“Europe can die”, warned Emmanuel Macron this Thursday April 25 at the Sorbonne, 45 days before the European elections. Seven years after setting out his ambitions for the EU in this same amphitheater, the French president pleaded for a “powerful Europe” with a “credible European defense”. A “hyperlucid” observation which clashes with the realities of the Old Continent, underlines Sylvain Kahn, professor at Sciences Po, and author of Europe facing Ukraine (Ed. PUF, February 2024). Interview.
L’Express: The Head of State calls for building a credible European defense. Do we have the means to achieve this?
Sylvain Kahn : There is a huge gap between Emmanuel Macron’s ambition and reality. We have a hyper-lucid president, who makes an excellent diagnosis like a great professor at the Sorbonne, without giving us realistic clues as to the path to get there. There really is a “Yes, we can” side to this speech. In addition, many of the problems highlighted on April 25 were already there in 2017.
A passage from the speech sums up the French paradox: the president pleads for defense Europe, while in the same sentence welcoming the purchase of Rafale by two European countries. Here we have one of the main obstacles on the path to European defense: in Europe, there are around twenty models of fighter planes while in the United States there are only four! In other words, with the same money spent, we achieve much more fragmented results. Of the top 25 global arms exporters, there are 10 European countries. There are at least five countries on the Old Continent that have a defense industrial and technological base large enough to be considered autonomous (including France, Germany, and Italy).
But could this not also constitute an asset in favor of a defense Europe?
In theory yes, but as long as there is a situation of competition between national industries, we will not have a European defense industry. Remember, at the time of the Aukus “Trafalgar coup” (the military alliance concluded in 2021 between Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States, at the expense of the giant submarine sales contract French to Australia), the head of French diplomacy Jean-Yves le Drian cried treason against Europe. He forgot in passing that the French had won the tender for these submarines against the Japanese and the Germans. At the time, there was no question of Europe!
The anti-missile shield is another textbook case: the one proposed by the Germans [utilisant le système israélo-américain Arrow, NDLR] attracted the interest of 13 member countries while the competing Franco-Italian project only won the support of two countries. It is clear that the French defense industry is as much part of the problem as it is part of the solution.
Emmanuel Macron’s speech is meaningful in the sense that it opens a horizon, designates a point of arrival, but it ignores reality. As if France, which had become the second largest arms exporter, did not have its share of responsibility. There is no magic wand to resolve this problem: there are jobs at stake, pressure from industrialists, questions of national sovereignty.
The president pleads for European preference in arms purchases. Is this feasible?
Member States would first have to agree to consider that the European defense fund is a priority item. For the moment, this is not the case. In the multiannual financial framework from 2021 to 2027, the budget allocated to this fund was almost halved, from 13 to 7.9 billion euros! True, it was adopted before the war in Ukraine. Perceptions have evolved since then, but it will take a long time to build this “European preference”.
One option would be to immediately involve Ukraine in mechanisms for pooling, financing and producing defense equipment. This would make it possible to network the armies to try to cover, on a European scale, all the needs in terms of types of weapons. For example, no European country today produces tanker aircraft. Countries specialize in different weapon systems. We must first make them interoperable, and manage to coordinate in order to cover all the needs of a modern army.
Are European partners ready for it?
In recent months, initiatives have been successfully launched. For example, the Czech president proposed that Europeans buy munitions together to deliver them to the Ukrainians. And the Future Air Combat System (FCAS) project was relaunched.
Thanks to the Covid-19 crisis, the EU has invented a new system since the European Commission has taken on the role of European purchasing center for vaccines. The Europeans are trying to do the same thing for the purchase of weapons, this would make it possible to have joint calls for tender: not only would these weapons be interoperable, but it would also make it possible to save money since the quantities to be purchased would be more important.
The head of state believes that it is necessary to “create strategic intimacy between European armies”. He cites as an example a coalition of European special forces in the Sahel, which was not a great success…
We can see the glass half empty… or half full! The Takuba force still mobilized soldiers from around ten European countries, including states very far from the Mediterranean and the Sahel. From that point of view, it was quite successful. But their presence on the ground was short-lived (and for good reason, the arrival of the junta in Mali accelerated their departure) and they did not obtain great results.
Above all, it is a device that adds to the pile of those already existing in European defense policy. Since the Maastricht Treaty, a new “layer” has been added every 4-5 years. Our European defense policy is a panoply of public policies rather than a common plan to defend our territory together. And this, for a simple reason: since 1949, Europeans have made the conscious choice, assumed and repeated since, of NATO to ensure the defense of their territory.
Macron’s ambition is beautiful – in favor of a strategic doctrine shared by the 27, of a paradigm shift which would lead to a new weapons system. But he preaches in the desert! No one really subscribes to this discourse in the rest of Europe, even if Trump’s statements on NATO and the war in Ukraine have moved the lines.
The president calls for switching to a “war economy”. Where is France in this area?
A substantial step was taken during the last military programming law. From this point of view, Emmanuel Macron is rather consistent. He assumes France’s choice in terms of military policy: to have a complete apparatus… At the risk of ending up with “a bonsai army”, having chosen no specialization. We know how to do everything (external operations, nuclear deterrence, mobilization of a professional army) but in miniature version…
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