Foundered dreams….Who is at Europe's helm now?
Macron loses his mojo, Europe loses a leader, America acquires a purpose?
The leadership of Europe passed from France to the Czech Republic as Thursday morphed into Friday, June into July. And with this passage, French president Emmanuel Macron has moved from center stage back into the shadows.
So, this is as good a time as any to take a close, hard-nosed look at just where this Europe that Macron has left behind finds itself. Not for a long time has Europe faced the prospects of a leaderless, rudderless continent. Gone now is the firm rock of any single national leader with the stature, the gravitas and the domestic anchor to be able to steer Europe at a most dangerous moment to leave the continent in such a predicament.
Last week, at the end of France's six-month rotation through the presidency of the Council of Europe, Macron issued a detailed, 22-page recitation of his accomplishments: "Assessment of the French presidency of the Council of the European Union." The headline, according to this document is that "the face of Europe has changed profoundly in six months." In some ways there is no doubt that it has—and not necessarily for the better. In other ways, sadly, it has not changed at all.
In January, Europe was just coming off a 16-year high of Angela Merkel as leader of Germany, the motor-economy of the continent and by extension the E-U's defacto leader as well. Barely three weeks after Merkel stepped down as chancellor, Macron, himself ending his first five-year term as France's president, stepped into what he assumed would be his destiny as her successor during his own second and final term in office.
From the beginning, Macron had some grand visions for the continent. There was his treasured dream of a European Defense Force that would fill a gap that NATO no longer seemed able or willing to assume for the 27 nations in the European Union, several of whom were not even within the NATO envelope and especially after the alliance had been pummeled for four years by Donald Trump's bullying rhetoric. At the same time, Macron was hoping desperately to embark on a new era of unity and comity, finding some way of bridging the ideological and philosophical gaps between the old Europe on the West and the new Europe of the newly-arrived communist nations on the East. Several still seemed intent on avoiding western concepts of democracy and justice that had not yet really taken hold in the vacuum left by the collapse of the Soviet empire.
There were other initiatives that were needed, many quite urgently: sharp reductions in carbon emissions including ever closer adherence to the COP-21 environmental accords negotiated years before in Paris. Europe also needed to move toward a more resolutely single economy including uniform minimum wages, a single digital market and a congruent way of dealing with vast stretches of the planet outside the continent—particularly China and Africa.
Before most of these initiatives could even be addressed, however, Europe found itself faced with the first potentially existential threat in eight decades. Hostilities began on February 24 when the first Russian troops poured across the border into Ukraine. Already, Macron had been sucked into a spiral of negotiations between December 14 and May 3—20 phone calls with Vladimir Putin, even an in-person Kremlin meeting on February 7 at opposite ends of a clownishly long table. None bore any fruit.
The invasion and the heroic, stolid resistance by Ukrainian forces effectively brought an end to one Macron dream—a mediated end to Europe's most lethal conflict since World War Two. Instead, a new and very different nightmare began to unspool—how to sustain at once the valiant Ukrainian military in a war that seemed suddenly to have no end and at the same time care for 7.6 million Ukrainians who had poured across Europe's frontiers in the largest single refugee wave in the history of the EU.
On its own, Europe had none of the resources to cope with this newest challenge. So, Macron had to stand by helplessly while the United States again stepped into the breach. Rather than Macron as Jupiter, the Roman god of sky and thunder and king of the gods, a tag that had followed him from his first arrival in power, suddenly it seemed he was reduced to just another national leader with domestic problems that threatened to eclipse his broader trans-national ambitions,
A host of such dreams, ambitions and so much more have foundered on 44 seats in the 577-member French parliament that voters decided Emmanuel Macron should not have and that would have given him an unassailable majority last month in France's elections for a new National Assembly. His party's plurality in the absence of a majority, is likely to mean five years of compromise, negotiation, bickering, potential stagnation at home, and sharply curtailed ambitions abroad.
Who now is in any position to confront the likes of Hungary's autocratic leader Viktor Orban? The mole Vladimir Putin has succeeded in embedding effectively in the heart of Europe has succeeded in neutering the most profound challenges to Russia's ambitions of expansion and control—and with little penalty.
A leader capable of facing down Viktor Orban might have been Emmanuel Macron. After all, more than any other single national figure, Macron had stood up to Donald Trump during his four years as America's president. At the same time, the French president had begun moving on a host of pan-European initiatives from defense to environment that seemed tailor-made to drag Europe into the 21st century. In April, confirmed for the first time in a generation to re-election as a French president, Macron might well have believed he'd been launched into an unassailable orbit. Instead, like Icarus rather than Jupiter, his wings have melted, and he would seem to have come crashing down to earth.
As Politico reported last week from the G-7 summit in Germany, "Macron was so eager for a few minutes of Biden’s time that he broke into a brisk walk chasing him down one evening on the deck of the Schloss Elmau, the grand German summit site perched atop a mountain." Today, it is Biden and NATO who appear to carry the hopes and prayers of Europe.
The biggest and most critical question is whether NATO and its 30 disparate members can maintain a constant purpose and outlast Russia and a host of other challenges. Suddenly, the Atlantic alliance has found a real, tangible purpose and mission. It has managed to welcome into its ranks two key members—the two outstanding Scandinavian nations—Sweden and Finland, which itself shares an 830-mile-long frontline frontier with Russia. With this one action, every continental member of the European Union except neutral Austria is now a member of NATO. It was Biden who seemed to have managed somehow to arm-wrestle Turkey's Recep Erdogan into agreeing to admit Sweden and Finland. Still, there are challenges ahead. Where, for instance, to find the 300,000 NATO troops that the alliance's Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg pledged would be placed at high readiness in "the biggest overhaul of our collective defense and deterrence since the Cold War?" Don't look to France or Macron.
In many respects, or course, Biden faces even more profound challenges domestically than Macron. Indeed, many European officials I've consulted do still worry about Donald Trump or a conservative clone returning to power in America. As Le Monde's star editorialist Alain Frachon put it: "Between a bellicose Russia and a United States in the throes of a permanent civil war, the European Union [looks] reassuring." Now, if Emmanuel Macron can reassure his fellow European leaders that he has at least as much of a hold on power as any of them, in the final analysis the battle may not be lost.
“European sovereignty is not just a slogan, today it is an imperative," Macron wrote in his assessment of his six months as the continent's leader, which he characterized as "a more humane Europe." Then he added, perhaps wistfully, a vision that many in France and far beyond hope might still be a signpost for the future: "I want us to be able to make this French presidency a great moment of European humanism, a time of mobilization for what I call this 'human Europe.'"
Macron was referring, of course, to his six months’ presidency of the Council of Europe. But certainly this cannot have been far from his mind: a still-cherished belief that he can turn around his own French presidency in such a direction—a European humanism—that can resonate far beyond France's frontiers.
This piece is not focused on economics, but in that realm as well the European project seems to lag. Although often cited as superior places for people of standard means to live, the continent never matches the growth highs of the U.S., nor--in times like the present--do its GDP and markets offer a better cushion on the way back down. And we have yet to see the full force of energy prices hit.