Illustration
by Benn Jennings for POLITICO
Ukraine war gives Macron’s drive for EU autonomy
new impetus
Where France sees vindication, others fear Europe
turning in on itself.
France's President Emmanuel Macron has long argued the
EU needs to become less reliant on others
BY GIORGIO
LEALI AND BARBARA MOENS
March 9,
2022 10:25 pm
PARIS —
Russia's war on Ukraine has given new momentum to Emmanuel Macron's push to
make the EU more autonomous. But the Continent's leaders still need to thrash
out what that means in practice.
The French
president, who welcomes fellow EU leaders to Versailles on Thursday for a
summit overshadowed by the war, has long argued the EU needs to become less
reliant on others — when it comes to everything from its own security to the
supply of semiconductors.
For
Macron's government, Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine and its repercussions
have dramatically illustrated its point — showing the danger of a Europe unable
to defend itself militarily, heavily reliant on Russian energy and too
susceptible to external economic shocks.
The war
should push the EU “to reduce our interdependence with the outside world, to
create not an autocracy but a form of European independence,” Clément Beaune,
France's EU minister, said this week. "If this is the result of this
crisis, it will be a success for Europe."
Some EU
members — particularly economic liberals and countries with strong
transatlantic ties — have always been resistant to Macron's buzzword of
"strategic autonomy," fearing that it is code for dirigisme,
protectionism and a ploy to get Europe to "buy French."
And when it
comes to the war's impact on defense policy, a number of senior European
officials are drawing a quite different lesson from Macron — namely that the
U.S. is vital to the protection of Europe and that NATO is now more relevant
than it has been for decades.
But even
former skeptics are now embracing Macron's overall agenda, at least up to a
point.
“We have to
enhance our open strategic autonomy, something France has been urging for a
long time,” Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte said on Wednesday at an event in
Paris.
Asked by
POLITICO whether the Netherlands and other countries such as the Nordics are
shifting position on the concept, Rutte replied: "Yes, we are."
However,
Rutte was also quick to stress that the European economy should stay open. And
his use of the phrase "open strategic autonomy" has become code of
its own, used by those who want a more balanced approach.
"Everybody
agrees that we have to take a critical look at our dependency on certain
countries, and Ukraine has made that even more clear,” said a diplomat from a
more economically liberal EU member. “But the French interpretation is a more
autarkic approach, which is building new walls.”
In
rhetorical terms, however, the political center of gravity is already shifting
in Macron's direction. In Versailles, EU leaders are expected to approve a
declaration that reads like a French wish list.
In the
draft text, seen by POLITICO, EU leaders commit to increasing defense spending,
phasing out dependency on Russian fossil fuels and investing to reduce
strategic dependencies on foreign goods.
These are
the very same priorities that Macron outlined in an address to the French
nation last week as he set out his vision for transforming the EU into a
puissance — a genuine power.
Pascal
Lamy, the French former World Trade Organization chief and ex-European
commissioner, said crises such as the coronavirus pandemic and the war in
Ukraine have accelerated Europe’s path toward that goal, which has been a
long-standing French aim.
“The idea
that the construction of Europe is a dream of power for France does not date
from yesterday, it has always existed," Lamy told POLITICO.
Defense
boost
On defense
policy, the shock of Russia's attack on Ukraine has had an immediate effect,
most strikingly in Germany, which abandoned decades of reticence to commit to a
huge boost in military spending.
In the draft
Versailles declaration, EU leaders agree collectively to "resolutely
bolster our investment" in defense capabilities and "substantially
increase" defense spending.
But how
that money will be spent remains to be hammered out. Advocates of the EU
developing its own defense capabilities argue that this would also strengthen
NATO. But skeptics fear EU money could be wasted on projects that don't fit
with NATO's priorities.
While
supporting the increase in European defense spending, NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg
also delivered a blunt message in recent days about the limits of the
Continent's ambitions: "The EU cannot defend Europe," he declared.
The idea of
strategic autonomy has long been associated with defense. But it is also now at
the forefront of discussions across a wide range of EU policy areas,
particularly energy.
At their
summit, EU leaders will also agree on cutting ties to Russian fossil fuels by
2030. And the European Commission this week doubled down on a plan to “reach
independence from Russian gas.”
That drive
to achieve greater "energy sovereignty" by moving rapidly away from
fossil fuels fits with the priorities of the German government that took office
late last year, with the Greens in a prominent role.
"The
more we rely on our own energy sources and the more these energy sources are
not dependent on imports, the more sovereign we will be in our foreign
policy," said German Climate and Economy Minister Robert Habeck, a senior
Green. "This is what we mean when we say that renewable energies give us
more freedom or foreign policy freedom."
Talk of
autonomy is also on the increase among agriculture policymakers. French
Agriculture Minister Julien Denormandie went as far as calling for “food
sovereignty” at a meeting of EU farm ministers last week, as Moscow's war has
exposed just how much the EU relies on imports of fertilizers from Russia and
Belarus and crops like maize and soy from Ukraine.
At
Versailles, leaders are set to agree to “improve our food security by reducing
our dependencies on imported agricultural products and inputs” and also to
boost investments to make the bloc more independent in key sectors such as raw
materials, semiconductors and medicines.
Digital
debate
On the
technology front, the threat of Russian cyberattacks has prompted renewed calls
to shore up the EU's digital security and resilience, including by boosting EU
businesses in the sector and taking political control of some critical parts of
the tech supply chain.
EU
ministers responsible for cybersecurity called this week for the bloc to
“increase EU funds to promote the emergence of trusted cybersecurity service
providers,” adding that “encouraging the development of such EU providers
should be a priority of the EU industrial policy in the cybersecurity field,”
according to a draft statement obtained by POLITICO.
The French
strategic autonomy push is moving so fast that more economically liberal
countries are having trouble finding the brakes.
They argue
the way to make the EU more resilient is to build more networks with other
like-minded countries, rather than for the bloc to turn in on itself.
That's an
approach echoed by the European Commission's trade and economic policy chief,
Valdis Dombrovskis. “The more diversified, the more resilient EU trade flows
will be,” he told POLITICO earlier this week. “That's why I'm insisting on this
point of open strategic autonomy to diversify the supply chains who need to be
open.”
How far
Europe will follow the French playbook is yet to be determined. In some
sectors, such as trade and agriculture, the fight has yet to be fought, especially
as the more liberally minded Czechs and Swedes will take over the helm of the
Council of the EU after the French.
But Paris
feels it has the wind in its sails. As France’s trade minister, Franck Riester,
said this week: “Strategic autonomy has ceased being taboo.”
Laurens
Cerulus, David M. Herszenhorn, Laura Kayali, Eddy Wax and Zia Weise contributed
reporting.
What the hell does Emmanuel Macron think he’s
playing at with Vladimir Putin?
Even as the bombs fall on Ukraine, the French
president keeps reaching out to the Russian leader.
BY CLEA
CAULCUTT
March 10,
2022 4:00 am
https://www.politico.eu/article/macron-putins-last-open-line-to-the-west/
PARIS —
When Emmanuel Macron welcomes European leaders to Versailles on Thursday to
discuss energy and defense policy, he’ll be standing against a grandiose but
familiar backdrop. After all, it was in those same gilded halls that the French
president hosted Vladimir Putin in 2017 — the first step in an effort to engage
the Russian leader that has continued even as Russian troops carry out a brutal
assault on Ukraine.
No other
leader spends as much time talking to Putin as Macron. Not only have the two
men spoken 11 times in the last month — on one occasion twice in the same day —
but, in a break with its tradition of discretion, the Elysée Palace has given a
blow-by-blow account of the calls between them, offering a glimpse of their
relationship.
Macron may
have managed to keep a line of communication open. What he hasn’t been able to
do is demonstrate any sign of having influenced Putin’s behavior. In February,
as Russian troops massed on the border of Ukraine, Macron flew to Moscow, where
he sat at a very long table and tried to convince Putin to show restraint. A
couple of weeks later, Russia launched its invasion.
On March 3,
Putin initiated a call with Macron to inform him that operations in Ukraine
were unfolding “as planned,” according to the Elysée. Meanwhile, on the ground,
Russian forces were mounting an assault on Europe’s largest nuclear plant at
Zaporizhzhia, sparking concerns about radiation leaks.
Putin
allegedly told Macron that Ukrainians were using “human shields” and “behaving
like Nazis,” just as Russian forces pummeled the cities of Mariupol and
Chernihiv. According to the Elysée, Macron cuttingly told Putin, “You are
telling yourself stories” and said, “What you’re telling me doesn’t conform to
reality and can in no way justify the violence of what you’ve unleashed today.”
On March 6,
the last time the two men spoke, the French president was forced to scramble
after Russia said it would respond to a “personal demand” from Macron and
organize humanitarian corridors for Ukrainian civilians to escape from the
heavy fighting — but only to Russia.
Caught
off-guard by press reports, the French president took to television to denounce
the plan: “All this is not serious,” he said. “It is moral and political
cynicism, which is unbearable to me.”
According
to the Elysée, Putin agreed to Macron’s request to hold talks with the
International Atomic Energy Agency to secure Ukraine’s nuclear facilities, but
so far nothing has happened.
While
Macron’s outreach has come under criticism, in particular from the Nordic and
Baltic countries most exposed to Russian aggression, officials at the Elysée
and supporters of Macron insist it’s important the two leaders keep talking —
especially as the West ratchets up sanctions on Russia and sends arms into
Ukraine.
“It’s not
very useful, but we still have to do it, maybe there are some lives that can be
saved,” said Michel Duclos, a veteran diplomat who once served as ambassador to
Syria. “We must not give the impression that we are refusing to talk. With
Putin increasingly isolated due to the sanctions, we need to play this out.”
Sunk costs
In his
diplomatic outreach, Macron has sometimes appeared to be trying to compensate
for past mistakes — or to draw some meager dividend from years of seeking to
engage with Russia.
Macron’s
wooing of Putin is in line with his other efforts on the global stage,
including his efforts to keep Donald Trump on board when the then-U.S.
president was taking a confrontational approach to the EU and causing some to
question Washington’s commitment to NATO.
“Macron had
an obsession with Trump and Putin,” said one of Macron’s former advisers. “His
view was that they need to feel considered.”
In addition
to the 2017 Versailles visit, the French president has hosted Putin three
times. He traveled to Russia twice in 2018, but his first visit to Ukraine took
place just last month.
Macron’s
courting of Putin, according to the French president and his supporters, had
been aimed at drawing Russia into the EU’s orbit and resolving conflicts on the
EU doorstep. In 2019, Macron told Putin he saw Russia as a “profoundly European
nation” with an important place in a Europe of shared values.
“His vision
was that we had to offer Russia an alternative to China,” said a former Macron
aide. “That’s why he invited him to Versailles … He said we need to tie Russia
to the West, with European openness, with the economy.”
And yet,
Macron’s efforts sometimes gave the impression he was privileging his
relationship with Moscow at the expense of his ties to European partners. His
hosting of the Russian leader at the presidential summer residence on the
French Riviera to discuss security issues ahead of a 2019 G7 meeting in France
did not go down well, said Duclos, the former French ambassador.
“It’s
normal to invite foreign leaders to the Elysée… but the private residence of
the French president is an intimate environment,” Duclos said. “He hadn’t
warned the Germans and the other EU states, so they were vexed. And the theme,
he chose to discuss a ‘new architecture of security’ [with Putin], so everyone
got suspicious because for them that means NATO. And you don’t discuss NATO
with Putin.”
Some have
pointed out that Macron has sometimes echoed Kremlin talking points, referring
to Russia’s “contemporary traumas” or describing in 2019 the existence of a
Europe stretching from Lisbon to Vladivostok, a concept Putin had sketched out
in an article nearly 10 years earlier.
At one
point, the French president appeared to sideline his own foreign affairs
ministry, dressing down diplomats accusing them of “deep-state” resistance to
engaging with Russia. Many think Macron has preferred to listen to politicians
who were nostalgic for past French global influence and who were too soft on
Russia, such as former ministers Hubert Védrine and Jean-Pierre Chevènement.
“There was
perhaps the temptation to think we understood Russia’s intentions,” said Marie
Dumoulin, director at the European Council on Foreign Affairs. “We no doubt
underestimated how much Russians wanted to take control of Ukraine. There was
an assumption of rationality, that invading Ukraine would be very costly, and
not a rational decision … But there’s a different rationality in Russia.”
Macron also
missed opportunities to draw red lines, according to Nicolas Tenzer, an expert
on French-Russian relations at Sciences Po. “Germany and France gave the
impression they were pushing Ukraine into accepting concessions during the
renegotiation of the Minsk agreements in 2019,” he said. “Overall, it looked
like France … was in favor of appeasement.”
Franco-Russian
winter
It’s
difficult to pinpoint exactly when the scales fell from Macron’s eyes.
Putin
doesn’t seem to engage much with Macron. “One of the great difficulties talking
to Putin is that there isn’t much dialogue,” said a former French diplomat, who
took part in the negotiations for the Minsk agreements in 2014.
He
described conversations with the Russian president as one-sided. “Vladimir
Putin would go back over Russian history, with his narrative of the great
Russian empire and later Stalin’s communism. It’s terrible … He repeats more
than he tries to convince. With him, your point of view does not matter.”
The Elysée’s
accounts of the conversations between the two leaders have come with a stream
of photos showing the French president unshaven, tense and focused as he speaks
to his Russian counterpart, sparking speculation in Paris that he is playing up
his role for domestic consumption ahead of a presidential election in April.
But allies
of the president say the output is merely an effort to shape how the calls are
perceived.
“We push
out very, very quickly accounts of the conversations, sometimes including
verbatim [text] of the exchanges [between Putin and Macron],” said Anne
Genetet, an MP for Macron’s La Republique En Marche party and a representative
for French citizens living in Eastern Europe.
“We need to
control the narrative to prevent the opposite side from giving an inexact
version,” she said.
After
Macron’s failed trip to bring Putin back from the brink of war, Elysée
officials said that the French president had found a changed man in Moscow, who
drowned him in “long monologues” and “historical revisionism.” Russia watchers
say Putin has always behaved the same — Macron just hadn’t been willing to
accept it.
With
Russian troops in Ukraine, Macron is now talking tough and pushing for harder
sanctions, almost as if to “compensate for his past enthusiasm,” said one civil
servant. France has supported sweeping sanctions including excluding banks from
the SWIFT system, and has taken swift action at home, freezing Russian assets
and seizing yachts belonging to oligarchs close to Putin. The French president “has
been and is in constant contact with all his allies” throughout the crisis,
said one of Macron’s advisers.
Macron
isn’t the only leader to be talking with Putin. Israeli Prime Minister Naftali
Bennett visited Putin in Moscow last week and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has
also exchanged calls with the Russian president.
But despite
the battle of briefings raging between the Elysée and the Kremlin, Macron is
unlikely to break off talks with Putin anytime soon. The view in France is that
the French president is the person best-placed to keep the lines of
communication open — even if he doesn’t have much to show for his effort so
far.
According
to a March 6 briefing by the Elysée, Macron is still talking about organizing
“talks that have to take place between the Russians and the Ukrainians.”
“France has
to play this role; it’s a member of the U.N. Security Council and it is one of
the European countries that matters now that the U.K. has left the EU,” said a
former junior foreign affairs minister.
“I’ve had
to deal with a lot of crap in my time, but one thing I can tell you is that you
always need to keep a line of communication open,” he added. “Because you never
know when your opponent will want to seek a way out.”
Maïa de La Baume contributed to reporting.
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