Contrary to what the delirium of some currently suggests, the context and the time in which things happen are everything. Analyzing a certain past time with the magnifying glass of the present is an insult to that very exercise and to the force that History should have and deserves. As it is, but to a considerably lesser degree, observing a certain episode, ignoring what leads to certain positions.
With more or less staging, it is said that Xi Jinping ended Macron’s visit to China by telling him that he could extend it for as many days as he wanted or even take up residence in the country. I don’t know if the information in these statements is true, but if they are, they certainly reflect a certain irony about the recent storm and the strong opposition that the French president feels all over France. The ones that help to explain part of the imbecilities said by Macron in China and that are in direct and complete contradiction with the position of the European Union, well reaffirmed on the eve of the visit by von der Leyen.
Presumably, another part of Macron’s inconsistency in his references to the Chinese peace plan and even the prolonged paradox in which he puts the European Union itself has to do with the demand for distancing from the Americans and that, there it is, whatever the context, always go down well with most French people.
It is not by chance that we see many confusing an institutionally courageous and certain position taken by France twenty years ago against the American invasion of Iraq (followed at the time by many people in other European countries and for which a geopolitical price is still “paid” today), with the Ukrainian defense short of the Biden administration in the current invasion of the Putin regime. Decontextualization has no limits.
But that’s also where we realize that a buzzword so dear to the geopolitical weakening of Europe in the last decade and which goes by the name of “economic diplomacy” was the final stab at the ambitions of the French President’s visit to Xi Jinping.
I don’t know if he learned little or nothing in the last eight years and how today economic diplomacy should be more careful and even, in a certain sense, in the wake of geopolitics, but someone should explain to him that the times are not for transformed European political leaders in suit and tie merchants in China and a diplomacy reduced to the commercial and puffy stage.
Who would remember that business entourage backed by a supposed illusion of getting the Chinese President to manifest any change of position in Putin’s invasion? Naturally, all of this came to nothing!
The truth is that there was a time when it was not difficult to see a lot of political talent and even a certain firmness in the defense of European values in Macron. But since Putin’s invasion, he has gone from misstep to misstep on the great world stage he’s been looking for. Whether due to the despair of the internal political situation that he is experiencing or the miscalculations that even contradict his past position of a Europe that bets more on its defense and security because of the Chinese bet to divide and conquer on the continent.
Today, the French President has not avoided the shadow of a divided European Union and transatlantic alliance in the worst place where he could have done so. More or less inadvertently, he ended up exposing it without any kind of political cunning.
It remains to be hoped that the clarity and firmness of von der Leyen and even Roberta Metsola will resonate more within the European Union than leaders who have always been plastic or others who have become so, such as Emmanuel Macron. Until then, hopelessly irrelevant and without any sense of a lever that the European Union not only has, but should use.
Xi Jinping may well continue to smile with more or less irony in all shapes and forms whenever European leaders’ entourages land in Beijing.