The European Union in the face of crises: a strong or a weak link?

Europe continues to face an unprecedented number of crises.

France is undoubtedly the most striking illustration of this today, following its parliamentary dissolution that was as unexpected as it was surreal, giving birth to a National Assembly divided into three blocs that are as minority as they are hostile. This deadly triangle is strangely reminiscent of "the good, the bad and the ugly" confronting each other at the centre of a derelict graveyard, in this case that of three trillion euros of debt accumulated and buried over nearly fifty years!

Despite its less troubled political and budgetary fundamentals, Germany is no longer the best pupil in the class. The first victim of the energy backlash against Putin's Russia, it is now faced with an ageing industrial model and sluggish growth. Worsening social tensions and the electoral rise of the eurosceptics of the AFD, symmetrical to that of the RN in France, are now forcing it to review its immigration policy from top to bottom, to the point of reintroducing controls at its own borders, sweeping away the freedoms now lost under Schengen!

To complete the picture of this contest of lost illusions, Thierry Breton, hitherto the valiant commissioner responsible for the single market and the standard-bearer of all the battles for "European sovereignty", is slamming the door in the face of the new Commission and its renewed president Ursula von der Leyen, with whom disputes have been mounting in recent years.

A Europe with more reports than successes

Beyond these setbacks and emblematic problems, the whole of the European Union is in a bad way. Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine is becoming increasingly intense and destabilising on its eastern borders. Its dependence on the United States for security, still as essential as ever, is further weakened by the election campaign across the Atlantic and growing tensions with China in the Pacific. In all its member countries, there is a general rise in euroscepticism, tensions and political and social radicalisation. Finally, framing this gloomy picture, the European economy appears to be structurally weakened by the changes and all-out competition of a "new world".

The Draghi report commissioned by the European Commission has brutally underlined Europe's decline in the autumn of 2024, based on a series of findings and graphs, each more damning than the last. As a result, Europe finds itself downgraded from the podium of champions, and could even be relegated to the Paralympics in the future as a result of its persistent handicaps. Unfortunately, this new report is the umpteenth to illustrate the same story of the decline of a Europe undermined by its internal divisions and outstripped by its external competitors.

More than forty years ago, in other words two generations ago, the Albert-Ball report of 1983 had already warned, through a succession of unvarnished comparisons, of the worrying lag of "non-Europe" in relation to its main competitors, namely the United States and, at the time, Japan. His observations were similar to those of the Draghi report, particularly on the growing insufficiency and dependence in the sectors and technologies of the future. Its warnings were just as similar, with the eternal "tomorrow will be too late". Finally, the same recommendations were made, stressing the need to increase common resources and reform decision-making methods. The only thing missing then, as now, was the operational plan to make the change a success.

A serious but not desperate situation

However, the Albert-Ball report was deprived of this operational plan for only a short time. Two years later, Jacques Delors, having taken over the presidency of the European Commission, rekindled the flame with the Single Act and his plan for a single market by 1992, followed by the Maastricht Treaty inaugurating the euro, while the unexpected fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 paved the way for German reunification and then continental enlargement.

We are still benefiting from the threefold giant leap forward that European integration has achieved, even if over the last thirty years the Union has become too complacent on the laurels of the past. Each Member State has continued to be endowed with a dual system of effective governance that puts unavoidable pressure on it at European level, and since the Covid crisis has been backed by a common debt.

For the twenty-seven Member States, the European Union remains the central link in a chain of solidarity formed by the Central Bank, the Council, the Commission and the European Parliament. No national government or parliament in the Member States can escape this "magic square". But the question remains: in the face of so many crises, is this Union a strong or a weak link?

In the current French situation, where France has temporarily escaped with a severe warning from the Commission, this chain of solidarity protects us and shields us from the serious economic and financial crisis, with its trail of devaluations and instabilities, that our unprecedented political situation and our abysmal debt would otherwise have inflicted on us.

This European framework has prevented France from going off the rails and has safeguarded its chances of starting up again on a sound footing. On the other hand, it will undoubtedly have contributed to anaesthetising France too much, by making it easier to postpone reforms that were essential and which are now all the more urgent, whatever their demands if we are to regain our equilibrium.

However, this framework will have to be more than just a safeguard, it will have to become a driving force enabling France and its European partners to emerge from their calamitous situation.

Persistent mistakes to be avoided

Because Europe can no longer afford to fail: the strategic error has already occurred and cannot be repeated indefinitely. This precedent was set by the emblematic failure of the "Lisbon strategy" launched almost a quarter of a century ago, a failure from which all the lessons must eventually be learned.

The European Council meeting in Lisbon in March 2000, at a time of political détente and economic growth, set itself the goal of becoming "the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world" by 2010.

In addition to the hopes placed in the monetary union that had just begun, which was supposed to accelerate and complete economic union, the European Council had chosen to make use of an "open method of coordination" based on the evaluation and exchange of national "best practices", in other words emulation based on internal competition facilitated by the completion of the single market.

When the 2010 deadline arrived, we had to admit not only that the objective had remained utopian, but also that, due to a lack of integrated resources rather than mutual competition, the gap between our competitors in terms of economic and technological competitiveness had continued to widen. This predictable and obvious setback did little to prevent the European Union from pursuing a 2010-2020 programme based on the same illusions and the same mistakes. Twice the same blindness: should we be surprised that we now have to pay the bill?

Without a rapid change of course, this incomplete Europe looks set for an even darker third act, and the Draghi report sounds the alarm. Yet the 2024-2029 political guidelines "for a sustainable prosperity and competitiveness for Europe" presented by Ursula von der Leyen in support of her reappointment so far amount to nothing more than a catalogue of all-out good intentions, with nothing really to show for it. It shines not so much because of its thousand scattered lights as because of the lack of focus and mobilisation on an identifiable innovative ambition, backed up by common resources that are finally up to the task.

What new approach for our competitiveness?

For its part, beyond the dark side of an implacable regime forcing its society into a state of total control, China has succeeded over the last few decades in achieving an economic transformation that is scarcely believable. At the time of the Albert-Ball report in 1983, its GDP was less than half that of France. By 2001, when it joined the WTO, it was on a par with France. Today, its GDP is seven times that of France, equal to that of the European Union as a whole, and on a par with that of the United States! A political and economic power of the first order, developing its military equipment at breakneck speed and relying on all the new technologies, China now intends to challenge the United States for primacy in the Pacific zone, where growing tensions increasingly belie the semantic designation.

The European Union, for its part, no longer carries any weight other than on a global scale, as its individual states are no longer in a position to compete with such a giant. This is something that Emmanuel Macron clearly grasped when he called on Ursula von der Leyen to be present during his contacts with Xi Jinping, while Olaf Scholz had more difficulty coming to terms with Germany's own resizing in this new situation.

The Draghi report forcefully emphasises that it will not be enough for Europe to make its mark by adding up, but rather by integrating - a process that is still too incomplete - and by collectively winning back the new technologies. According to his calculations, catching up would require 800 billion euros of additional investment per year. But how can this be achieved with the Member States' public finances in a state of exsanguination and their still fierce opposition to getting the European budget out of its undersized state, capped for ages (as far back as the Albert-Ball report!) at a paltry 1% of GDP, when their own national budgets confiscate almost 50% of this GDP (while the US federal budget amounts to almost 25% of its own)?

Could we not then have recourse to European loans on the scale required, not only from the financial markets but also, with a great deal of publicity, from the European citizens themselves, thus opening up new outlets for their savings, a new dimension to their participation and an unprecedented reality to economic and monetary union, which to date has remained mainly monetary, insufficiently financial and more semantically than authentically economic?

What new approach to security?

These European loans should give pride of place to the imperatives of rearming our defence, which is essential in the face of worsening international tensions and, first and foremost, in the face of Putin's Russian aggression against Ukraine, which in recent years has called into question the entire security and stability of the continent.

The effectiveness of this rearmament will require harmonised bases, with mutual opening of defence procurement markets, currently excluded from Community rules, and a European preference in this opening. Without calling into question the Atlantic Alliance or the NATO umbrella, it is time to build an autonomous European defence, admittedly in partnership with the United States but no longer strictly dependent on it. In this context, the extension of France's nuclear deterrent to the entire European Union is essential.

What new approach to our identity?

Pooling our resources in this way to serve a new, mobilising European ambition, with adequate political, security and financial resources, would have a direct impact on our technological and competitive catch-up. It would give full meaning and content to the single market, which has so far been abusively reduced to mutual competition with little added value.

To complete, confirm and illustrate this affirmation of true European integration, shouldn't our customs officers at the Union's external borders be equipped with identical uniforms and brought together in a common organisation directly attached to the European Commission? You want the end, you want the means, and this is just one of them! For this is what is most sorely lacking in Europe today and explains, beyond all the graphs, why its political weight and competitiveness on a global scale are in increasing decline.

Jean Monnet had already observed that we only consent to changes and new ideas when there is a crisis on our doorstep. Will the multiplicity of current crises finally get the better of the rearguard resistance to these changes and new ideas on which the future of Europeans now depends more than ever?