Europe must show that it is not a vassal of the United States and that it knows how to talk with all other regions of the world, said Emmanuel Macron in yesterday’s address at the Sorbonne University, warning that “Europe is mortal today and can die”, stressing that it depends only on from “our choices”.
“Europe must face the challenges of a changed world and increase its defense.” We have to build a strategic concept of credible European defense for ourselves”, said the French president.
Macron gave a similar speech on Europe in September 2017, also at the Sorbonne, a few months after taking office as president. However, seven years later, after Brexit, covid-19, Ukraine and the war in Gaza, the world looks completely different, with much greater geopolitical challenges and tensions.
In yesterday’s speech, the French president assessed that the EU is not armed enough to take on global threats such as Russia’s war in Ukraine. He described Russia’s behavior after its invasion of Ukraine as “unfettered” and said that it is no longer clear where Moscow’s “borders” lie.
As he said, Russia must not be allowed to win in Ukraine. Macron called for strengthening Europe’s cyber security capacity, closer defense ties with Britain after Brexit and the creation of a European academy to train senior military personnel.
“There is no defense without a defense industry… We have had insufficient investments for decades,” he said, adding that Europeans should give priority to buying European military equipment.
“How can we build our sovereignty, our autonomy, if we do not take responsibility for the development of our own European defense industry?” he asked, adding: “We must produce more, we must produce faster and we must produce like Europeans.”
Some saw this as an extension of the French military industry.
The head of the Élysée also called for a “revision” of the EU’s trade policy in order to defend European interests, accusing both China and the US of no longer respecting the rules of global trade:
“It can’t work if we’re the only ones in the world who respect the trade rules – as they were written 15 years ago – if the Chinese and the Americans no longer respect them by subsidizing critical sectors.”
The EU, he pointed out, should agree on exemptions from its own competition rules so it can support firms in sectors such as artificial intelligence and green energy as it faces “excessive subsidies” from the United States and China. Europe needs less fragmented markets for energy, telecommunications and financial services, and it must also reduce bureaucracy, he added.
The French president warned that in Europe “our values and our culture are in danger”, stating that the media content watched by children and adolescents in Europe is “increasingly American and Asian”, “Mond” reported. “These three remarks about security, economy and culture lead me to say that the issue of our sovereignty is much more important today than before,” Macron said.
He added that Brexit was “an explosion whose negative effects mean that today no one should dare to propose leaving Europe”. Macron warned that European bureaucracy can be “too complicated” and that the recent protests of European farmers and their “anger was not against the EU, but against regulation, complexity”.
He also said he wants the EU to be a “world leader by 2030” in five strategic sectors: artificial intelligence, space, biotechnology, quantum information, and renewable and nuclear energy capacities.
Macron’s advisers described Thursday’s speech, as reported by Reuters, as France’s contribution to the EU’s strategic agenda for the next five years. The agenda should be decided after the European elections, when EU leaders will haggle over top positions in the bloc.
Critics say Macron’s speech comes at a time when his personal popularity is declining, with his centrist Renaissance party lagging far behind the far-right and even the Socialists in polls for the European Parliament elections due in early June.
Macron has three more years left in his presidential term and will no longer be able to run for the head of state.
