The recently re-elected French President Emmanuel Macron is at it again.
Addressing the European Parliament on May 9 in Strasbourg, Macron, while France is still holding the Presidency in the European Union (EU), delivered a speech in which he tried to emulate the late French Prime Minister Robert Schuman – by invoking his Declaration’s famous opening line on world peace and placing it into a modern-day context.
In his address, Macron repeated the need to thoroughly reform the EU – a promise he largely failed to deliver on in the past five years. He denounced Russia, noting its unspeakable crimes in Ukraine, and suggested the creation of a “European political community” to welcome Kyiv in particular, in parallel with an EU accession procedure that could take decades.
“This new European organization would allow democratic European nations adhering to our core values to find a new space for security and cooperation,” he said before embarking on an official visit to Berlin to meet German Chancellor Olaf Scholz who expressed support for Macron’s initiative.
But the floated project smacks of political fluff, simultaneously lacking both substance and goal. Furthermore, besides Macron, it is unclear who needs it since neither Kyiv nor other aspiring EU member states have expressed a desire for such an arrangement.
Macron’s suggestion that Britain could become part of this new community is all the more baffling given London’s post-Brexit ambitions to reinstate its role in the global arena. Given the EU’s cumbersome, multi-level decision-making, why would London want to join an obscure community led by a union that it had left just several years ago, with Macron as nominal leader?
Given the range of existing formats available for countries to hold dialogue – from the United Nations to G7 and G20 – there already appears to be a lack of necessity for this new project. Added to that, it resembles yet another pyramid scheme too clever by half; an elaborate attempt to create an illusion that you are doing something to hide the fact that you are doing everything in order not to do something.
Scholz is no stranger to such schemes, with his continuous and sophisticated attempts to hamper the essential supplies of heavy weapons to the Ukrainian Armed Forces. Macron, who according to President Zelensky, has suggested giving Putin some of Ukraine’s land to let him “save face”, seems to have caught the bug as well, trying to cover up the lack of political will to start Ukraine’s integration to the EU with beautiful diversionary initiatives.
It is indeed true that Ukraine’s EU membership will not happen overnight as the status of a candidate country is just one of the many laborious steps in aligning the country’s legislation with that of the EU. However, it is critical that this process begins and is taken seriously by all key officials across the EU and in Ukraine, which now has no choice but to complete long-overdue pivotal reforms.
The truth is that the EU does not need any new quasi communities. Nor does it need to become NATO’s “mini-me,” which Macron has long been advocating.
What the EU needs is to reinvent its essence that was seriously undermined following the 2008 financial meltdown, when it turned away from its logic of expansion aimed at preventing countries from going to war with one other, to thinking in terms of financial or well-being status.
Were Schuman to have taken this approach from the outset, the EU would never have grown post-World War II into what it is today. Nor would it have accepted countries in the big-bang enlargement of 2004 that saw ten states, including Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia, most of which were substantially lagging behind economically compared with the traditional West, accede to the union.
If the EU were to replace its preoccupation with requesting impeccability from potential candidates without a fixed timeline of accession, with a more realistic assessment of what is going on in the region, then there would be a very clear picture of what needs to be done.
On the one hand, EU institutions must undergo a well-overdue political overhaul. It would certainly undermine the culture of consensus that Brussels holds dear, but it is a must for the union to move forward since the current setup has bred authoritarian regimes like Hungary, which recurrently takes others hostage. In this respect, Macron’s proposals, also supported by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, to reform the union and abandon the principle of consensus in sensitive areas, are timely and necessary.
On the other hand, the EU must develop a clear-cut outline and timeline for its expansion – and this applies not only to Ukraine, but to the Western Balkans as well. The region’s wounds have not healed, with troubling signs already emerging in Bosnia and Herzegovina’s Serbian regional hub Republika Srpska.
There is no way the EU needs a new war on its doorstep, with Russia stepping in to fan the Balkan flames.
If Macron is keen on emulating Schuman, then instead of creating yet another community underpinned by attractive yet empty words, he should take the reins and advocate what the EU really needs: a 2004 big bang enlargement that would undermine Russia’s ambition in the entire continent for good.
