Contact us: info@strategic-culture.su

A conventional wisdom is sweeping across much of Europe as indignity is heaped upon it by the new imperator in Washington. Maybe Charles de Gaulle was right after all. Finally, it seems, France’s age-old push for “strategic autonomy” has found its moment. No longer simply an aspiration of the usual sovereigntists in Paris, but the stated ambition of the continent’s most stalwart Atlanticists in Berlin — and even, perhaps, London too.

The scale and speed of this geopolitical shift was captured by the incoming German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, when, responding to his party’s victory at the weekend, declared that his priority would be to “achieve independence from the US”. Once the archetype of a solid West German realist, Merz declared that Trump’s behaviour had left Europe with little choice. Two days previously, the CDU leader had even argued that Germany needed to begin discussions with Britain and France about “nuclear sharing” because the US could no longer be relied upon.

Nor is Britain quite as allergic as it once was to such talk. Following the emergency summit called by Emmanuel Macron last week to discuss the Trump administration’s opening of peace talks with Russia, Keir Starmer declared that Europe could no longer “cling to the comforts of the past”; it needed to take responsibility for its own security.

In Paris, were it not for France’s own political crisis, there might have been a sense of delayed gratification. For as early as 1962, de Gaulle had been clear about the purpose of what was then the Common Market. “What is the point of Europe?” the general asked. “The point is that one is not dominated by either the Russians or the Americans.” And so it seems today.

If anything, Macron’s speech has proved too timid. Back in 2017, he was calling for an autonomous European force capable of “complementing” Nato. Today, Germany’s Merz is questioning whether the trans-Atlantic alliance even exists in practical terms any longer.

The appeal of the Gaullist argument always lay in its apparent moral clarity and dignity. As Thomas Paine might have put it: There is something absurd in supposing a continent be perpetually governed by an Empire on the other side of the ocean. Perhaps, but the problem has never really been one of morality — rather the reality of national ambition lurking underneath. As de Gaulle said, Europe was not so much the means to make Europe great again, but France. It was, he said, the means for France to “become again what she has ceased to be since Waterloo: First in the world”.

Macron’s 2017 speech is a reminder that just beneath the European surface of French foreign policy lurks that old Gaullist national interest. As well as calling for European autonomy to protect the continent’s interests from an American withdrawal, Macron also called for the EU to develop a foreign policy focused above all on the Mediterranean and Africa, and for the euro to be placed at “the heart of Europe’s economic power in the world”. Neither of these priorities speaks in any way to the one country France would need to support a policy of European autonomy from the United States: Poland. In fact, the focus on the Mediterranean and Africa is a transparent attempt to use the power of the EU to pursue what are, in effect, French strategic concerns.

A regular complaint from American officials over the years has been that, despite repeated demands for European autonomy, there was never much interest shown in the practical realities of turning this into genuine continent-wide integration supporting any war for survival against Russia. It is notable, for instance, that Macron’s speech from 2017 focuses on threats from terrorism and instability in Africa but not Russia, despite the fact that it had already invaded and annexed land from Ukraine.

Even today, many of the old instincts remain. Starmer’s hopes for a new defence and security pact, for example, are currently being held up by discussions over fishing rights. Those close to Starmer remain deeply sceptical that there will be any significant change in the EU’s willingness to compromise its single-market “red lines” in order to forge a closer relationship with Britain’s defence industry — something which could be a key asset in developing European military-industrial capacity. “The French see no benefit opening up the market to British competition,” one British official put it. The simple fact remains that whatever the rhetoric coming out of Berlin, Paris or Brussels about nuclear deals and “resets”, the old red-lines of the Brexit negotiations remain: if Britain wants more than it has today, it will have to accept the EU’s rules.

Yet, de Gaulle was also a deeply flawed prophet, casting his country “into a role which was beyond her power”, as Britain’s ambassador at the time, Gladwyn Jebb, remarked. This remains a core challenge for Europe today. While there are questions of indignity and morality, there are also questions of means and will. France, Germany and Britain remain bound by fiscal and political constraints — many of their own making — which make any serious push towards strategic autonomy hard to take seriously.

Right now, Germany is in the fifth year of an unprecedented post-war economic stagnation, having seen each of the core planks of its geopolitical strategy ripped apart following the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Having bet the house on its export-led industrial economy, it was ultimately dependent on Russian gas, Chinese trade and American defence. Today the German economic model faces the existential challenge of losing all three of these core pillars in one go. Having also removed all nuclear energy in a gamble on renewables, and tied itself to the most extreme form of fiscal conservatism imaginable by shoehorning a “debt brake” into the German constitution, the incoming government’s room for manoevre is extraordinarily limited.

The initial results of the election suggest that Merz will not have the required two-thirds majority in the Bundestag necessary to remove the debt brake, making any significant uplift in defence spending extremely difficult. In July last year, the previous coalition government agreed to cut military aid to Ukraine by almost half to €4 billion in its draft budget for 2025, despite Olaf Scholz’s Zeitenwende — or turning point — speech declaring a whole new attitude to defence following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

In France, meanwhile, Macron has no majority in the National Assembly to pass any budget, and lost three prime ministers last year trying to do so. Faced with a blocking majority of the hard-Left and hard-Right, much of which is sceptical of the war in Ukraine and opposed to significant cuts to pensions or welfare, it is similarly difficult to see a path to significant defence spending increases in the foreseeable future — unless new elections later this year can break the impasse.

Even in Britain, which has the most parliamentary powerful government of the three major European powers, there are severe fiscal constraints against any rapid increase in defence spending of the sort required to achieve independence from the US. According to senior British officials, even increasing the budget to 3% of GDP would only strengthen the conventional forces we already have, allowing London to fulfill the role demanded of it by Nato. To fill the hole left by the United States — including, as Merz suggested, an independent European nuclear deterrent against Russia — would require an uplift of the order Trump has demanded: to 4-5% of GDP.

For any British government, such a choice is not only politically unfeasible, but far from obviously militarily desirable. As one senior official put it, in some of the core aspects of modern defence — from space, to drones and AI — European states dreaming of autonomy from the US could quickly look markedly unattractive to the UK, which may chose to partner with fast-moving, well-funded American programmes, rather than speculative, expensive and unproven European alternatives. These also come with the added risk that Britain could be “blocked at the last minute because Breton langoustine fishermen are unhappy”.

But as the spectre of de Gaulle looms over a Europe bickering over seafood, the continent should find inspiration in another figure: not the great man of France, but the founding father of modern Europe, Jean Monnet.

In his biography of the great statesman, François Duchêne sets out how Monnet used moments of crisis to pursue new ideas, rather than simply leaning on those old maxims of foreign policy: “He suspected history of being a crutch,” Duchêne wrote, “for those who hoped relying on it would be easier than thinking for themselves.”

Indeed, one of the interesting things about Jean Monnet is that he is not simply revered by Europe’s federalists as the founding father of modern Europe, the first to be given named an honorary “citizen of Europe”, but that he is also held up as icon among eurosceptic revolutionaries such as Dominic Cummings who see him as one of the geniuses of modern politics, able to give institutional life to his ideals. Monnet led a remarkable life: French official and European hero, but also a man of the Western order who was knighted by the British, worked for Churchill, proposed the union of Britain and France and was seen by de Gaulle as being too much of an anglo to be trusted.

The highest praise Monnet had for any statesman was that they were “generous”, the opposite of which he called the “spirit of domination” whereby these men seek only to further their immediate interests within their narrow positions of power. Looking out across Europe today, it is hard to see much generosity among its statesmen — or indeed any of Monnet’s genius for taking an idea such as “strategic autonomy” and making it real. For Monnet, in fact, one of the central purposes of the “Europe” he created was to keep together the Atlantic world and what he originally saw as its three component parts: the continent; the British Commonwealth; and the might of the United States.

There were, for Monnet, very few politicians who combined the skill of high office with the “generosity” to achieve results that went beyond immediate national interest. Without that generosity, Monnet argued, men turned too often to what he called “little solutions to big problems”. If there is a description of modern Europe’s predicament, it is this: a continent stuck in its old ways of thinking, still focused on its old red lines and petty nationalisms — and still lacking the generosity required to break free from the indignity of Trump’s domination.

In the summer of 1945, with Europe lying in ruins, Charles de Gaulle and Jean Monnet were the two dominant Frenchmen of the day. Having returned from a visit to Washington, the general and the “inspirer” as de Gaulle dismissively referred to Monnet, held a long discussion about the state of the continent. “You speak of greatness,” Monnet told de Gaulle, “but today the French are small. There will only be greatness when the French are of a stature to warrant it… For this purpose they need to modernise.” De Gaulle had returned from American stunned by the prosperity — and power — of the new hegemon. “You are certainly right,” he replied. “Do you want to try?”

The rest is history. But some things remain unchanged. Europe today is small and it will only achieve greatness when it assumes the stature to warrant it. Instead, no doubt, Berlin, London and Paris will argue about fish and plead for America to stay just a bit longer.

Original article: unherd.com