Raphael Kappeler

Macron's former Prime Minister, who is candidate at France's next presidential elections, proposes to "build the United States of Europe" 👇 I've been hearing this discourse ever since I was a child, that we cannot compete with the US and China without a strong Europe. Which, granted, makes a lot of sense on paper: if you're to compete against giants, you've got to be a giant yourself. Logical, right? Except, in practice, the exact opposite occurred. Just look at the evolution of relative share of global GDP (visualcapitalist.com/ranked-…): in 1992, the year of the Maastricht treaty (which officially created the EU), the countries making up the EU used to have 28.8% of global GDP which was actually more than the US (25.7%) and China (1.9%) combined! Fast forward to today and both the US and China's shares have grown - in the case of China it's grown considerably - but Europe's share has shrunk to around 17%, the same share as China, losing about 40% of its economic weight in a mere 3 decades. Which means that, very concretely, more Europe - and there has been, treaty after treaty, more and more Europe - has so far meant more and more economic irrelevance. The more we built Europe - this supposed economic giant on paper - the smaller we got economically. And it's not a China story, it's not that simple: if it were, the US's global share of GDP would have shrunk alongside Europe, but it just didn't. Which means it's really a Europe problem. And, unfortunately, it's not just the economy. More Europe has meant more irrelevance and weakness in just about all fields that matter. Take foreign affairs for instance. There used to be a time when Europe's voice mattered in the world - or at least that of the countries making up Europe. When, say, De Gaulle could, in the space of a single year, pull France out of NATO (adst.org/2014/06/france-has-…), ask American troops to leave French soil (humanite.fr/histoire/general…), and then fly to Phnom Penh to tell a packed stadium that the US had no business waging war in Vietnam (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phnom_…). Try to picture a single European leader doing even one of those three things today. Heck, in 2009 France got **back** in NATO, a sad illustration that the "strong Europe" we were promised as a counterweight to the US has in practice meant ever deeper subordination to it. It's even written in black and white in the Lisbon Treaty itself (eur-lex.europa.eu/resource.h…), which states that NATO "remains the foundation" of its members' collective defence. So much for the independent giant... Or take another critical dimension of power: technology. The countries of Europe used to sit at the technological frontier: Concorde, Ariane, the TGV, the World Wide Web invented at CERN, etc. A reminder that as late as 2007 a single European company, namely Nokia, sold 4 out of every 10 mobile phones on the planet. Today look at the ASPI Critical Technology Tracker (aspi.org.au/programs/critica…): out of the 74 critical technologies of the future, in how many is any European country in the lead? Answer: not a single one of them. And I'm not even speaking about energy, culture, and a dozen other fields where the story is identical. On energy alone: European companies now pay 2 to 3 times more for their electricity than their American and Chinese competitors, and just last year Brussels pledged to buy $750 billion worth of American energy as part of a trade "deal" for which it received, in exchange, 15% tariffs on its exports. Some giant... Long story short, there is the logic on paper and then there is the logic in practice: when you see that the patient has been getting steadily sicker for 3 decades, and that the doctor's only answer, year after year, is to increase the dose of the very same medicine, at some point you have to question the medicine. Or the doctor. De Gaulle, coming back to him because he was in my view one of the most prescient statesmen we ever produced, saw it coming clear as day: as early as 1962 he warned that a supranational Europe, having dissolved the only entities capable of having a will and a policy of their own - nations - would have no policy at all, and would end up following someone else's. He warned that "there would perhaps be a federator, but he would not be European" (fresques.ina.fr/de-gaulle/fi…). In the same 1962 press conference he also beautifully said that "Dante, Goethe, Chateaubriand belong to all of Europe to the very extent that they were respectively and eminently Italian, German and French. They would not have served Europe much had they been stateless men and had they thought, written in some integrated Esperanto or Volapük." That was his conviction: that Europe's genius is really the sum of its singular geniuses, and that you cannot add them up by melting them down. If you make some sort of soup out of French, Italian, Greek, and Spanish cuisine, all thrown in the same pot, you don't get all the flavors at once. Instead, you've destroyed four of the world's great culinary traditions to produce something no one wants to eat. I'm not anti-European, by the way, and neither was De Gaulle. I do believe - and so did he - that Europe should be a power in its own right. What De Gaulle called a "European Europe": independent of Washington, speaking with its own voice, master of its own destiny. He simply understood that only nations can carry such an ambition, because only nations have a will. Which is the great irony of this whole story: those who claim to want a strong Europe are busy dismantling the only thing that could ever make it one - the sovereignty of nations.