Paris looks insideEurope a platform on which to broadcast your national interests. So is Macron, who, despite disguising himself as pro-European and considering himself a champion of continental integration, has never stopped reiterating more or less between the lines the need for a France-driven Europe. That message it seemed at first to be linked to the dialectic between pro-Europeans and sovereignists, but over time it became clear that there was a deeper, Euro-French strategy at work. Because from Europe, Paris sees the possibility of rebuilding its “imperial” strategy. A conception that has emerged on some points that also appear clearly in the decisions that have characterized the current “empire” as Macronian as the predecessor of the current President.
The impression is that after the various developments that have shaped its changing European fortunes, Paris is based on two assumptions. On the one hand, the feeling of “Size”, superior to other forces and able to command the continental tides by playing the role of director. On the other hand, a ancestral fear: being excluded from the control of Europe because of the choice of internal, but above all external, powers as its great continental hunting ground.
power and fear they coexist in an almost inseparable combination. Power, which is above all the feeling of being at best primus inter pares of the European assembly. Fear that takes many forms. Compared to the German neighbor, who can possibly play a hegemonic role. Opposite Britain, which despite being isolated by sea, has always managed to undermine Paris’s ambitions on land by employing its infamous “balance of power” mechanism. Finally, since the end of World War II, there has been concern about the East-West dichotomy, with the United States and the Soviet Union (now Russia) sharing influence over Europe, and in recent years also registering the rise of the Chinese empire in the economy and mainland politics.
It is this fear of losing the ability to control Europe that has largely pulled the strings of Parisian diplomacy. You can already guess it from the speeches with which de Gaulle it outlined a conception of the continent alien to the inter-bloc opposition that shaped its destiny at the time of the Cold War. On November 12, 1953, the general spoke of Europe as a unit “ranging from Gibraltar to the Urals,” recalling having been “to both Moscow and London or Brussels” and having ties “both to Madrid and.” to Ankara”. Let’s remember, at that time Moscow was the USSR, Madrid was Franco’s Spain, Ankara was the capital of a republic foreign to the western bloc. They were not the cities of today, but the hearts of the states beyond the original European and Atlantic core.
De Gaulle already gave an idea of what the Hexagon wanted from the continent with his “Those who really want it, become part of Europe”. And this sentence has even more value when placed in a historical context in which, after the catastrophe of the two world wars, Europe had finally lost any claim to hegemony, and with it France. In this regard, De Gaulle, a staunch anti-communist, confirmed the desire to build an autonomous transalpine strategy, which had its first practical implementation in Europe, and never closed the doors to Moscow, defined as Russia and not soviet union precisely to affirm association with a nation regardless of its regime. And as early as 1942, he was the one who defined the Franco-Russian alliance, “a necessity that manifests itself in every nook and cranny of history.”
It is not difficult to observe these elements in the steps that Macron has taken in recent years, especially with regard to the difficult relationship with Russia. The French President has tried to build bridges with Moscow and his counterpart Putin on several occasions, although by now the western world and the Kremlin seemed to have taken the path of confrontation or lack of dialogue. He did so in 2019, when he met the President of the Federation, he said he believed in one “European Russia”. He did so in 2020 when he declared that “there can be no defense and security project for European citizens without a political vision aimed at promoting the gradual rebuilding of trust in Russia”.
And it is a diplomatic approach that did not stop even with the start of the war in Ukraine, when even in the darkest moments of the first part of the conflict, the head of the Elysee always left open a channel of dialogue with the Kremlin. A choice that served both to elevate France to the leading power of the European Union and to demonstrate that it knows how to liberate its country and its “European” vision from a renewed – and obvious – Atlantic wind that is blowing blows across the continent. To the point of specifically asking that the West not approach “the humiliation” that Putin is also, in a way, breaking with the image conveyed by the main international media of a pro-European leader anchored in the so-called moderate and fully Atlantic principles increasingly clinging to the so-called “mainstream” world.
The relationship between France and Russia can therefore be read under two cloaks. As a strategic choice vis-à-vis Moscow, but also as a tool to establish oneself on the international stage: a Washington (and partly in Berlin) in the difficult balance between dreams of European fame and the desire not to become a plaything in a bigger game anchored in American aspirations. A difficult relationship between France and the United States, marked by a cultural challenge before a geopolitical one.