Dtwo approaches, two places, two opposing visions. When Emmanuel Macron went back on the offensive on the concept of European strategic autonomy, in a speech delivered on Tuesday April 11 in The Hague, in the Netherlands, one of the six founding States of the Union, the Prime Minister Pole, Mateusz Morawiecki, flew to Washington with a clearly stated objective: to strengthen economic and defense ties with “our strongest ally”the one who “guarantees our security in Europe”.
Strategic autonomy is both the DNA of the French president and his most divisive battle horse. The epidermal reactions to the remarks he made on his return from China on Saturday April 8 to put the subject of European sovereignty back on the agenda show to what extent the question remains inflammable, while China becomes a superpower and the West closes ranks against Russia.
Emmanuel Macron does not have the paternity of strategic autonomy. The expression appeared in Brussels jargon in 2013, in connection with the defense industry, then was incorporated into the European Union’s “global strategy” document in 2016. But it is he who, since his first keynote speech on Europe at the Sorbonne in 2017, sought to make it a marker of European construction, with this argument: in an increasingly complex and threatening world, Europe must give itself the means to assert itself as a power.
At the time, Mr. Macron was experiencing a semblance of a state of grace among his European partners. He was the visionary, the newcomer who could bring a second wind to the project shaken by the populist wave. Even haloed by this hope, he quickly came up against deep reservations about the idea of strategic autonomy: the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, did not even pay attention to it, the countries of Central and Eastern Europe saw it as a dangerous red rag intended to ward off the United States, Swedes, Dutch and many others suspected yet another French strategy to transform Europe into a Gallic stronghold secretly ruled from Paris.
Risk of “vassalization”
The state of grace faded quickly enough, but Mr. Macron found two unexpected allies in his fight for strategic autonomy, renamed European sovereignty to make it more digestible: Donald Trump and the Covid-19. The first, by threatening to throw out Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty which guarantees collective defence, made the Old Continent aware of its military vulnerability if the American ally failed. The pandemic has cruelly laid bare the dependence of Europeans on China when they needed to protect themselves from the virus.
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