Category: VIEWS

We owe them for the defeat of ISIS, the liberation of Mosul and Raqqa, the saving of tens of thousands of Yazidi people who escaped from sexual slavery and from brigades of children-soldiers. In other words, we owe them for the victory of humankind against the most unlikely barbarism, because as the international coalition struck from the air, it was the Kurds who were on the ground, brigades of men, brigades of women, mixed brigades, advancing metre-by-metre and falling in great numbers.

Two things struck me in Brussels and in Strasbourg. The first is the Americanisation of the European political scene; the second is the sudden breakthrough of French ideas about Europe.
It was not such a long time ago that France was mocked by all her partners, or by almost all of them. The “grand nation”, the Germans said ironically, and France’s appeals for the creation of a European defence were perceived as the consequence of an obsessive anti-Americanism. Her mantras about “l’Europe puissance”, this ambition to turn the Union into an international player on equal footing with the United States, was nothing else, they grumbled, but the megalomaniac nostalgia of an old country for her lost greatness. As for the pleas of all the French presidents for a common industrial policy, they were regarded as a sign of Colbertism that had been taken over by the liberal times whose success only France did not see.

Open letter to our British friends

Maybe it is already over. I could be very late telling you this, but because I cannot believe it, I will shout it out nevertheless, even if it is just a crazy hope: Don’t do it, don’t leave us!

Don’t go away, because more than our common economic and strategic interests, what it would put in danger are some two thousand years of common history, the depth and the logic of an intimate relationship, twenty centuries of interaction and parallel evolution, without any justification, without a single piece of it.

We have, of course, our differences that create disputes and feed illusions. Some say that if we separate the two sides of the Channel, our inland sea, we will multiply our energies and we will open up a realm of possibilities. Some already see Britain regaining its past glory, while others claim that freed from your chains you will find your way back to the old world of greatness. These illusions carry a lot of weight, but if you leave us now, all of us will wake up from these childish dreams amputated.