Macron delivers prophetic message about Europe
A prophetic message about Europe has been a point of discussion, about the future of the region and the risks to which it is exposed.
In 1940, after France was defeated by the Nazi blitzkrieg, historian Marc Bloch condemned his country’s elites in the interwar period for having failed to cope with the threat looming over it.
But today, a prophetic message about Europe reverberates with Emmanuel Macron who cites Bloch as a warning that European elites are prey to the same fatal complacency.
The French president laid out his apocalyptic vision in an interview with The Economist at the Elysee Palace.
The prophetic message on Europe came days after his big speech on the future of Europe, a two-hour marathon on a Castro-esque scale that ranged from nuclear annihilation to an alliance of European libraries.
Macron’s critics called it a mixture of electioneering, the usual French self-interest and the intellectual vanity of a Jupiterian president thinking about his legacy.
But Macron’s prophetic message on Europe is as compelling as it is alarming.
Macron delivers prophetic message about Europe
In the interview, he warned that Europe faces imminent danger, stating that “things can fall apart very quickly.”
He also spoke of the mountain of work that lies ahead to make Europe a safe place. But he is beset by unpopularity at home and poor relations with Germany. Like other pessimistic visionaries, he risks having his message ignored.
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The motivation of the prophetic message about Europe has the invasion of Ukraine as its focal point.
The war has changed Russia, flouting international law, launching nuclear threats, investing heavily in weaponry and hybrid tactics, has embraced “aggression in every known sphere of conflict.”
Now Russia knows no limits, he says. Moldova, Lithuania, Poland, Romania or any neighboring country could be its targets. If it wins in Ukraine, European security will be in ruins.
Despite the controversial prophetic message about Europe, Macron refuses to retract his February statement that Europe should not rule out sending troops to Ukraine.
This provoked horror and fury from some of his allies, but he insists that his caution will only encourage Russia to press on: “We have certainly been too hesitant in defining the limits of our action in the face of someone who no longer has them and who is the aggressor.”
Macron insists that, whoever is in the White House in 2025, Europe must shake off its decades-long military dependence on the United States and, with it, a reluctance to take hard power seriously. “My responsibility,” he says, “is never to put [the United States] in a strategic dilemma that means choosing between the Europeans and [its] own interests vis-à-vis China.” He calls for an “existential” debate in a few months’ time. With the participation of non-EU countries, such as Britain and Norway, it would create a new framework for European defense that would place less of a burden on the United States.
He is willing to discuss extending the protection offered by France’s nuclear weapons, which would make a drastic break with Gaullist orthodoxy and transform France’s relations with the rest of Europe.
The second theme of the prophetic message on Europe is that Macron believes that an alarming industrial gap has opened up, as Europe has fallen behind the United States and China.
For Macron, this is part of a broader dependence on energy and technology, especially in renewable energies and artificial intelligence. Europe must react now or it will never be able to catch up.
In his view, the Americans “have given up trying to make the Chinese conform to the rules of international trade.”
Calling the Inflation Reduction Act a “conceptual revolution,” he accuses the U.S. of being like China in subsidizing its critical industries. “You can’t go on as if this is not happening,” he says.
