He had not wanted this. He would not have imagined it, but thanks to Donald Trump, thanks to the Munich tirades of his vice-president and thanks to the astonishing blindness with which he has made a man of peace out of Vladimir Putin, Europe is standing in close ranks, ready to equip itself with a common defence and to assert itself as a political power.
This will require money that we do not have, time that we do not have, and conflicts that we will not be able to avoid. We will have to resolve to borrow and find impossible industrial compromises, but the turning point has been reached because finally…
On Friday, the Germans were the first to pick up the gauntlet. These Germans, who, even more than the British, had always been the United States’ most compliant allies, could not bear to have the Trumpists criticise them for not letting their far right enter the government. The Germans fired the first shot, and who was there to support or even excuse this reckless vice-president?
Nobody.
Since Donald Trump’s amorous exchanges with the Russian despot, only Viktor Orbán, the Kremlin’s Trojan horse on the European Council, has agreed with him. That is very, very little, and all the more striking because even Giorgia Meloni, the Italian friend, refrained from applauding because she is well aware that Italy would be one of the three countries, along with Ireland and Germany, to suffer most from the customs barriers that the White House wants to put up against our exports.
This is a time for European solidarity. This is a time for rapprochement between the Union and the United Kingdom, now involved in all our discussions on security issues. Poland, which for a long time was so deeply hostile to the idea of a common defence, is now arguing for its necessity with as much ardour as the French. Ursula von der Leyen, the ever-cautious President of the European Commission, has become more French than the French by announcing that military spending would no longer be included in the calculation of the 3% of GDP threshold below which Member States must keep their budget deficit.
This is an encouragement to increase national arms orders, an objective of the Commission, supported in this by Germany and France. This is happening now that the Russian invasion of Ukraine has led Sweden and Finland to join NATO, thus turning the Baltic into a new Atlantic sea.
It would be no mistake to say that the European Union has never been better and has never been so close to beginning its long march towards a United States of Europe. It would not be an exaggeration to say this, bearing in mind the how deep the divisions were that tore the EU apart during the Iraq war or the Greek bankruptcy, but the problem is that we are talking about the medium term, if not the long term.
Ten or fifteen years from now, the turning point now taken by the Union will lead it to become a political power of the same weight as the United States or China, but today?
Alas, it is a very different situation.
For the time being, the Union has 27 different armies, which is to say almost no army. Its technological backwardness is worrying and it will take it some ten years to equip itself with a common operational defence. In the negotiations that should open on Ukraine, the Union is at best relegated to the children’s table while the big ones intend to carve up Europe into zones of influence. The French and German economies, the two leading ones of the Union, are going through a bad patch, compounded in both capitals by a political crisis. There is hardly a country in the Union where the far right does not attract between a quarter and a third of the vote. Mrs Le Pen is in a position to win the next French presidential election, while the Trump team, like the Kremlin, is playing the card of these new parties, which, by destroying the Union from within, could do Mr Trump and Mr Putin the favour of getting rid of a rising economic and political force.
For the time being, the Union is seriously weakened, but what should we be looking at, the current weaknesses or the dynamic of affirmation? The reality of the moment or the promise of the current mobilisation?
The answer is that the promise of the dynamic eclipses the reality of the weaknesses because, contrary to what one might think, time is on our side. Assuming that the Russian-American talks result in a ceasefire, we will have to deploy troops along the demarcation line, not in the front line but in the second line, behind the Ukrainians.
This will be the birth of a common defence, under the mandate of the Union but without the participation of all Member States. On the battlefield, the Defence would anticipate the future of the Union, which would no longer enlarge after endless negotiations, chapter by chapter, but through bilateral agreements between the Union and the candidate countries. Ukraine would not wait fifteen years to enter the Union, but would join it in the cooperation in Defence and arms industries before one day forming with it the world’s leading agricultural power. Future enlargements will be carried out in stages. This will enable Great Britain to join us when it decides to do so, after having placed soldiers on Ukrainian soil alongside the French, Germans, Scandinavians, Baltic states, Italians, Spaniards and even Poles, even though they are refusing to do so for the moment.
In the political adversity and the military challenge that will be thrown down to us by this ceasefire, if it happens, the Union of tomorrow is taking shape. Its degrees of integration will remain different for a long time to come, but the habit of acting together, and even under fire, will forge indissoluble bonds from which, in a quarter of a century, a political entity of some forty members will be born.
Maybe, you might say, but what if Putin breaks the ceasefire and attacks our forces in three or five years’ time, without the United States to defend us?
It is not impossible, but it is much more likely that Putin will need to catch his breath and will not immediately go on the attack again. The time it will take him to mobilise new forces will allow us to prepare for the inevitable continuation of his aggression because, between them, the 27 have nearly two million men to deploy.
Europe is not yet dead.
(Photo: @ European Union 2013)
