is Europe’s strongest and most credible leader and interlocutor, in a different league to Boris Johnson and any likely British successor, and ahead of Olaf Scholz, a more vacillating figure and managing a far from stable three-party coalition in Berlin. The Ukraine war has thrust Macron to the fore as Europe’s principal articulator, east and west.
The key challenges for Macron are to drive an economic and social reform programme at home that makes France more powerful; and to align Nato and the EU behind a far stronger European defence and security commitment, with institutions to match. If he succeeds, not only will he lead Europe, but he will be its strongest leader since Kohl amid the unification of Germany and the creation of the euro a generation ago.
