What the new Franco-German treaty signed yesterday in Aachen by Chancellor Angela Merkel and President Emmanuel Macron really represents? An important new chapter in the peaceful relations between the two countries after the bloodshed of the last two centuries. An agreement that strengthens and relaunches the so-called Franco-German axis or engine. It is certainly all of this, but also something more and different. With this agreement, France and Germany are somehow throwing the mask on their ambitions and putting the last nail in the coffin of the European Union, at least as it was naively understood and told here in Italy. Also symbolically the place chosen for the signature, Aachen, speaks truly unequivocally. Aachen: capital of the Holy Roman Empire, where Charlemagne is buried and where for over five centuries emperors were crowned "King of the Germans". Charlemagne certainly gave impetus to the idea of ​​Europe, but we are sure that it fits with the modern federalist idea, liberal and democratic that established itself after the Second World War?
It is clear that the bilateral relations between Paris and Berlin represent one of the pillars on which the European project cannot fail to be based. However, it is also undeniable that the Treaty of Aachen does not only represent an update of the Elysée Treaty signed in 1963 by the then French president Charles De Gaulle and the German chancellor Konrad Adenauer. France and Germany are not simply leading the way in the process of European integration, it is no longer a question of "multi-speed" Europe, “in concentric circles”, and similar formulas… The leap forward, qualitative and quantitative, which takes place in the integration between the two countries (foreign and defense policy, safety, a common economic and legislative area) it is such as to impart not only or not so much a change of pace to the European project, but a change in its very nature. The other countries only have two roads in front of them: to lean on, but from provinces of the newborn Carolingian Empire, or get in the way, looking for counterweights within, or even in actors external to the Union. In one case or another, the EU as we have known it up to now, or rather how we thought we knew it, it no longer exists.
The so-called Franco-German engine emerges transformed. Something profoundly different from a driving force of European integration as it was, all things considered, with the Elysée Treaty. Franco-Germans also become wheels and axles, bodywork and lights, but above all the steering wheel and the driver. The passengers? They are welcome, as long as they don't disturb too much and contribute to the costs of fuel and tolls. It's also difficult to ask to get off, once you get on board.
But let's look at the substance of the treaty. What is surprising is not so much the statement that France and Germany will hold "regular consultations at all levels" before the major European summits, trying to consolidate the "common positions". This is a manifestation of the traditional Franco-German axis or engine. There is much more and, despite the abandoned use of pro-European and multilateralist rhetoric, in clear contradiction with the propagated idea of ​​"European Union" and with its laborious implementation.
The treaty is located “within Europe”, Chancellor Merkel assured. “The two countries deepen their collaboration in the context of European politics”, it is written in the text. But how can these statements be reconciled with the provision that Germany's entry as a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council is now "a priority of Franco-German diplomacy"? “In the context of European politics”, to strengthen the international weight of the Union, rather, the priority should not be an EU seat to replace the French one, or at least add to it. No, the declared objective is the entry of Germany supported by Paris. And why not the other great losers of the Second World War, Italy and Japan? O l’India? Who is it that intends to reform (subverting it would be too much) the post-war international system?
Germany and France intend to strengthen the integration of their respective economies until the creation of "a Franco-German economic space with common rules". And the single market? How and to what extent this new space will influence the rules and dynamics of the European single market, without the other member states having a say? The Eurozone's ability to influence the single market, especially in the financial services sector, it is one of the main sources of British intolerance towards their membership of the EU. It is the Eurozone countries and the ECB that shape the banking system and the services market, while in London it does not remain (remained) that a weak influence on those decision-making processes – one of the issues on which former Prime Minister Cameron had returned empty-handed from Brussels.
But there's worse. France and Germany in Aachen have effectively signed a defensive military alliance, pledging to “provide mutual aid and assistance with all the means at their disposal, including the armed forces, in case of aggression against their territory” and foreseeing, for this purpose, also the establishment of a “French-German Defense and Security Council as a political body to manage these mutual commitments”. Consequent to the objective of "further strengthening cooperation between their armed forces" and "proceeding with joint deployments".
Chancellor Merkel spoke of “a joint military committee, a common defense ministry, a shared security and military export policy". According to the chancellor, it would be "only through coordination" in foreign and defense policy between Berlin and Paris that "the new European army" will be able to be founded. Ora, the military being an instrument at the service of foreign policy, what foreign policy interests could a European army conceived in this way ever serve?, if not those of the countries that have already founded it and lead it? And how close will the Germans come to the great “unmentionable” of all debates on the “European” army – the atomic bomb??
And NATO? Isn't this defensive solidarity already foreseen within the framework of the Atlantic Alliance? A Franco-German-led European army would be at best a duplication, at worst a competing and non-complementary NATO project.
France and Germany therefore do not limit themselves, to use Merkel's words, to "set the pace" for Europe. In “reorienting” their cooperation, in “agreeing on the international role” and engaging in “common actions”, they risk subjecting an already unsafe building to further stress and centrifugal forces, instead of “contributing to the success of the EU” as they proclaim.
Seen through the lines of the Aachen Treaty, the EU appears to be a fiction, the screen of Franco-German ambitions, and at the same time the instrument to serve them. If on the one hand it moves away, indeed, the constructivist utopia of the United States of Europe disappears behind the horizon, on the other hand, the "imperial" character of a European Union where outside of France and Germany is accentuated (with Belgium and Luxembourg) everything else is provincial, more or less far away.
Brexit and Aachen are two events that together will change the face of the European Union and the West forever: a wider Atlantic, more marked geopolitical and cultural divisions between the Anglosphere and Central Europe. Evidently intertwined, it would be simplistic to conclude that one causes the other or vice versa. This is not a bolt from the blue, but of a process that began at least since the end of the Cold War. Perhaps accelerated by Brexit and the Trump presidency, but certainly not determined by such events, any more than they are the reaction to the taking shape of a Franco-German Europe, or rather German-French. Already today, from an economic and institutional point of view, the European Union appears to be the result of a "division" between the Germans and the French. First up is governance, economic rules, to the latter the ministries, bureaucracy and, the English out, a leading role in defense. The EU increasingly resembles the scale-replicated French state: centralist and directing, Napoleonic. Perhaps, a mysterious collective intuition guided British voters in their decision to leave the EU right now: how could one imagine that the United Kingdom could accept being reduced to a mere peripheral province of an EU increasingly characterized by Franco-German centralism?
Many complain about Italy's isolation compared to the Aachen signatures, for which responsibility is attributed to the yellow-green government, guilty of looking elsewhere instead of Berlin and Paris. But despite twenty years of bows by many of the previous governments in the two capitals, We have never been able to sit at that table, not on par, and assuming we were ever invited, it's at least since 2011 that we are excluded from it. And in recent years, not months, Paris and Berlin have done everything to make us understand this. Rather, we might wonder if we hadn't used our resources better by working to strengthen our possible counterweights, both internal (Uk, Eastern countries) that non-EU (Usa, Russia, Japan). Berlusconi, at times, he tried. It does not seem that Lega and M5S have sufficient awareness and strategic depth, engaged as they are in short-term skirmishes.
We also need to deal with reality. Effectively, the level of economic integration, financial, social, cultural – between France and Germany (with Belgium and Luxembourg) it is not found among other member states. AND, in a certain sense, the only case in which Europe seems to be a done deal, a fait accompli which only lacks the seal of political union. In fact, it is undeniable that along that border, no longer bathed in blood for seventy years, there is a true European feeling, fueled by historical ties, from the passage of goods, companies and people, from true economic integration, financial, of interests, as probably along no other border between European states. From these points of view, central-northern Italy could have been part of this integration process (as it was already part of the Holy Roman Empire), but he also left this match with the unification of Italy.
It must be said, however, that the Old Continent and the Mediterranean are not as central as they were a thousand or five hundred years ago. A neo-Carolingian Europe that cultivated a sort of equidistance between Washington on the one hand and Beijing and Moscow on the other, who deluded herself into thinking she could "do it alone", disengaging from the transatlantic link, would end up proving unrealistic. A serious danger, if instead it were to represent a completion of the“Heartland” Eurasian by being attracted into the orbit of China and Russia. The German question has certainly returned, to which we dedicated a chapter in “Brexit. The Challenge” (2017). The concrete prospect of a hegemonic Germany in Europe worries Anglo-Americans, as well as the ghost of a new Ribbentrop-Molotov pact, the absence of a natural border between Moscow and Berlin, torments the capitals of Eastern countries.