Is France Having a Moment? Emmanuel Macron and ‘Political Europe’

The election of French President Emmanuel Macron in May 2017 has revived the idea of a ‘political Europe’. This expression is a mainstay of French political discourse on the EU, but is notoriously shapeless and defies easy translation. In Macron’s own words, political Europe means a ‘voluntary and realistic association of states’ who have agreed upon ‘useful policies’. More broadly, and like many of his predecessors, Macron rationalizes European integration – political Europe - as a matter of national states and governments favouring the long term and the strategic; as a project defined by fundamental values (freedom, peace, progress); and as an expression of Europe’s potential as a global actor. This is a vision that is dismissive of the EU’s current nature as an intensely rules-based system of governance, and Macron has proposed instead to initiate ‘democratic conventions’ across the EU27 to get the continent back onto a political footing. Member states can sign up or not, he breezily announces; and it is a job for a new generation of political leaders, in his view. His time horizon is ten years. In the context of the UK’s forthcoming exit from the EU, and the potentially weakened leadership of German Chancellor Angela Merkel following the 2017 federal elections, could France be having a moment? On previous occasions in the history of contemporary France, French ‘statesmen of interdependence’ have unexpectedly taken France closer towards its European neighbours. Robert Schuman in 1950 had the breath-taking audacity to envision Franco-German reconciliation in the form of the European Coal and Steel Community. Slipping through the narrowest window of opportunity in domestic French politics, the Schuman Plan became a founding moment of today’s Franco-German relationship. French President Charles de Gaulle built on these foundations a decade later to strike the Elysée friendship treaty between France, although de Gaulle’s broader vision of a ‘Union of States’ to replace the ECSC was not supported by Germany at the time. In January 2018 Paris and Berlin commemorated the 55th anniversary of the Elysée Treaty and a recalibration of the relationship is to be expected, particularly in the light of Macron’s declared intention to revive Jacques Delors’ notions of a more balanced single market within a ‘sovereign Europe’. Other pivotal moments have punctuated France’s quest for a political Europe, and this paper will place Macron’s vision in that comparative frame. It will draw on an analysis of French domestic politics and of Macron’s political leadership style, particularly but not exclusively in the Franco-German context, to evaluate the chances of success or failure of France’s ‘Macron moment’.