Emmanuel Macron’s grand Franco-German bargain

  • Thread starter Thread starter Vouthon
  • Start date Start date
Status
Not open for further replies.
V

Vouthon

Guest
ft.com/content/63a8c1cc-3713-11e7-bce4-9023f8c0fd2e#comments
**Emmanuel Macron’s grand Franco-German bargain
Click to expand...
A well-led and united EU leadership will make life harder for Britain as it leaves
Click to expand...
Mr Macron envisages a grand bargain in which Berlin secures the euro with a fiscal union while Paris agrees to structural reform at home. Such a trade would revive an old relationship that has atrophied through the weakness of his predecessors and the economy they oversaw. If it happens — and the freshness of his electoral mandate gives him a shot — then Britain enters an invidious.
Click to expand...
It has worked for centuries to avoid a concentration of power in mainland Europe. When it failed, as it did before the world wars, Britain paid a blood price. When it failed again in the postwar era, it paid an economic price: a unified continent led by a Franco-German industrial core left Britain for dust until it started to bid for membership of the project in the 1960s.
Click to expand...
A coherent, decisively led Europe will always be a problem for Britain. It cannot not be. It has the power to set the terms of access to the continental market and exclude Britain from any influence over events that nevertheless affect it…
Click to expand...
Both countries want to see Britain incur some material cost for its decision to leave. Both want to lure some banking activity from London. Both want the euro to survive and challenge the dollar. Both are led by politicians who believe populists can be seen off through confrontation rather than capitulation. Both can think of a dozen things they would rather harmonise at European level before they can name one they would return to nations.
Click to expand...
All of this points to the emergence of a tighter, better-led EU that makes life harder for Britain as it leaves and in the years after. And all of it has become more achievable with the election of Mr Macron.
Click to expand...
Britain would not be neighbourly to say so, of course, but once it chose to leave the EU it gained a strategic interest in the paralysis or even breakdown of the bloc. That way the eternal dilemma — what to do about a giant neighbouring trade zone whose rules you observe but cannot shape — would resolve itself. Not only does the restoration of Europe’s central bilateral relationship make that breakdown less likely, it creates the dread prospect of an EU that is actually more coherent after British departure…
Click to expand...
For generational reasons, Mr Macron might be the first post-national president of France, the first to believe in the European project as an end in itself as well as an alternative instrument for French glory after the eclipse of empire. His dynamism promises a tighter bond between France and Germany, and a Europe that is harder to divide and rule.
Click to expand...
**
Click to expand...
 
The centuries-long struggle on the part of the British to prevent the concentration of power within an organised continental Europe - through playing “divide and rule” by orchestrating ever-shifting alliances against country after country which attempted European hegemony - is fascinating to consider in light of recent developments.

This was, of course, Britain’s foreign policy goal during the First World War too as the then Prime Minister Aquith stated in September 1914, noting among other things that Britain entered the conflict:
"…to withstand, as we believe is in our best interests…the arrogant claim of a single power to dominate the development of the destinies of Europe."
Click to expand...
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_balance_of_power
**In the 16th and 17th centuries, English foreign policy strove to prevent a creation of a single universal monarchy in Europe, which many believed France or Spain might attempt to create. To maintain the balance of power, the English made alliances with other states—including Portugal, the Ottoman Empire, and the Netherlands—to counter the perceived threat. These Grand Alliances reached their height in the wars against Louis XIV and Louis XV of France. They often involved the English (later the British) and Dutch paying large subsidies to European allies to finance large armies.
Click to expand...
In the 18th century, this led to the stately quadrille, with a number of major European powers—such as Austria, Prussia, Great Britain, and France—changing alliances multiple times to prevent the hegemony of one nation or alliance. A number of wars stemmed, at least in part, from the desire to maintain the balance of power, including the War of the Spanish Succession, War of the Austrian Succession, the Seven Years’ War, the War of the Bavarian Succession and the Napoleonic Wars. Following Britain’s success in the Seven Years’ War, many of the other powers began to see Great Britain as a greater threat than France. Several states entered the American War of Independence in the hope of overturning Britain’s growing strength by securing the independence of the Thirteen colonies of British America…
Click to expand...
After 1870 the creation and rise of the German Empire as a dominant nation restructured the European balance of power. For the next twenty years, Otto von Bismarck managed to maintain the balance of power, by proposing treaties and creating many complex alliances between the European nations such as the Triple Alliance.[8][9]
Click to expand...
After the resignation of Otto Von Bismarck in the 1890s, the foreign policy of the German Empire became expansionary and the newly created alliances were proven to be fragile, something that triggered the First World War in 1914. One of the objectives of the Treaty of Versailles, the main post-World War I treaty, was to abolish the dominance of the ‘Balance of Power’ concept and replace it with the (global) League of Nations…**
Click to expand...
Britain’s winning streak in this regard is set to finally run out 😉

In the 1970s, Britain adopted the novel idea “if you can’t beat 'em, join them”.

We have abandoned this perfectly sound policy just at the time where the continent is about to become more tightly integrated than ever before.
 
Ridgerunner said:
My college French is pretty rusty, but I think the translation from Macron is: “France will pretend to reform if Germany will finance the pretense.”
Click to expand...
Well, you can read between the lines in French very well.
 
Ridgerunner said:
My college French is pretty rusty, but I think the translation from Macron is: “France will pretend to reform if Germany will finance the pretense.”
Click to expand...
Maybe I’m naive but I actually think he’s serious about labour reform.

He knows that the public sector in France needs to be streamlined and the economy made more hospitable to entrepreneurship, with a lot less red-tape.

If the French don’t act now, then their unemployment situation will only worsen.

Macron knows that to overcome German apprehensions (wholly justifiable, by the way) of a future fiscal union in Europe and fiscal transfers leading to Germans becoming the perpetual pay-masters of the EU, he has to show Germany that France means business with its finances and is willing to step up to the plate.

Macron needs his domestic reforms to have real bite, so that he can convince Merkel to accede to deeper Eurozone integration with a common budget, supranational finance minister and transfer union.

So I don’t think there is any pretence in his ambitions. The only question is whether or not he can pull it off.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top