In 2017, newly elected French President Emmanuel Macron laid out his grand vision for France’s role in the future of Europe. Speaking at Sorbonne University, he bemoaned that Europeans were “concentrating all of our energy on our internal divisions.”.
He warned of “losing our debates in a European civil war”—by which he meant endless disagreements within the European Union about financial resources and budget constraints. To create a “strong Europe” capable of leading on the world stage, Macron proposed his solution: A centralized EU with a common political, economic, and social model—essentially an EU recreated in France’s own image—wrapped in another deeply ingrained French idea, that of a bloc that is strategically autonomous from the United States.
Plans to reshape the European Union in France’s image have met stiff resistance.
Anyone who has followed French debates even for an instant will recognize this as textbook French statism—with a few updates for the digital, environmentally conscious age.
Fortunately for the EU, events over the past year have disabused most of the other 26 member states of the veracity and desirability of Macron’s French-centric views. His misjudgment of Russian President Vladimir Putin, his substance-free platitudes about peace, and his abdication of any major French role in resisting Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have fatally undermined trust in France across the bloc.
However, among France’s famously homogeneous elite, Macron’s Ukrainian debacle has not stimulated a reappraisal of European policy. In fact, it appears that the exact opposite has occurred. Hemmed in by groupthink about France’s role in Europe, Macron is either unwilling or unable to reconceive France’s positioning in an EU that has been transformed by Russia’s war.
The latest evidence of Macron’s misjudgments is France’s renewed attempt to foist its statist economic model on other EU member states. The ostensible cause is the U.S. Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), a package of industrial subsidies and protections that has raised much concern in Europe over unfair competition and the future of transatlantic trade. For Macron and the French protectionists in the European Commission, it’s a chance to foist their anti-competitive, anti-Atlanticist impulses onto the rest of the bloc.
Similarly, the recent launch of the EU’s Green Deal Industrial Plan was ostensibly about how Europe can best support industry to meet future climate goals. But it has quickly become a proxy for a much broader political and economic conflict in Europe—between French interventionism and Brussels’s traditional focus on global trade, the EU’s internal market, and competition policy as drivers of economic expansion. Because these priorities largely focus on a level playing field, they also act as the guardians of equality between the EU’s big and small member states, much to Paris’s annoyance.
European Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton, a close French ally of Macron’s, is at the vanguard of leveraging European concerns over the IRA in order to push Paris’s vision of an interventionist, subsidy-driven industrial strategy. By tying this approach to European fears of being wiped out by U.S. rivals and falling behind in the green transition, France is seeking to leverage these fears to override resistance in other member states.
Breton has also been explicit in promoting the concept of a European sovereignty fund for “direct, fast and flexible budgetary support to well-identified projects of interest for EU sovereignty across any sector of our industrial spectrum.” This would be nothing less than a debt-fueled carte blanche for EU-level intervention across Europe’s entire industrial base. It’s old French wine in new bottles, proposing to let politicians and bureaucrats choose state champions in each industry. “There is no sovereignty without local champions,” the French proposal says. Anyone who thinks this could work should look at Paris’s long record of expensive fiascos when it tried to play this game, from trying to turn Groupe Bull into France’s answer to IBM in the early 1990s to the Danone “strategic yogurt” fiasco in 2005. Think tanks, competition policy experts, academics, and European industrial leaders all agree that the French approach of subsidizing your way to competitiveness is an illusion without real competition and meaningful structural change. It’s an irrational and disproportionate response to the IRA and does not address the wider problems of European industry in many high-tech sectors.
Not only is the French proposal bound to fail in a 21st-century innovation economy, but it has also made other member states question Macron’s motives. More than anything, Paris’s approach reflects French economic insecurities. With France’s public debt approaching 120 percent of GDP (nearly double Germany’s figure) and taxes already consuming a whopping 47.3 percent of economic output (the second-highest burden in the EU), France is running out of money to continue financing its big-state economic model. Paris’s obsession with industrial subsidies reflects a struggling manufacturing sector that now accounts for just 11 percent of industrial production in the EU (compared to Germany’s 27 percent and Italy’s 16 percent). Even France’s leadership in the nuclear sector—one of the few economic success stories—has been maintained only by the expensive recent renationalization of Électricité de France (EDF), the loss-making, debt-encumbered French nuclear operator.
With a guileless Berlin in tow, Paris also seems intent on reversing the European Commission’s blocking, on antitrust grounds, of the 2019 merger of French industrial giant Alstom with German conglomerate Siemens. It should be clear by now that this isn’t the grand plan for European unity that Macron’s soaring rhetoric makes it appear. It’s a blatant attempt to access EU funds to shore up creaking French industrial competitiveness on the global stage.
The transparency of the French plan and Paris’s combative approach to push it through at the European level have left Macron short of true political allies in the bloc—at a time when trust in Macron is already at rock bottom due to his vacillating on Ukraine and refusal to assume a significant role on the security and defense of Eastern Europe.
Anyone who has followed French debates will recognize this as textbook French statism—with a few updates for the digital, environmentally conscious age.
The subsidy proposals have therefore laid bare France’s increasing isolation in the EU. Seven EU member states openly opposed additional EU borrowing for industrial subsidies. At the special European Council Summit in Brussels on Feb. 9, a renewed Franco-German push for industrial aid was met with broad opposition from the other member states. The summit’s anodyne, noncommittal conclusions suggest there has been a coherent pushback against Paris’s statist impulses across much of the bloc.
Macron’s approach reflects the more fundamental issue of France’s uncertain role in the post-Cold War world. Macron’s eager overtures to Putin, which continued long into the war, were based on his personal belief in French foreign policy as the indispensable arbiter of global relations. This grandiose notion has gone hand in hand with something much more toxic for future European security: Macron’s obsession with the centrality of Franco-Russian accommodation in maintaining French influence over Europe.
So while Britain was guaranteeing Finland and Sweden’s security even in advance of their accession to NATO, France was busy blasting Poland for its “Atlanticist leanings” in choosing U.S. and South Korean companies over EDF to build new nuclear power plants. This is a strategy designed to lose friends and alienate people, particularly in Central and Eastern Europe.
For politicians steeped in French conventions like Macron, ensuring France sits at the same table as other traditional great powers—even if it means making deals with an authoritarian, declining Russia—will always be more important than acknowledging France’s own relative decline over the past century. Keeping France in the concert of great powers is also a much higher priority for Paris than building effective partnerships with smaller EU member states. This mindset long predates the founding of the EU, and it has been a staple of French policy for centuries. Macron’s line of thinking has underpinned Paris’s relationship with Moscow since at least the 1890s.
Unlike Britain, which has more or less adapted to its post-imperial role, France has never been able to accept the United States’ rise to economic and political hegemon. Nor has France been willing or able to provide a viable alternative to U.S. (and now British) political and security support to the post-communist states of Central and Eastern Europe.
And so the disconnect between France (supported, at best, by a few increasingly lukewarm backers) and the rest of the EU deepens. Not even a year of Russian missiles raining down on Ukrainian cities appears to have shaken Macron’s view that Europe should proactively “address Russia’s need for security guarantees.” In a supreme example of Macron’s tone-deafness, his plea that Russia not be “humiliated” for its genocidal invasion came just weeks after copious evidence of Russian war crimes emerged in Bucha, a suburb of Kyiv.
Today, it’s become clear that Macron’s vision for so-called European strategic autonomy—never backed up by any serious strategy or military capabilities—crashed and burned in Ukraine. And rather than lead Europe into a glorious age of integration, Macron is widening the very divisions in Europe he warned against in 2017. The meeting of lofty aspiration and cold reality has exposed a diminished France, a more powerful Central and Eastern Europe, and an increasingly disconnected Macron.
