“Europe is experiencing a shrinkage that we do not measure enough” – L’Express

“We believed, because it lasted, that it was definitive. Eternal peace had arrived. But that is ignoring History, not having traveled the world. Peace is a parenthesis.” The call seems alarmist, but resonates in the face of the dangers which threaten the European space today. We know Patrice Franceschi, the adventurer writer, who knows how to tell stories of men and women who love freedom. Aviator, sailor, this great traveler is also keen on political philosophy. His thoughts lead him today to defend a strong Europe, capable of facing resurgent empires like Russia and China. In Believe and act, published by Plon (March 2024), it defends a philosophical and practical program to ignore nationalism in order to reinvent a more united Europe around a political project. For L’Express, he details his vision, as 360 million voters in the European Union go to the polls from June 6 to 9.

L’Express: In Believe and act [Ed. Plon, mars 2024]you talk about what the European Union should be, a great idea and an effective system, but today it is rather perceived as a set of restrictive standards, a bureaucracy detached from citizens.

Patrice Franceschi: As a system producing standards, yes, most of the time economic. Therein lies original sin. It was necessary to build a political system from which the economic system would have derived. The opposite of what was done. This seemed logical in the post-World War II era when everything had to be rebuilt, except that it would have been necessary to first have a very clear political idea, and we would have built the economic system around it.

There was still a political idea in the project, that of securing peace.

It was less a political idea than an existential necessity. A political idea, we must think about its implementation. There, we only did the economy, we created the Coal and Steel Community. The political side came to complement the economic decisions. The logic was: if we create the Economic Community of Coal and Steel, how does it translate politically?

But concretely, how do we create this Europe?

We first ask ourselves what we want as a society. Peace, prosperity, that’s a basis. And then we talk about the economy. Otherwise, it works haphazardly. But above all, that does not make for a political power capable of facing the challenges of the future. First, we must rebalance the relationship with the United States, because we are its vassals in all areas. Next, create an independent European army. But here, we do not have the means to achieve this because each country today bargains over the number of soldiers and tanks that it is ready to put. Who will order? A rotating command is not going to work. In the current system, we will never create a defense Europe, because we have given primacy to economic Europe. So it will be in proportion to what everyone is willing to put in. Look when we wanted to create the Franco-German brigade decades ago, it didn’t come to fruition.

You defend a certain European federalism, but the word seems taboo today…

How did the United States become a great power? Because they first created a political function, the federal entity. They are not the only ones, there is India, Brazil… Each state can have real representation at the federal level. Whereas today, the President of the Commission Ursula von der Leyen, no one elected her. When we say that there is too much federalism in the European model, that is not the right word. There is more and more centralization of the European Union to the detriment of the States. People did not understand the concept of a federal state. And if you look at what others have done, you see that this is the solution.

But the United States, Brazil… We can say that they are young nations. In Europe, nationalisms have been built for centuries. There is the impression among Europeans that if they merged into a larger whole, they would lose their identity.

Look at India, it was even worse. To create Indian union, it was necessary to create twenty-two official languages. So complex, so different from Europe… Languages, religions, everything is different between Indian states. And yet they found a way to do it. They are becoming one of the great world powers. We do not lose our identity in a well-constructed federal state, it is not a question of saying at a given moment that we are a single country. In federalism, the collective protects each cell. In a federal state, national egoisms are kept on a leash by the federal state. As we did in a normal State elsewhere. Corrèze was financed by Ile-de-France for a very long time. National solidarity, normal and useful to everyone.

But who can have such political will today? This seems like a utopia.

Nobody has it, because the site seems too big. But it would be enough for the President of the French Republic to create a ministry of the United States of Europe. It would be a boost across the continent. At the beginning it will be necessary to negotiate with one State, two States, it would be a very long process, at least the time of a human life. Today, we have the feeling that the European Union captures too many states’ freedoms. But in the federal state, there are very precise regulations for everyone, equal for everyone. Everyone has their say but also preserves their nation. And after the rest everything will go easily. We need to make a real revolution, but in a positive sense. The preservation of democracy requires a change in political paradigm, namely federalism. But to do it, you have to be a leader, a statesman, who gives a signal and who completely upsets the established order. It would take years, but a process would be initiated. Today, the European Union is a bastard system that functions with difficulty and deprives countries of much of their sovereignty without the people having been consulted.

And what does a consultation like the one that is happening inspire you?

We are simply facing the legislative renewal of the European Union, the only place where still – in a federal state, it would be more or less like that – the citizens of each country express themselves and elect their deputies, but this is not is neither the judiciary nor the executive. We have to vote because Parliament has a little decision-making power over the Commission. The federal state never constitutes an obstacle, as long as each people can express themselves freely within the vertical structures of a federal apparatus. As in the United States, all states have their own national laws, incredible freedom and autonomy. But the federal state allows a powerful army. If we think this is a utopia, if we give up, if we don’t change anything, we will continue like this and we will pay the price before twenty years. And France will no longer be much. Europe is experiencing a shrinkage that we do not measure enough.

“It is our pride to have built such a secure world. But it could turn against us. Our solidity has diminished,” you write. Basically, Europeans are not cut out for the world to come.

And they will be less and less. This was not the case thirty years ago, because there was not China, India at the level we see today, which want to dominate the world, without qualms and with the necessary violence. We fell asleep in comfort, we focused on the economy. We no longer have an army in Europe, except that of France, but which has shrunk considerably. How long does it take to train an officer? Ten years ! Build a submarine or aircraft carrier program? Thirty years ! It takes decades to put that back into place. A European army formed from 1945 would have been superior to that of the United States. Largely, and the Russians would not have arrived in Ukraine, they would not even have dared. Now we are governed by fear of what we will have to do against the Russians, the Chinese, and we do anything. Even the Turks are more powerful than us. There is no idea, there is no will, there is nothing.

President Emmanuel Macron in his speech on Europe delivered in April at the Sorbonne seems aware of the threat.

Yes, but we have to do something that turns the tables, that means we have to put an end to the European Union, we have to create the United States of Europe. It will take sixty or eighty years. But let’s start right away. Churchill, in 1940, in the debacle, what did he propose to France? The Franco-British union, to form a single State. By saying that we will only be able to get out of this if we make one country together. Obviously, it’s too late. The others are stunned to hear this. But he had this realization at a certain point that the table must be radically reversed. As the economy in Europe is still doing very well compared to the rest of the world, we think that everything is going well, except that we do not see the groundswells that are brewing. We will pay dearly for it in twenty years. We give predators appetites through our dissensions, etc. The disarmament of Europe over the past forty years is incredible. But our politicians don’t understand anything.

Are there any real leaders missing in the face of Putin?

Yes, Putin’s statesman against evil is missing, the good statesman who wants to defend freedom, democracy, etc. At the cost of his life if necessary. Putin is ready to die for what he does, and so he does it. We are in a truly terrible gap. Before there was the Cold War, the balance of terror, etc. Now it’s exploding. The United States will take as much power as possible, but others will arise. China, Indonesia, Pakistan… The world is going to be much more dangerous.

And can countries like India and China also take on a military dimension?

China builds the equivalent of the French war fleet every four years, it is on its third aircraft carrier. One day, there will be Chinese aircraft carriers cruising off the coast of Brest, off the coast of Marseille, it’s their project – they write it, believe them. They won’t need to attack us. They will be there, very close and will then say: “You know, the commercial agreement we signed for electric cars, we must sign it.” And what will we do? We are not going to make war on them. We won’t dare. We will be vassalized. A colony of China. In Chinese philosophy, the greatest soldier is the one who wages war without even shooting an arrow.

We are far from a federal Europe, it is rather the nationalist vision who wins, the trend is towards withdrawal.

People are afraid, they see that things are not going well. They go to those who they think will have the strongest hand to do something within their borders, to protect them. But France is too small an entity. If we want to protect ourselves, we must do it globally, they are on the wrong track. Our smallness will only increase and nuclear weapons are only a weapon of last resort, of protection. If tomorrow the Chinese impose on us all the economic contracts they want, nuclear weapons will not allow us to oppose their impoverishment with less and less wages. Nationalisms throughout Europe, due to the situation, are gaining ground because people are afraid and because they think that those who close the borders best are the ones who will save them. This is an illusion. The strength is in the collective project. I am certain that young people, if we offer them a generous project, can dream. We must give young people realistic idealisms. If we wanted, we could. It’s not impossible. It is a question of will.