En June 1991, at the initiative of François Mitterrand, the meeting of the European Confederation was held in Prague. Their aim was to define a structure intended to accommodate the states of Central and Eastern Europe liberated from Soviet tutelage. The project was a failure, undermined by the reluctance of the United States, Germany and Czechoslovakia. By being part of the continuity of this proposal but by dressing it with an expression specific to the 1950s, that of “European political community”, Emmanuel Macron is causing trouble in spite of himself. He seems to give the notion of confederation a federalist meaning, at odds with his intentions.
Let us remind those who have forgotten: a project for a “European political community” has already existed, and its history is also one of failure. This project, also called “European political authority” at the time, emerged the day after the signing of the Paris agreements on the European Defense Community (EDC), on May 27, 1952, from a Franco-Italian initiative led by Robert Schuman and Alcide de Gasperi. The Assembly of the only European Community then existing, the European Coal and Steel Community, had been invited to draw up, before March 10, 1953, a draft treaty establishing a “European political community”.
age-old question
This would come to cap the already existing communities, together with a function of coordinating the foreign policies of the Member States and carrying the germ of a common market, supported by the Netherlands. Consubstantially linked to the idea of CED, it was rooted in what the historian Georges-Henri Soutou has described as a period “very daring, very supranational and integrationist” [L’Alliance incertaine, Fayard, 1996] throughout the history of European construction. The idea resurfaced in the early 1960s as “political union” with the Fouchet plans, but according to an intergovernmental dynamic. In the early 1970s, it was limited to the field of foreign policy, with the birth of European political cooperation, a process of political and administrative coordination of foreign affairs ministries established outside the community process.
The “confederation” that President Macron has in mind is quite different. It offers States on the fringes of Russia (Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia), wishing to integrate the European Union, a political structure which fully associates them with the European family for essentially economic and social cooperation, while giving them the time to bring up to standard, first of all, the functioning of their administration and their market. Beyond that, the challenge is to stabilize all of Europe’s borders and to establish a new relationship with these great states, the United Kingdom, Turkey and, one day, Russia.
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