Will the European Union finally come to terms with its ambiguity?

Who doesn't know this quote from Cardinal de Retz: «ambiguity can only be overcome to one's detriment».» ?
This is undoubtedly why, for more than seven decades, our diplomats have been keen to refine the ambiguity of their European construction.

An interstate Europe that is as ambiguous as it is misunderstood by its citizens

The curious «federation of nation states» evoked by Jacques Delors, so close to an oxymoron, sums up the situation. Having largely taken the place of the people in building a Europe to their own specifications and under their direct control, these States, though democratic (i.e. «of the people, by the people and for the people»), easily qualify as «populists», this time without any concern for ambiguity, the detractors of the current institutional system on which they have built Europe. The denunciation is certainly justified when it comes to principled opponents of European integration. But critics of the shortcomings and inadequacies of today's European Union do not deserve to be singled out when they rail against an inward-looking state and an administrative vacuum from which the citizens, beyond a European Parliament curiously elected by diversified national ballots, are essentially excluded. How can we prove them wrong? For this «federation of nation states», which can easily be described as an ’unidentified political object«, has remained, beyond its own merits and its sometimes unexpected achievements, utterly ambiguous.

Its budget, still capped at 1% of GDP, is in no way federal, even though its Member States confiscate half of Europe's GDP, while adding up public debts that have become abysmal. Such disproportion largely explains these deficits by multiplying duplication and preventing any economy of scale to the detriment of all Europeans. The euro, the only federal achievement of the European Union, provides immunity from currency disturbances but has not been accompanied by any serious economic convergence, due to the lack of a spirit of collective responsibility on the part of the Member States and the laxity of a European Commission without sufficient authority. The creation of the euro has curiously placed the ox at the back of ploughs that have remained divergent, digging in their furrows the public deficits that correspond to the price of impossible devaluations!

Another oddity of the single market of free movement without borders is that it has no common European customs officers at its external borders. The Member States have not accepted that their national customs could be supplanted by a unified European system. Illegal immigration, fraudulent imports and trafficking of all kinds are the only beneficiaries of this situation, to the detriment of Europeans themselves! Nor has this so-called single market been equipped with a common tax framework, to the advantage this time of floating capital from all horizons but to the detriment of most Europeans, who are forced to endure abusive increases in their own taxes.

The de-industrialisation of this unbalanced Europe has not ceased to accelerate, fuelled by a Commission that has long been hostile, in the name of misinterpreted competition, to large-scale European groupings, in other words to the promotion of competitive and innovative champions. Their current inadequacy severely penalises European industry in the face of external competitors of a different scale and aggressiveness, for whom our vast internal market has remained wide open.

Moreover, there is no mutual preference between Europeans when it comes to public procurement, due to a restrictive interpretation of the GATT rules that are so easily circumvented by our external competitors. This is particularly obvious in the case of military equipment, where most Member States prefer to buy from the United States, which has more than one means of pressure, starting with its undivided control of NATO, to force them to do so.

This situation, so detrimental primarily to French equipment manufacturers, has for ages prevented any prospect of an autonomous European defence. Donald Trump's incessant threats, intimidation and invective against Europeans, whether in relation to free trade, NATO guarantees, the appropriation of Greenland, the defence of Ukraine or the very justification for the European Union, demonstrate the strategic, economic and defensive absurdity of such dependence, which has remained unchanged since 1945, despite the fall of the communist regimes in Eastern Europe thirty years ago!

An interstate Europe with no reverse gear and no forward gear

This congenital ambiguity has led some people to try and get out of it by going backwards, while others have tried to go up a gear. It has to be said that they have all failed.

For its part, the United Kingdom opted for a bottom-up exit by opting for its Brexit. In the end, it was left totally isolated, weakened by the costly and unpopular burden of obsolete administrative constraints. All the polls show that the British people now bitterly regret it, deceived by anti-European politicians who no longer hesitate to admit the pretence and deception of their own campaigns. As for the European Union, it has been politically weakened, even if the proven cost of Brexit for those leaving the EU has acted as a salutary deterrent to potential emulators.

Other Member States have tried to come out on top, in other words to build a federalising Europe. Germany proposed this twice, first to President Mitterrand in cohabitation with Edouard Balladur, then to President Chirac in cohabitation with Lionel Jospin. But all it got was a deafening silence, shared twice by our leaders on both the right and the left. In particular, we can see a persistent national concern to preserve, after historical ups and downs in all directions, the full status of associate of the victors of 1945, sealed by an irremovable national seat on the UN Security Council. A final, clumsy attempt by Chancellor Olaf Scholz on this sensitive issue seemed to put an end to any further debate on the subject, with France taking refuge behind symbolic support for an additional seat for Germany, a support devoid of any credibility in the face of other global contenders and of any coherence with regard to a unified European foreign policy.

To complete the debacle of a «top-down» exit, the bowling of divided French political parties, with public opinion fooled by shameless and unwelcome criticism of the very provisions of the 1957 Treaty of Rome, led to the rejection in a 2005 referendum of Germany's cherished European Constitutional Treaty, even though it had been prepared under the auspices of Valéry Giscard d'Estaing and co-signed by all the governments. In the end, this situation convinced Germany to reorient itself towards other objectives, this time primarily national. The symbolic but half-hearted attempts of the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, the eventual anniversary of the 1963 Elysée Treaty, did nothing to change this. This cooling of Franco-German relations will have completed Europe's stalemate.

An interstate Europe absent and a victim of global upheaval

While Europe was mired in its divisions and contradictions, losing more authority and competitiveness every year, the world continued to change at an accelerating pace. While China was consolidating its position as a superpower at an astonishing rate, Putin's Russia returned to the Soviet spirit and methods by eliminating all its internal opponents and invading Volodymyr Zelensky's Ukraine, guilty of democratic national autonomy and collusion with the European Union.

After four terrible years, as devastating as they were hopeless for both sides, the impulsive and brutal Trump presidency called into question American support for Ukraine by passing on the bill and the responsibility to the Europeans, with customs threats to back it up, while imposing the indecent spectacle of his personal rapprochement with Putin.

To complete the tragic picture, the American attack on Iran, at the behest of Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu, who no longer hesitates to attack his regional neighbours without restraint, confirmed the failure of the UN balance in the face of the return of brutal powers in all directions, with the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz creating an energy crisis, economic uncertainty and unprecedented international tension.

Faced with all these upheavals, the European Union, although a collateral victim of this calamitous situation, remained blissfully inert, forgotten on the sidelines in the face of conflicts everywhere and massacres of all kinds. The alternative of talks between the British, French and Germans, with no tangible results, was no more successful, except as a nostalgic reminder of the old days when, before they tore each other apart, the chancelleries of Europe dominated the world.

Citizens legitimately seeking a Europe that is valued and respected

For Europe to once again count in today's world, it must regain political confidence and popular legitimacy, by reconciling itself with its own citizens beyond the specific interests of individual states, by giving them new reasons to feel a common identity and to regain confidence in renewed competitiveness, impact and international success. Sadly, we are a long way from achieving this, probably even further than we were twenty-five years ago.

In the absence of any chance of envisaging a new treaty to recast Europe, which would be illusory with twenty-seven Member States, the time now seems ripe, for want of anything better but not for want of hope, to return, in the pragmatic words of Robert Schuman at the start of the construction of Europe, to new «de facto solidarities».

 Four new forms of solidarity are needed, even if only at the level of a core group of European countries, at the forefront of which is a Franco-German axis that has finally been reconciled, recast and activated: a unified defence that is finally autonomous, a foreign policy that is finally common, a reindustrialisation that is finally active, and a civic identity that is finally credible.

An autonomous unified defence and a common foreign policy can only go hand in hand. They have become a priority in the face of Vladimir Putin's increasing aggressiveness and Donald Trump's gradual abandonment. France and Germany would set an example if France stopped clinging to its tricolour patch in isolation and concluded a bilateral pact ensuring that the positions expressed by France at the UN Security Council would henceforth be expressed in their common name. This founding act, ensuring a genuinely new vision of the realities of the present and the imperatives of the future, would enable the two countries to inaugurate a common foreign policy, paving the way for a corresponding unified defence. It would finally give Europe, as was the case in other times, the backbone it so cruelly lacks today. In so doing, it would defrost many things within the European Council of the twenty-seven and open up unprecedented prospects for the whole of the European Union!

A unified defence in which France and Germany take the first step would fundamentally change the attitude of external powers towards us, while having a direct impact on the renewed competitiveness of European technologies, with positive consequences for our entire industry. This innovative re-industrialisation, on a par with our biggest international competitors, could only be vigorously supported by the European Commission, which finally seems to understand the urgency of the matter, having stated its objective of pushing it back to 20% of GDP, after so many years of blindness and decline.

Nothing will be possible without directly involving all citizens in such a renewal of Europe. To date, however, almost everything has been done to alienate them and to provoke the anti-European reactions that have been condescendingly described as populist: the technocratic and anonymous obscurity of Brussels communiqués, the media's lack of interest in European political life, the usual assimilation of European countries with other foreign countries (as illustrated by the current name of our «Ministry of Europe and Foreign Affairs»), television weather bulletins locked within their national borders, the absence of any European decoration (those with which, as Napoleon said, «one leads men»), etc.

On the other hand, could we not provide Europeans with the means to open up to each other about their respective political data, their approaches to Europe, their internal debates, their own motivations and their cultural particularities? Yet such an objective would be within our grasp if our information and communication media were to agree to play the game by relying on the artificial intelligence revolution that is breaking down the language barriers that have hitherto prevented the emergence of a multicultural European spirit and any appropriation of Europe by Europeans themselves, beyond the filters of their own States. The political consequences of such an upheaval for all Europeans and for new common perspectives would be unprecedented!

Will the interstate system that blocks progress eventually give way to a federal system that liberates?

Talleyrand was right when he observed that «those who do not have the means to achieve their ambitions have all the worries». And none of the benefits! Today, this common-sense observation applies as much to France and each of the other Member States taken individually as, conversely, to Europe as a whole. In today's world, France and each of its neighbours no longer have the national means to fulfil ambitions that have become illusory. Europe, on the other hand, does have them, but remains stubbornly hampered by the inability of its Member States to grant it the resources to match its legitimate ambitions. Where is the mistake? And why do our States persist in refusing to see the world as it is today, just as they refuse to see their Europe as it should be to protect and enhance Europeans in this new world?

Ronald Reagan dared to say that the State is not the solution but the problem. In today's Europe, the problem is multiplied by twenty-seven! Will we be able to respond by simplifying these twenty-seven problems into a single one? And could we not, in so doing, turn the problem into a solution, in the form of an intelligently proportioned federalism, ambitious for Europe, effective in its decisions, liberating energies, competitive in its results, mindful of the expectations of its citizens, autonomous in its security, respected by other powers, influential on the world stage, and, in so doing, once again popular with its own citizens?

Such is the still unrealized, if not necessarily unrealistic, project of a United States of Europe, sabotaged to this day by nation states jealous of their vain prerogatives and fought against by small-minded nationalists from another era, wrongly rejecting any imperative of a necessary European nationalism, in the service of a new Europe capable of making a useful contribution to the return of world peace, the promotion of freedoms and the primacy of international law.

While we wait for those better days, and to prepare ourselves for such a prospect, which is certainly unlikely today, but not forbidden in a future that, as in the past and as always, we can neither foresee nor insult, let's wake up and justify hope by already multiplying our «de facto solidarity»!