France's president has a vision of a more 'strategic' and 'sovereign' Europe
stepped from his presidential plane onto the red carpet at the airport in Shanghai on November 4th, two flags were fluttering in the warm air: one Chinese, the other the French. This was only to be expected for a visiting French president, whom President Xi Jinping treated to two banquets and a private dinner, in two different cities. Yet the absence of a European Union flag was a small visual reminder of the scale of the diplomatic challenge Mr Macron has set himself.
“But we find ourselves for the first time with an American president who doesn’t share our idea of the European project,” Mr Macron notes, and whose attitude to the risk of jihadist prisoners on the loose in Syria is that they will “be escaping to Europe”.
But can he? French Fifth-Republic presidents are fond of laying out sweeping visions of the world that appeal to the country’s grandeur. Over the years, when French leaders have called for a, this has often sounded suspiciously like code for French hegemonic ambitions. Such efforts in the past have been dismissed in London or Washington as quaint, or dangerously undermining of, or both.
China is a good test of whether Mr Macron can get Europe to speak as one voice, and whether Europe wants that voice to be Mr Macron’s. He has been outspoken about “China’s real diplomatic genius for playing on our divisions and weakening us”. He says he wants fellow Europeans to be less naive; he has argued it was “stupid” to sell essential infrastructure in southern Europe to the Chinese.
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