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«Our Europe today is deadly. He can die, and this depends solely on our choices.” Emmanuel Macron chose strong tones in his second speech at the Sorbonne on Europe, after the one in September 2017 which paved the way for the French strategy on the EU. On the eve of important elections – which see his party decidedly behind Marine Le Pen’s sovereignist right – the president wanted to redesign the contours of his Union “in a French style”. In a very long speech, almost two hours, and of a high level, in which he quoted many Italians – Enrico Letta on the internal market, Mario Draghi on competitiveness, his ally Matteo Renzi on the culture bonus, even Antonio Gramsci on the optimism of the will – he designed a «powerful Europe», capable of becoming independent from the rest of the world.
“On the horizon of the next decade – said Macron – Europe can be made more fragile”. It is therefore necessary to know how to “enforce respect”, “ensure one’s own security” and one’s “strategic autonomy”. A single defense – but not necessarily a single army, rather a “strategic intimacy” between the armed forces – and a new economic strategy with the “obsession with productivity”, together with the ability to spread its own humanistic, universal culture of rights of man, are the great chapters of his strategy.
His economic speech also includes a provocation compared to the dominant opinion: that on monetary policy. “We cannot have a central bank whose sole objective is inflation,” he said, thus negating years of academic discussion on the efficiency and institutional role of a technocratic body in a democratic society. Macron really wants to multiply the objectives – and therefore the opacity – of the ECB. “We need to raise the theoretical and political debate to find out how to integrate at least a growth objective, if not also a decarbonisation objective, into the objectives of the European Central Bank,” he said. If the first additional objective finds an example in the Fed, although surpassed by practice, the second belongs more to fiscal policy than to monetary policy. However, the stone is thrown into the pond.
The Europe that Macron wants is a Europe that experiences a “common investment shock” and “a large public investment plan” for which, evidently, the support of the Central Bank (however risky it may be) is important. The goal is to make Europe a “world leader” in the 2030s, with “dedicated investment strategies” in five sectors: artificial intelligence, quantum computing, space, biotechnology and new energies. The rules of international trade will also need to be rewritten now that the United States and China no longer respect the rules.
The point of contact between the economic dossier and the military one (and space, now linked) is the “European preference” in supplies. European defense will have to be based on a “European defense initiative” which equips the Union, “perhaps”, with an anti-missile shield (the absence of which has been greatly felt in recent weeks). We will need to strengthen ourselves, he added, in cybersecurity and cyber defense. Above all, Europe will have to learn to defend its borders, a task for which it will propose a body similar to Ecofin for the euro, therefore intergovernmental. “Our borders are a common good”, he underlined: “We must build a political structure” that allows decisions to be made “on issues of immigration, the fight against organized crime, terrorism, the fight against drug trafficking”.
