President François Hollande has caused for a “jump start” to revive the European project after the dramatic British vote to quit the European Union. Gone, however, is the previous emphasis by Hollande on “changing direction” in Brussels towards greater focus on growth and less austerity. Instead the reaction to Brexit is set to be a tightening of EU priorities around greater security and policies on immigration.
The reaction of Hollande, who was very publicly opposed to Britain leaving the European Union, was immediate on Friday morning as the final results were announced. He held a meeting at the Elysée with his finance and foreign affairs ministers, with the EU economic commissioner Pierre Moscovici – a former French finance minister under Hollande – also attending. The president then spoke on the phone with several European leaders, including German chancellor Angela Merkel, before convening an extraordinary ministerial cabinet meeting.
Late on Friday the president met with the presidents of the National Assembly and the Senate, Claude Bartolone and Gérard Larcher. Both chambers of the French Parliament will hold debates on Tuesday about the consequences of Brexit and the likely impact on Europe. This weekend the president has also invited in the leaders of some of France's main political parties, including former president Nicolas Sarkozy, for a series of interviews. One aim of these meetings is to allow François Hollande to set out the position that France will defend when the president visits Berlin on Monday at the invitation of Angela Merkel, ahead of a European summit in Brussels on Tuesday and Wednesday. Italian prime minister Matteo Renzi, who was visiting Paris to meet Hollande on Saturday, will also be at the Berlin gathering.
As has been the case for many months now, the French and German positions are far from being in agreement. On the one hand the German chancellor, who fears confrontation with France now that the other main EU heavyweight Britain is leaving, wants to take her time, and rejects any deepening of European integration and moves towards a new treaty. On the other side, the French president wants to go faster and is still calling for a strengthening of the Eurozone. However, the two leaders could well reach an agreement on tightening European priorities around security, the fight against terrorism and defence policies.
As for the timing of British departure from the EU, François Hollande wants the negotiations on this to start as soon as possible. “Great Britain will thus no longer be part of the European Union and the procedures provided for in the treaties will quickly be applied,” he said at the Elysée. “Today history is knocking on our door. What is at stake is the dilution of Europe with the risk of looking inwards and the reaffirmation of our existence at the expense of profound changes,” he said, before calling for a “jump start” and repeating proposals that he has been making for some months.
“France will thus be pushing for Europe to concentrate on the essential: the security and defence of our continent to protect our borders and to preserve the peace faced with threats; investment for growth and for jobs, to put into action industrial policies in the domain of new technologies and energy transition: tax and social harmonisation to give our economies rules and our citizens some guarantees: finally, the strengthening of the Eurozone and its democratic governance,” said Hollande.
However Angela Merkel, who worries about the Brexit mood spreading, thinks that the 27 states remaining in the EU should not “draw rapid quick and simple conclusions from the referendum in Great Britain, which would divide Europe even more”. The member states have to “analyse the situation with calm and restraint, to evaluate it and afterwards take the right decisions together” the German leader said.
In a secret document entitled “The post-Brexit German strategy”, revealed on Friday by the economic daily newspaper Handelsblatt, officials working for German finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble write that there is a risk that the European Commission, France and Italy will “use the uncertainty of the moment [to push] for more integration”, in particular giving the Eurozone its own budget and with a European guarantee for bank deposits. The note says that Germany should fight such proposals in a “determined” way.
The eight-page document also points out that Berlin is ready to deepen the integration of the Eurozone but only on the condition that there are even greater controls on the economic policies and budget of the member states – notably by giving a right of veto over national budgets which do not respect the rule that budget deficits should not exceed 3%. Such a measure would require a modification of the treaties currently defended by Angela Merkel.
Even before the Brexit vote Wolfgang Schäuble had said: “We cannot, as a response to Brexit, promote more integration. That would be stupid, many would rightly ask if we other political leaders had still not understood.”
Enlargement : Illustration 2
Also before the British decision a senior French government source had indicated that European defence would be a big topic in the coming months. “We must get back to basics,” added another source close to François Hollande, who recalled the failure of the European Defence Community at the start of the 1950s, an idea ultimately rejected by France; both the communists and the supporters of Charles de Gaulle opposed it in Parliament and the project was abandoned. “Economic questions are not today at the heart of the issue,” say officials at the Elysée. “The question is how to ensure that the states don't retreat back in on themselves, because they have the feeling they're being invaded [editor's note, by migrants].”
On Friday French prime minister Manual Valls, who had already come to the conclusion that the issue of national identity will be at the heart of the 2017 presidential election in France, also noted that “Europe should no longer intervene everywhere, all the time”. He added: “I am profoundly patriotic, I love my country, France, and I am also fully European. Yes, we must rebuild the European project: what project? What values? What identity? What borders? That's how we will restore faith in Europe.”
A senior German source, meanwhile, said last week: “There's quite a broad consensus over the fact that one can do more in the domain of exterior policy and common European security.” Among the moves being given particular consideration are more joint exterior missions, agreements to buy military equipment and the creation of a genuine EU border police force. Up to now the main signs of a defence initiative have been between France and Great Britain.
François Hollande hopes that such initiatives will give Europeans the feeling their concerns are being addressed at a time when more and more people are tempted by xenophobic stances and retreats into national identity.
However a previous president, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, who was head of the French state when Britain voted in 1975 to stay in the then-European Economic Community, said he believed many of the current problems with the EU came from its size, which had grown to 28 member states. “We have created a system that could not work and it has not worked,” he told TF1 television news on Friday. “With a Europe of 28, we improvised.” The former president said the EU needed to be focussed on its original member states. “We should bring together the founder countries [editor's note, France, Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Italy] and neighbouring countries, Spain, Portugal … who share the same ideas and have a plan,” said Giscard. He also said that the EU had focussed too much on the “problems of the day” and had given up on spelling out a vision for Europe's future. “That's not very exciting in terms of Europe moving forward,” he said.
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- The French version of this article can be read here.
English version by Michael Streeter.