Strategic autonomy: Europe’s awakening

The ideas presen­ted by Pres­id­ent Mac­ron in Septem­ber 2017 in his Sor­bonne speech regard­ing European stra­tegic autonomy, were the product of cur­rent events. The pres­id­ency of Don­ald Trump had brought about a change in the stra­tegic vis­ion of the United States, which had begun with Obama. We were enter­ing a world where, due to the growth of China and a harden­ing of inter­na­tion­al rela­tions, the com­pla­cency of Europeans regard­ing inter­na­tion­al prob­lems could not last.

Because of this situ­ation, Pres­id­ent Mac­ron Europe said Europe had to wake up. But when a pro­pos­al is made by Par­is, it is often greeted with a cer­tain amount of mis­trust. There are sev­er­al reas­ons for this. On the one hand, there is a cer­tain pom­pos­ity that is char­ac­ter­ist­ic of French debate, and which is poorly under­stood out­side France. Secondly, there is a dis­trust that exists every­where in Europe (and even more so in the United States): every time a sug­ges­tion on inter­na­tion­al policy comes from Par­is, it is inter­preted in a neo-Gaullist sense. The French must be aware of this. The word “autonomy” used by Mac­ron has been widely inter­preted in this way out­side France, which has made the dis­cus­sion more difficult.

But this mis­trust of the French pro­pos­al hid anoth­er prob­lem: some Europeans, not­ably Ger­many and Italy, were liv­ing in com­pla­cency and deni­al. They con­sidered that the inter­na­tion­al sys­tem was safe, that if there were any dangers, we could count on the Amer­ic­ans, and that our interest was above all to look after our eco­nom­ic and com­mer­cial interests, includ­ing with Rus­sia and China.

Under these con­di­tions, it is not sur­pris­ing that coun­tries that had a much more pre­cise per­cep­tion of threats to their secur­ity, such as Poland, the Balt­ic coun­tries, or the Scand­inavi­ans, could find the European Uni­on of little use from a stra­tegic point of view, which fur­ther strengthened their attach­ment to NATO. With the Biden admin­is­tra­tion, reas­sur­ing mes­sages began to mul­tiply, which cer­tainly helped to light­en the atmo­sphere. But the mis­un­der­stand­ings did not dis­ap­pear. All these mis­un­der­stand­ings have been swept away by the cur­rent crisis.

It has shown two things. The first is that Putin’s real interest is not NATO, which is just a pre­text for the whole oper­a­tion. His real interest is, on the one hand, to re-estab­lish a sphere of influ­ence bey­ond Rus­si­a’s bor­ders and to re-estab­lish what can still be saved from the Soviet empire. And, on the oth­er hand, to avoid the demo­crat­ic con­tam­in­a­tion com­ing from his neigh­bours, at all costs. But the fact that between Ukraine and Rus­sia there are, as he insists on remind­ing us, deep his­tor­ic­al, eth­nic, and cul­tur­al links makes this danger of con­tam­in­a­tion even great­er. If demo­cracy were to suc­ceed in Ukraine, inev­it­ably the Rus­si­ans would see it. So, for Putin, it is a ques­tion of sur­viv­al. Everything could have been dif­fer­ent if, after the fall of the Soviet Uni­on, Rus­sia had taken a dif­fer­ent path. But it is not because of us that it could not do so. It was its intern­al dia­lectics that led it to replace com­mun­ism with an auto­cracy, passing from Joseph Stal­in to Joseph de Maistre.

The cur­rent crisis has also revealed that Atlantic unity and European unity were not con­tra­dict­ory, but on the con­trary were closely linked. There is no European unity pos­sible without Atlantic unity. And sym­met­ric­ally, Atlantic unity is inef­fect­ive if Europeans are not united. This is an import­ant les­son of this crisis.

It was not obvi­ous, because mis­trust did not dis­ap­pear. Among the Europeans: did the Amer­ic­ans want to talk to the Rus­si­ans over their heads? The Amer­ic­ans, for their part, did not believe that the Europeans would be up to the task. Indeed, it was not easy to get the Ger­mans and Itali­ans to move. Finally, many people wondered why Mac­ron was going to Moscow. All this, in a sys­tem that involves a num­ber of demo­cra­cies, was prob­ably inev­it­able. But the res­ult is extraordin­ary. Nobody expec­ted such a strong con­sensus in such a short time. All those who expec­ted purely sym­bol­ic sanc­tions should rethink their opinion.

And I would add that there is a game changer in what has happened in the last few days, when Ger­man Chan­cel­lor Olaf Scholz announced a spec­tac­u­lar increase in his defence budget. If Ger­many spent 2 % of its GDP on defence, its defence budget would far exceed that of Rus­sia. Ber­lin’s change of course is fun­da­ment­al: it can be com­pared to Helmut Kohl’s decision to give up the deutsche mark and join the euro.

It is now pos­sible, and France has a par­tic­u­lar respons­ib­il­ity here. When it comes to for­eign policy and defence, because of its inter­na­tion­al pos­i­tion, its seat at the United Nations, its nuc­le­ar deterrent, France object­ively occu­pies the same place as Ger­many in eco­nom­ic and mon­et­ary mat­ters. There is a sort of lead­er­ship oblig­a­tion on the French side. France must be able to remove the ambi­gu­ity con­cern­ing rela­tions with NATO, which will not pre­vent us, depend­ing on the cir­cum­stances, from assert­ing our interests with regards tothe Amer­ic­ans. How­ever, this ambi­gu­ity must be removed, oth­er­wise the European’s will struggle to reach a consensus.

Also, European defence will be dif­fi­cult to cre­ate because it imposes indus­tri­al optim­isa­tions that are always dif­fi­cult to nego­ti­ate. There­fore, I think that pri­or­ity should be giv­en to cyber defence. Rus­sia has been giv­ing us an excel­lent les­son in hybrid war­fare for sev­er­al years, with a con­tinu­ity between false inform­a­tion, cyber-attacks and high intens­ity war­fare. Cyber defence is a sec­tor where Europe is lag­ging, even though it is a real com­mon interest. Moreover, we know that digit­al tech­no­lo­gies are « dual », with civil­ian and mil­it­ary uses: there is there­fore an object­ive, stra­tegic but also eco­nom­ic interest.

Finally, it will undoubtedly be dif­fi­cult to achieve unan­im­ity quickly, but a hard core will be needed. In addi­tion to France and Ger­many, it should include at least Poland, Italy, and Spain, but also Sweden and the Neth­er­lands. Poland becomes a key coun­try here, which can help us to resolve the oth­er dis­putes we have with it. This oppor­tun­ity has nev­er been presen­ted before, and the win­dow may close again because the inter­na­tion­al situ­ation may worsen, the United States will enter a situ­ation of intern­al dif­fi­culties, polar­isa­tion and all our coun­tries are facing eco­nom­ic and social prob­lems. So, we must exploit it.