‘Europe needs to wake up!’
Emmanuel Macron to the author, 21 July 2017
‘In every beginning dwells a certain magic.’ Germany’s Angela Merkel quoted these lines from ‘Stufen’, a poem by Hermann Hesse, when she welcomed Emmanuel Macron to Berlin on the evening of his first full day in office. The doyenne of European leaders, she was by then on her fourth French president, having worked first with Jacques Chirac in 2005. The link with her second, Nicolas Sarkozy, was volatile; with François Hollande, lopsided. The election of Macron, who praised Germany for ‘rescuing our collective dignity’ during the refugee crisis and whose supporters waved EU flags at rallies, came as a relief, a source of promise but also a reckoning.
In his first three months, Macron met Merkel nine times, more than twice as often as the leaders of the United States and Italy, and three times more than those of Russia and Great Britain. This was a return to the traditional European reflex of French presidents under the Fifth Republic. After the Second World War, France had dealt with its insecurities towards its mighty neighbour by building the European Union, a project through which it sought to bind in Germany and amplify French power. By pooling their steel and coal production, declared Robert Schuman, the French foreign minister, from the salon d’horloge of the Foreign Ministry in 1950, France and Germany would render war ‘not merely unthinkable, but materially impossible’. The French regarded shared sovereignty as a means of reinforcing, not undermining, their nation state, and the Franco-German axis was the foundation of the project. It was General de Gaulle and Konrad Adenauer, his German counterpart, who codified this link when they met in 1963 under the crystal chandeliers of the presidential palace to sign the Elysée Treaty. ‘My heart overflows and my soul is grateful,’ averred the General, adding that the treaty ‘opens the door to a new future for Germany, for France, for Europe and therefore for the world’.
Emmanuel Macron would probably not put it very differently. He twice took his election campaign in 2017 to Germany. The lanky, bearded former mayor of Le Havre who is now prime minister, Edouard Philippe, was educated at the French lycée in Bonn. The smooth-talking finance minister, Bruno Le Maire, is also a fluent German speaker. The president’s veteran diplomatic adviser, Philippe Etienne, arrived at the Elysée from Berlin, where he was ambassador. Sylvie Goulard, who was (briefly) Macron’s defence minister and is now deputy governor of the Bank of France, is well-connected in Germany. Macron has a long-standing fascination with German literature and culture, and considers the two countries ‘united’ by their common ‘taste for freedom and the universal, in art as in philosophy’.1 As a boy, he told Michaela Wiegel, one of the first books his grandmother gave him to read was the resistance novel Le silence de la mer by Vercors, about a cultured German officer quartered in a provincial French home under the Occupation, which was published secretly in 1942. ‘Civilization and culture,’ he said, ‘are stronger than the idiocies of certain leaders and the people who follow them.’
Macron and Merkel may make for an unlikely couple. He, hailing from the left, is grandiose, literary, florid and tactile. She, from the conservative right, is understated, scientific, cautious and reserved. But they have established a strong bond. They speak in English to each other, in their meetings or during their very frequent telephone calls. Before Macron gave a big speech on Europe at the Sorbonne in September 2017, he sent Merkel a draft to read through first. ‘She wants to trust France,’ claims one of his aides. ‘She’s very straight and technical. So you have to be precise, know your stuff, and follow up. He respects that. Whenever there’s a disagreement, he always talks to her first.’ Whatever the question in Europe, the first answer for Macron seems to be Germany.
The new French president took office determined to restore balance to what had become an uneven Franco-German relationship, tilted towards mighty Germany. His objective was to reach a ‘new deal’ with his neighbour, as part of a wider plan to transform the European Union from an object of indifference, frustration and disappointment into a project that can offer growth, jobs and meaning to its citizens. Macron summed up the core bargain he sought when he was still economy minister, with the phrase ‘€50bn of spending cuts for us; €50bn of investment for them.’ A fuller version goes something like this: France restores its lost credibility in German eyes by sticking to its promises to reform France; in return, Germany supports closer integration of the 19-member eurozone, with more fiscal convergence and joint investment, and in time some form of common budget, even finance minister and parliament, for the currency area. Despite a robust economic recovery in 2017–18, both countries recognize that the eurozone remains vulnerable to future financial shocks, and that growth is not what it could be. Where Paris and Berlin diverge is over what to do about it.
Macron’s first step was to keep to his word at home. ‘He will surprise them, because the Germans don’t believe it will happen,’ one of his aides told me shortly after he was elected. ‘They have been disappointed by France too many times before.’ Nobody in Berlin expected Macron to pass his labour reform without provoking chaos on the streets. They had heard too many French governments in the past promise reform only to back down. Nor was there much confidence that France would keep to its promise to bring down the government’s budget deficit to below 3 per cent in 2017. France’s chronic inability to do so over the years had become a source of German exasperation. The European Commission first slapped France on the wrist over this, under what is known as ‘excessive deficit procedure’ (EDP), in 2009. Successive French governments kept lobbying to be allowed to go on breaching the rules. When in 2015 the commission agreed to give France an extra two years to get its public finances in order, this was the third time it had indulged the French. By mid-2017 the commission had taken all offending countries out of the EDP, including Greece, bar two: Spain and France. Why would Berlin trust Macron to be any different?
Just days after the French election, the cover of Der Spiegel, a German weekly, summed up the views of many east of the Rhine. It featured Macron under the heading ‘Teurer Freund’ – which can mean either dear, or expensive, friend. In Berlin, French talk of greater integration is generally understood as a ‘transfer union’: a sort of giant sucking movement through which Europe’s profligate south would extract cash from the thriftier north. When France talks about more risk-sharing, Germany hears bigger bills to pay. When Germany insists on more control and rules, France hears a refusal to accept solidarity.
Macron called Germany’s bluff. He passed his labour reform four months after his election, followed it with tax cuts for businesses and investors, and delivered the first budget deficit below 3 per cent in over a decade. As a frequent visitor, Macron knew Germany well enough to know that it would take delicate nudging to get Berlin to shift. After sending a draft of his Sorbonne speech to Merkel, he ‘deliberately left open the technical implementation on some points’, he said, by which he meant his ideas on reforming eurozone institutions. Talk of eurobonds or debt mutualization, toxic in most German quarters, has been muted. Macron’s underlying strategy is nonetheless clear: the more reason that France can give Germany to trust it, the more it can hope to get from Berlin.
The French president’s ambitions for ‘transforming’ a dysfunctional eurozone, and the unloved European Union more broadly, are not modest. ‘Ambition is never modest,’ he told Der Spiegel. ‘If modesty means having middling success, then I can only say: I’m not interested.’ He seems to have cast himself as the man of the hour, less a king than a sort of modern-day de Gaulle, who will rescue Europe from its demons, and conjure hope from crisis. Around him, nationalists and populists are on the rise, sitting in government in Poland, Hungary and Austria, and in parliament in Germany, where they hold more seats than at any time since the Second World War. Forces of fragmentation, from Britain to Catalonia, are undermining the EU’s common purpose. Internal economic strains within the single-currency area are testing its unity. Instability on Europe’s southern shores and eastern borders threatens its security. Migrants from Africa’s Mediterranean rim menace its resilience. Macron surveys all this and concludes what exactly? Not that Europe is too divided, rigid, ageing or set in its ways to be able to hold its own. But that ‘France is back’, and with it Europe.
‘Europe needs to wake up!’ Macron told me in July 2017, the pitch of his voice rising. With the United States under Donald Trump volatile and morally adrift, Britain in retreat due to the all-absorbing complexities of Brexit, and illiberal powers on the continent’s doorstep, the French president senses an unusual – and probably brief – opportunity for the European Union: a chance to fashion a stronger centre, and reassert itself and its values as a guarantor of the democratic liberal order, but also as a place that needs to secure decent lives for its people. And, because there is a hidden romantic inside the French president, to help them to dream a little. ‘What world are we living in?’ he said to me. ‘Our responsibility is immense. We need to stop holding crisis summits around hyper-technical subjects. We need to define another horizon together. We can be the leaders of tomorrow’s world.’2
In this respect, Macron can sound quite impatient with his mighty neighbour. ‘Germany is faced with a real choice: whether it wants a European model with a German hegemony which isn’t durable, because it rests in part on courageous reforms that Germany did a dozen years ago, and in part on the imbalances in the eurozone,’ he told me. ‘Or whether Germany wants to participate with France in a new European leadership which rebalances Europe, with more solidarity and also a project of stronger convergence.’3 If the current situation of imbalances continues, he said, ‘Europe will fracture’. It was up to Germany, he argued, to decide ‘whether it is ready to join France in a remaking of Europe around a great moment of convergence’. As economy minister, he had battled against the German line (and his own president) to try to impose less harsh terms on a struggling Greece in order to keep it in the eurozone. Macron has no illusions about the price of failure. The choice, he judges, is about whether liberal democratic politics can prevail, and whether Europe can hold together.
In the autumn after his election, Macron laid out this vision in two landmark speeches. Before the backdrop of the Parthenon in Athens, and to an evening chorus of cicadas, he articulated the more lyrical and very Macronesque rendition. This was not the punchier version he later took to Davos, but a musing on Pericles, Hegel and History with a capital letter. Recalling words uttered by André Malraux, a writer and French former minister of culture, at the same spot in Athens in 1959, Macron spoke of these places of memory that ‘demand that we listen to them ... because it was here that the risk of democracy was taken’. Europe was built on the triumph of hope over failure, and unity over war. Yet new risks are emerging, old certainties fading. For too long, Europe’s leaders have failed to listen to their own voters, who rejected treaties and constitutions, and were simply made to vote again. ‘Did we listen?’ Macron asked in that speech. ‘No, we did not. Those who led Europe at the time decided not to respect their choice. They pretended nothing had happened, and sought compromises aside from the people, so as to continue a method that for decades had worked so well: building Europe a little to the side, and explaining it afterwards.’
Instead, Macron argued, Europe’s leaders need to repair the broken democratic link with their citizens, and find a new way to make the EU meaningful for them. Not by presenting them with structures and treaties designed only by experts and lawyers. Such technocrats have a job to do, but talk of summits and rules is what puts people off. Citizens also need to feel that they have their say, and that the EU works for them. Macron has his own grand designs, but he also wants to replicate his grass-roots ‘Grande Marche’ tactics across Europe. What actually matters to people? He has some ideas: the protection of data, online privacy, fair taxation of tech giants, safe food, clean air, easy and safe ways to travel, communicate, study and share with fellow Europeans. If those sound prosaic rather than visionary, Macron has an answer to that too. ‘Look at the time that we are sharing. It is the moment of which Hegel spoke, the moment when the owl of Minerva takes flight,’ he declared in Athens. ‘The owl of Minerva provides wisdom but it continues to look back,’ he declared, ‘because it is always so easy and so comforting to look at what we have, what we know.’ Instead of surveying the past, like the owl, he urged Europeans: dare to dream.
This was vintage Macron: grandiose, historically sweeping, overly intellectual, stylistically extravagant, baffling, but also admirable. It was the sort of speech that most other European leaders, Merkel among them, would never choose to make. What emerged from it was Macron’s unapologetic desire to line up with Europe’s thinkers and visionaries, not its technocrats. There are few questions that vex him more than being asked whether Europe needs a new treaty. Europe, he will reply irritably, is not primarily about institutions and rules: these are just tools, which should be at the service of grand ideas. Nor does he have much time for those who try to temper his ambition. Of course there will be discussions, debates and disagreements. His proposals are the start of a conversation. To get lost in the thicket of jargonese, or political bickering, or crisis management, is for Europe to lose its citizens all over again. Instead, the philosopher-president wants to get Europe to face the big existential questions first – what do its citizens want from it? what is its purpose? – and from there to work out how to achieve it.
For Macron’s second big presidential speech on Europe, he chose another seat of civilization: the great amphitheatre at the Sorbonne, a college originally founded in the thirteenth century, in the historic Latin Quarter of Paris. In an address brimming with ideas, both old and new, the French president described the EU as ‘too weak, too slow, too ineffective’, and spelt out a breathless list of policy ideas to transform it. The French love grands projets, and this speech was full of them: a shared European military budget, a European intelligence academy, a joint intervention force based on a ‘common strategic doctrine’, a European asylum office, a new agency for ‘radical innovation’, six-month exchanges for young people, an environmentally friendly carbon tax at the EU’s external border, a ‘trade prosecutor’, a eurozone budget and finance minister, fiscal harmonization, and more. If this speech was more technical, its impulse was nonetheless political. Macron reminded his audience that the ‘sad passions’ inflamed by ‘obscurantism’ were being awakened across the continent. Europe’s leaders, by blaming Europe when things went wrong and failing to give it credit for success, had to accept responsibility for having created the conditions for such forces to prosper.
The overarching message at the Sorbonne was threefold: that Europe needs to revive its democratic legitimacy; shore up its unity after a period of damaging division; and assert a new form of European sovereignty that will enable it to defend its values in the face of American clout and an assertive China. Europe’s leaders are not there to pander to popular anxieties. But they do need to take such fears into account, Macron argues, if voters are to start believing in Europe again. So global tech giants, whose technology brings benefits to consumers but also dislocates jobs, careers and work practices, should be made to pay their ‘fair’ share of taxes. And Europe should be able to protect itself from the dumping of Chinese steel, or to vet Chinese investment in strategic industries and infrastructure. ‘He believes that if you want to keep Europe open to trade and migration, you need to protect people,’ says an aide. Hence Macron’s mantra: a ‘Europe that protects’. The crisis of advanced capitalism that has unfolded since the financial crisis, he argues, requires a recalibration of the balance between the market and the state, between competition and protection, innovation and preservation. ‘I believe very profoundly in the innovation economy. I believe very profoundly in an open world,’ Macron told the Sorbonne students. ‘But an open world is only worth it if the competition that takes place there is fair.’ If Europe cannot protect its citizens, as well as offer them opportunities, fanaticism and extremism will continue to hold a dark fascination.
What might a Europe reshaped by Macron look like by 2024, the year that Paris hosts the Olympic games and by which he hopes to have helped bring it about? His starting principle breaks with French tradition in one important respect, by leaning in a federal direction. De Gaulle rejected the supra-nationalism envisaged by some of Europe’s founding bureaucrats, including France’s own Jean Monnet, in favour of a ‘Europe of nations’. Although the General denied ever using the phrase ‘Europe des patries’ that is often attributed to him, he did oppose supra-nationalism. Countries, he declared, could not simply be blended ‘like chestnuts in a purée’. This preference for an inter-governmental approach, whereby decision-making is done chiefly by nation states, has guided French policy on Europe over the years. The years of Europe’s federalist push under Jacques Delors, another Frenchman and head of the European Commission, which began with the Single European Act of 1986, were in many ways the exception. The wily François Mitterrand did back the creation of a single currency, which was written into the Maastricht Treaty of 1992, but not for ideological reasons: it was a means to counterbalance the growing might of a reunified Germany. Mitterrand had an almost obsessional fear of German unification, telling Britain’s Margaret Thatcher at a summit of European leaders that it felt like Munich in 1938. France was not ready to accept both a bigger Germany and the dominance of its currency; the creation of the euro to deal with the latter was Mitterrand’s condition for endorsing the former. French policy on Europe has traditionally been marked by a lingering Gaullist resistance to federal ideas, and a suspicion of the European Commission.
Macron approaches Europe with the French Finance Ministry’s more federal-leaning views. He is not only willing to talk about ceding sovereignty to a better integrated eurozone: he sees it as a condition for the strengthening of Europe’s core, if not its survival. Brexit, in some ways, provides both an opportunity and an impulse for continental Europe to do this, since integration involves lots of projects that the British instinctively dislike. Among the unintended consequences of Britain’s decision to leave the EU has been not only an enhancement of Europe’s popularity among other member states, and an improbable solidarity among the 27 other members, but also a willingness to think practically about what is known as ‘reinforced cooperation’. Under Macron’s multi-tier plan, the 19-member currency area would be deepened by harmonized rules and common projects, as well as – in time – new institutional structures. Other EU members would be arranged in a more flexible constellation, choosing to join certain integration schemes as and when they liked. No member would be forced to take part, but none would be allowed to hold back the more enthusiastic either. Binding this all together would be a strengthened common approach to certain matters central to EU unity, including border security, migration and asylum.
To secure political backing for his scheme, Macron is trying to reach beyond Germany. He sees his immediate neighbours often, and has toured Central and Eastern European countries that his predecessors largely ignored. He also hopes to bring En Marche-style disruption at elections to the European Parliament in 2019. The unloved parliament is generally perceived as a woefully remote gravy train, disconnected from voters and filled with second-rate, unknown legislators elected on a low turnout. Members of the European Parliament are elected nationally, yet they are supposed to represent a Europe-wide demos that does not really exist. They also now have real powers, among them voting rights over the selection of the commission’s head, a job occupied by Jean-Claude Juncker until 2019. If Macron wants to influence the make-up of the next commission, which acts as a sort of super-powered EU civil service, he needs to pull off what looks all but impossible: the creation of an En Marche-style European Parliament grouping, which peels away deputies from other established parties on the left and right, just as he did in France in 2017.
If France over the past 15 years has often been too weak a partner for Germany, the country in the coming years may turn out to be too ambitious. Macron’s wish list is dizzying. He knows that he needs to build relationships, and believes in working through multilateral institutions, to get things done. He may have said ‘I don’t think it’s possible to do great things alone’, but it’s not clear that he really believes this. There are shades of the self-belief of Nicolas Sarkozy about him, or Tony Blair, comparisons that raise their own concerns. Pascal Lamy, the French former head of the World Trade Organization, and a fine observer of political forces in Europe, told me that to understand Macron you need to know that ‘his method is motion’. His solutions may not be optimal, his vision ambitious. But he believes that once things begin to move, possibilities open up.
Does Macron stand any chance of setting off the motion he wants in Europe? Germany is not the only country sceptical about his plans for eurozone reform, which would ultimately require new institutions and some form of treaty. Other Northern Europeans too have their doubts about what Mark Rutte, the Dutch liberal prime minister, has called deeper integration and other ideas ‘coming from France’. It may be easier in the short run to make progress on less controversial elements designed to protect the currency area from future shocks, such as the transformation of the eurozone bail-out fund into a proper European Monetary Fund, as well as some form of common investment vehicle. Far more difficult will be winning Germany round to a substantial eurozone budget, which Macron would like to be worth ‘several points of GDP’, let alone a finance minister or parliament for the currency area.
Some ad hoc integration projects might well work. French officials point to defence cooperation as a model. An old idea, it was revived in the summer of 2017 as a joint Franco-German proposal, based on pooling some defence capabilities, such as rapid-reaction forces, as well as joint development work. Both France and Germany fret about Trump’s disdain for NATO, as well as the underlying, structural disengagement of the United States from Europe, and share a desire to strengthen European defence co-operation as a result. ‘We Europeans have to take our destiny into our own hands,’ Merkel declared when campaigning for re-election in 2017. By November that year 23 member states, including Poland, had agreed to what is known as Permanent Structured Cooperation (PESCO), designed to complement NATO and involving binding budget commitments.
Yet such initiatives will not transform Europe’s defence capability, which remains essentially guaranteed by the continent’s only two major military powers – Britain and France – under the North Atlantic security umbrella. As it is, the EU has its hands full containing trouble on its borders – from migration to Russian meddling – along with internal worries, from the independence movement in Catalonia to hard-line governments in Hungary and Poland. It may also be that Macron’s haste and ambition lead him to push too hard in ways that are divisive. He will rattle free-marketeers with his call for a ‘Europe that protects’. To Northern European ears, this smacks of old-style French protectionism and cuts against the principles of the EU’s single market. Such member states are sceptical too about the way Macron seems to regard the single market as a tool of convergence, rather than of competition, and his use of trade policy as a vehicle to protect citizens from the impact of globalization. They looked with concern at the way he nationalized a French shipyard in the summer of 2017, albeit temporarily, in order to renegotiate a Franco-Italian deal. Macron is willing to let go of French assets, it seems, but only if this creates European champions of the sort that can compete with Chinese and American rivals. Such a strategy has its own logic, but it will generate misunderstanding and conflict.
As it is, the French president’s scheme for a multi-tier EU, centred on an integrated eurozone, carries the risk that countries outside the single-currency area – which include Sweden and Denmark, as well as most of Central and Eastern Europe – will be treated as second-class states. This may turn some into difficult partners, and isolate nationalist governments outside the euro further still. Macron secured backing from Slovaks, Czechs, Romanians and Bulgarians for his reform of the ‘posted workers’ directive in 2017. Yet this also left damage in his wake, particularly in Poland. Beata Szydlo, who was then Polish prime minister, accused Macron of being ‘arrogant’ after he spoke out against her government’s infringement of liberties. If Macron is to contribute to European unity, he cannot afford to have too many brooding, resentful governments within the club.
And then there is Brexit. The French stress that this is neither a preoccupation for them, nor an issue that consumes much of their time. But negotiations over Britain’s departure will nonetheless continue to absorb EU energies, as the 27 member states work out what sort of arrangement they will offer Britain after it leaves in March 2019. On a trip to Britain in early 2018, Macron appeared at one point to have endorsed a ‘bespoke’ deal, raising hopes that he might be willing to cede some ground in Brexit talks. In reality, he has consistently kept to the EU-27 script. The French president regrets Brexit, claims not to want to punish Britain, and says France would welcome its cross-Channel neighbour back if the British people ever changed their mind. But he is clear that any deal for a country that chooses to leave the EU, which will by definition be ‘special’ even if based on a Norway or Canada-type trade agreement, cannot involve the same rights enjoyed by those who belong. Access means accepting the rules. ‘Europe is not a supermarket,’ he says. On this point, France and Germany understand the value of sticking together and are likely to hold their firm line, more so than other member states, not least because Paris still hopes to lure business from post-Brexit Britain, while Berlin wants to protect the integrity of the single market. Macron may be fond of the UK. He speaks English and has visited London often. But anybody in Britain who hopes that the French president can therefore be prised away from the EU line on Brexit negotiations is likely to be disappointed.
If Macron is likely to stick to the rule-book on Brexit, he is keen not to isolate Britain as a result. He warmed up a Franco-British summit at the UK’s Sandhurst military academy in early 2018 by offering to loan Britain the Bayeux Tapestry, telling guests at a reception, in English, how much he valued the close link that French and British people have forged by living, working and setting up home in each other’s countries. Macron values, and hopes to deepen, crucial Franco-British defence and intelligence cooperation after Britain’s departure from the EU. Hence the unusual meeting at Sandhurst between British Prime Minister Theresa May and President Macron, attended by the heads of all five of both countries’ intelligence services. The French president will not be willing to let the British government use future bilateral defence cooperation as a bargaining chip in discussions over a post-Brexit deal with the EU. But he does understand the importance of the Franco-British security tie – a genuine success built on the bilateral defence treaties signed at Lancaster House in 2010 – and is keen to ensure it survives Britain’s departure. It was in this spirit that, on the day he was elected, the second person he called after Angela Merkel was Theresa May.
If Macron can make a success of his European ambitions, or even some of them, he could reap big dividends. Diplomatic leadership is there for the taking. Merkel needs a stronger France to help share what Berlin considers to be the burden of EU leadership. Post-war Germany has never been comfortable with the idea of being the EU’s de facto leader, does not see itself as a world power, and has yet to entrench a new willingness to use force abroad. Britain in the foreseeable future will be too distracted by Brexit to be a fully engaged diplomatic partner. If Brexit goes ahead, France will become the EU’s only member with real military muscle: the only permanent member of the UN Security Council, the only country with an independent nuclear deterrent, and the only one that maintains a proper military force that can be sent abroad to fight at short notice. Despite an initial squeeze on military spending, Macron has promised to raise the French defence budget to 2 per cent of GDP by 2025.
How far might Macron be able to project such influence? The French leader arrived in the presidency new to foreign and security policy, and untested as commander-in-chief. During the campaign his foreign policy had to be invented from scratch, a process that one insider described as ‘shambolic’. The people in his close circle were young and smart, but had no experience in global strategic affairs. Macron wanted a free hand to set his own agenda, and establish his authority. In office, he talks to a number of veterans within the French foreign-policy establishment. But, besides his official diplomatic adviser, Philippe Etienne, there is no single elder statesman acting as his guide.
Nobody doubts that Macron is deft at using diplomatic symbols. Inviting Vladimir Putin to Versailles, against the backdrop of an exhibition celebrating Peter the Great’s 1717 visit to France, spoke of respect for great, or once-great, powers. As is his way, Macron used the occasion both to flatter, and then reprimand, speaking at a press conference with the Russian leader about ‘organs of influence and propaganda’ before his ashen-faced guest. The muscular handshake he gave Donald Trump on their first meeting, which was ‘not unintentional’, Macron said later, because ‘that’s how one gets respect’, was straight from the alpha-male diplomatic playbook. His offer to loan the Bayeux Tapestry to Britain, or his gift of a gelding from the elite Republican Guard cavalry corps to President Xi Jinping, who had admired the horsemen who escorted his visit to Paris in 2014, were smart. Each, says his team, was his own idea.
Macron’s emerging diplomacy seems to rest above all on dialogue and pragmatism: a belief in keeping the door open to all-comers, however unsavoury, on the premise that isolation breeds even greater danger. ‘He doesn’t want to lock himself into a doctrine, which is a good thing,’ notes François Heisbourg, the security analyst. Macron comes to French diplomacy with few of the complexes harboured by his predecessors, including the use of English. Jacques Chirac, on principle, refused to speak a word of English, even though he could, having spent a summer in Boston as a student, working part-time in a ‘Howard Johnson’s’ fast-food restaurant. Sarkozy, in office, struggled with the language, once memorably telling Hillary Clinton as she arrived at the Elysée Palace in the rain: ‘Sorry for the time’ (le temps meaning both ‘weather’ and ‘time’ in French). Macron, like many Frenchmen of his generation, has no hang-ups about speaking English, whether on the phone to Trump or while hosting global CEOs in Versailles, to a point that some French traditionalists find inappropriate or showy. But Macron probably secures a fair amount of goodwill by doing so, in diplomatic talks as well as foreign television interviews. It also lends France a less culturally defensive tone.
If there is not yet anything that can be defined as a Macron doctrine, the contours of his geo-strategic policy are emerging. He is enough of an Atlanticist to be committed to NATO, but enough of a realist – and admirer of both de Gaulle and Mitterrand – to know that Europe needs to strengthen its independent capacity to prepare for a diminishing American security guarantee, which began before Trump. He sees no contradiction between a commitment to both the trans-Atlantic security shield and European defence. In his dealings with Trump and Putin, he has shown that he believes in building relationships rather than moral grandstanding, and on doing so by calibrating his approach. He does the back-slapping bonhomie with Trump; with Merkel, he plays the respectful gentleman, or favourite son. In the Middle East and the Gulf, where France has some long-standing regional interests and ties, Macron’s policy is not to choose sides. Sarkozy set great store by his ties with Qatar. Hollande invested in a relationship with the Saudis. Macron seeks to keep lines open both to Saudi Arabia and to Iran, and to each of the Gulf states. He talks regularly on the telephone to the Iranian and Turkish leaders, and has said that he is prepared to visit Tehran. The French president is a realist, who knows that he needs to work with authoritarian regimes against complex global threats such as terrorism or climate change. And he judges that such leaders are more dangerous when ignored and isolated. Macron has made himself an interlocutor in Europe for Trump on this basis. ‘He likes to engage with people, with the good guys and the bad guys, with everybody basically,’ said a diplomatic aide. ‘He’s not naïve. He knows it’s not enough. But whenever Macron picks up the phone to Trump, he answers.’
If Macron is pragmatic, and opportunistic, he also seems to be working from some underlying principles. The first is a rejection of what he calls ‘the neo-conservatism imported into France over the last ten years’: the idea that Western powers can impose democracy and the rule of law on authoritarian sovereign states. Macron calls the intervention in Libya in 2011 ‘a historic error’, on a par with that in Iraq in 2003, which the French under Jacques Chirac at the time tried to prevent.4 Outside interference of this sort, he judges, based on a moralizing attempt to teach lessons to regimes deemed ‘evil’, ends up creating new threats: internal and regional conflicts, political instability, mass migration, and a breeding ground for jihadism. ‘Democracy isn’t built from the outside without the people,’ he says. ‘France didn’t take part in the Iraq war, and that was right. And France was wrong to go to war in Libya in this way. What was the result of those interventions? Failed states where terrorist groups prospered.’5 To this end, he has reversed the French policy pursued by Hollande of calling for the removal of Bashar al-Assad, arguing that this should not be a precondition for diplomatic efforts in Syria. ‘It’s not me, in Paris, in an office, who is going to choose the successor to Assad! It’s the Syrian people. What I want to do is to create the conditions so that the people can choose.’6 By turning the page on neo-conservatism, Macron is marking a return to foreign policy built around diplomacy, multilateralism and international law, more in the Gaullo-Mitterrandist tradition, which reached its high point in the passionate speech against the Iraq war at the United Nations in 2003 made by Dominique de Villepin.
Does ruling out interference in the internal affairs of sovereign states not risk emasculating his defence and security policy? Macron thinks not. From inside the Elysée Palace, he watched with dismay as the West failed to punish Syria for using chemical weapons in 2013. France at the time had its fighter planes ready to take part in an American-led bombing campaign. But Barack Obama decided to seek congressional approval first, and David Cameron failed to win parliamentary authorization in Britain. So the strikes never took place. As president, Macron laid down his own red line – the proven use by Assad of chemical weapons – and declared that, were Syria to breach international law on this point again, he would not hesitate to order the French armed forces to destroy chemical-weapons stocks. All the while, the French president hopes to be able to gain diplomatic traction in the region, talking to the Turks, Russians, Jordanians and others over Syria’s future.
The second focus is an attempt to normalize relationships strained by the weight of history across the Mediterranean, in order to minimize the friction and instability this engenders. To that end, during the 2017 campaign, Macron spoke of French colonization as a ‘crime against humanity’, and chose to do so on a campaign stop in Algeria, a country with which France has long, painful and complicated ties. Algiers is as close to Marseille as Marseille is to Paris. Algeria is also the country of origin of France’s biggest Muslim minority, and is run by an ill and ageing president whose departure could prompt instability. Macron needs to handle that relationship carefully, as well as those with other nations in the region, which he would like to see take on a greater share of the security burden. Concerns about jihadism, and migration pressures, in North and West Africa, where France has permanent military bases, have kept France engaged there as a sort of regional gendarme. Macron would now like structures such as the G5 Sahel force – composed of troops from Mali, Chad, Burkina Faso, Niger and Mauritania – to take on a bigger role so that France, which keeps 4,500 soldiers there under ‘Operation Barkhane’, can scale back its own contingent. On a tour of West Africa in 2017, Macron told students in Burkina Faso that he wanted to break with the approach of his elders more generally. ‘There is no longer a French Africa policy,’ he declared. ‘I belong to a generation that does not want to tell Africans what to do.’
Africans, of course, could be forgiven for saying that they have heard it all before. ‘They all say that. Let’s wait and see,’ one head of a West African state told me sceptically, as he tucked into a three-course dinner at Macron’s One Planet Summit in late 2017. Sarkozy and Hollande each in their time promised to turn the page on françafrique, the cosy web of political networks, business contracts and arms deals that has long linked France and French-speaking Africa. But the habits are hard to shift, and Macron has his work cut out if he is to persuade Africans that he is serious about making a break. The French president may think he is décomplexé, bringing in a breath of fresh young air. But such is the sensitivity in parts of French-speaking Africa about a supercilious France that even an off-hand comment can sour relations. While in Burkina Faso, Macron was asked by a student at the University of Ouagadougou what he planned to do about the country’s repeated power cuts. ‘You speak to me as if I’m a colonial power, but I don’t want to deal with electricity in Burkina Faso,’ Macron replied. ‘That’s the job of your president.’ As the audience laughed, President Roch Marc Kaboré left the hall, prompting Macron to joke: ‘He’s left to fix the air-conditioning!’ Macron later called the local social-media frenzy this prompted ‘ridiculous’: a relation of equals, he said, means being able to ‘laugh at one another’. African citizens will want to see evidence that France is ready to stop propping up their undemocratic leaders if they are both to indulge his sense of humour and believe his talk about turning the page. Given the level of security concerns in the Sahel region, France is likely to remain involved there for a long time yet.
A third principle of Macronist foreign policy is his effort to carve out a role where he can for France, and by extension Europe, by using soft power and innovative diplomacy. An early example was his climate push, prompted by Trump withdrawing America from the Paris climate deal, which kicked off with his cheeky social-media appeal to ‘Make the Planet Great Again’ and the offer of fellowships in Paris to international researchers into climate change. The One Planet Summit that Macron held on an island in the Seine in December 2017, designed to keep the issue alive, was part of what he calls ‘participative multilateralism’. Rather than putting heads of state around a table to read out prepared statements, he told them they were invited to listen, and to speak only when they had a specific commitment to make. The rest of the time he handed the floor to NGOs, start-ups, businessmen, city mayors, regional leaders or anybody with a pledge. Macron likes this sort of disruptive diplomacy, even if the heads of state present looked rather less amused.
A diplomacy of gestures and nudges seems to have won France friends. A poll by the University of Southern California’s Centre on Public Diplomacy ranked France, under President Macron, as the world’s leading ‘soft power’ in 2017, noting that ‘a more dynamic and energized France’ could take on ‘a leading role in the EU and perhaps show greater global leadership overall’. But what can France realistically hope to secure in broader diplomatic pay-back for all this fresh activism? Macron, after all, is not the first modern French president to believe in his special powers of diplomatic persuasion. Sarkozy’s energetic arrival in the presidency led to inflated expectations about what he could achieve. His dream of a ‘Union of the Mediterranean’ that would unite the countries around the sea was visionary, but unrealistic and poorly thought out. Sarkozy also imagined he could win over authoritarian leaders by bringing them out of isolation, inviting Gaddafi to plant his tent in the garden of a presidential mansion in Paris, and treating Syria’s Assad to the 2008 Bastille Day parade. Three years after his visit, Sarkozy and Cameron sent their fighter jets to destroy Gaddafi, in an operation that ultimately left Libya a ‘shit show’, as President Obama later described it.7 Diplomacy based to excess on personal relationships can end in disappointment and betrayal. ‘His great difficulty is accepting that there are limits to what one can do,’ says François Heisbourg of Macron. ‘It is a worry.’8
Arguably, Macron’s most skilful early diplomatic exploit was the extraction of Lebanon’s prime minister, Saad Hariri, from Saudi Arabia, where Lebanese authorities suggested he was being held under duress. With American diplomacy largely on hold, Macron stepped in, dropping in for talks in Riyadh on his way back from Abu Dhabi, inviting Hariri to Paris, and helping to devise a technical pretext on which the prime minister could rescind his resignation, thus helping the Saudis save face. This may hint at the sort of diplomatic role the French president can usefully play in places where France has historic levers to activate. Global campaign issues, such as climate, are also well suited to his cajoling style of leadership. France’s long-standing diplomatic channels may be able to help with some of the major regional geo-strategic threats, as it showed during the drafting of the agreement to curb Iran’s nuclear programme. Ultimately, though, on the big issues, France, and Europe, still need the credibility and heft of America.
This is why the improbably warm relationship that Macron has established with Trump may turn out to be so important. The French president enjoys enough political capital at home to be able to act as a friend to Trump, at a time when few Europeans are rushing to hold his hand, let alone to try to reach a better part of the American leader’s tortured self. Trump and Merkel are at odds with each other. After an initial love-in, the British prime minister Theresa May has had a rocky relationship with the American president. Trump tweeted to May: ‘don’t focus on me, focus on the destructive Radical Islamic Terrorism that is taking place within the United Kingdom. We are doing just fine!’ Yet he called the French president ‘a friend of mine, Emmanuel’ and ‘a great guy ... Smart. Strong. Loves holding my hand.’ The French seem willing to let Macron see what he can make of this relationship. He has understood that Trump relates to affection, and is awed by raw displays of power. ‘It was one of the greatest parades I’ve ever seen,’ the American leader gushed after attending the Bastille Day parade. ‘It was two hours on the button, and it was military might, and I think a tremendous thing for France and for the spirit of France.’
The French president judges that the greatest danger would be to isolate Trump. By keeping him inside the club, exposed to the views of liberal democrats, Macron hopes at worst to contain some of the damage he can do and, at best, to bring him back on board. To this end, he urged Trump to go to Davos, which he did. He has not given up hope of coaxing him back into the Paris climate agreement, and tried hard to stop him from breaking the Iran nuclear deal. He claims to have kept him involved in efforts to make diplomatic progress on Syria. Macron calls Trump often by telephone, addresses him as Donald, and speaks to him in English. The phone calls are short. ‘I’m always extremely direct and frank’ with him, the French president told the BBC. ‘Sometimes I manage to convince him, and sometimes I fail.’ Macron sees himself as a sort of ‘interpreter in Europe, sifting through the brash pronouncements to find places of common interest’, said an aide.
They make an unlikely pair, the nationalist and the globalist, the casino owner and the philosopher, the impulsive tweeter and the literary intellectual. Their world views are fundamentally divergent. Where Trump argues for borders, walls and America first, Macron preaches openness, liberal internationalism and the defence of the planet. Each is building his politics around an appeal to opposing aspects of human nature: Trump, in anger, on insult and division; Macron, in earnestness, on cooperation and bienveillance (goodwill). And yet each was also an insurgent against the establishment, defying the odds, and elected to the presidency at his first attempt. The pair have formed an unlikely bond, Trump, flattered and goggle-eyed at the parade of tanks and fighter planes the French president treated him to on Bastille Day in 2017; Macron, the first foreign leader Trump invited for a state visit to Washington D.C. There is something about the strange alchemy between these two leaders, the sunny liberal intellectual and the scowling former reality-TV host, that raises a small hope. Could Macron become the leader who can help to summon Trump’s better nature? Trump, Macron told me carefully, is ‘atypical’. He is ‘somebody who operates through emotion, who decides alone, but who listens. If we speak often, he hears things, and that in itself is important.’9 Against the odds, Macron seems to have found a way to handle him. The French president is not naive about where this can lead. But he seems to mean it when he says, almost despite himself, that he has established ‘a personal, affectionate link; we like each other’.10
Of course, Macron is not the first European leader to think that he can rein in an American president. And if he fails to win anything in return, he will not be the first to disappoint either. He cannot alone be the tamer of Trump. But if Macron is smart, he could well become a key political intermediary between Europe and Trump’s America. The more that Macron can turn France around, and get his European project moving, the more he may be able to build on what is already an encouraging start. As a weakened Merkel enters her twilight years, there is an unusual opportunity for him to establish a new balance in Europe, and a leading role for France, on issues where Washington sees no interest or is in disagreement with Europe. If he can build credibility through a stronger Europe, Macron could turn out to be a global leader with real influence.
If he cannot make progress in Europe, though, the best Macron may be able to hope for is to keep pushing on international campaign issues, such as global warming, while stepping in to help with points of friction as they emerge, as he did on Lebanon. This would cast the French president as a useful facilitator, go-between and campaigner. Which would not fit Macron’s global ambitions. But it may, in the end, be as much as any European leader can realistically hope for. Macron may not be able, de Gaulle-like, to restore fully France’s past glory in world affairs. But his starting point is promising. And, with 73 per cent of the French approving of the way he handles French diplomacy, they seem to think so.