“The walls of our common house have been cracked by the challenge to fundamental rights”, French President Emmanuel Macron said in a speech on Tuesday 1 October to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the pan-European organisation.
This “common house” is the one mentioned by Mikhail Gorbachev in July 1989 before the same assembly. At the time, it was a few months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, but 30 years after the beginning of the fall of the USSR, “the fascination for authoritarian regimes is expressed even within the European Union”.
“Our democracies are in crisis”, “they have failed to provide our fellow citizens with the protection to which they aspire”, “the return of history has put an end to hope”.
Faced with this observation of a weakened, even threatened Europe, Emmanuel Macron calls for a response with “strength of spirit, lucidity and courage” and preconditions for the European Union's accession to the European Convention on Human Rights.
“Europe's economic, digital and strategic sovereignty requires solidarity between Member States and the strengthening of the rule of law”, he said. The Europe of the Twenty-Eight and the Europe of the Forty-Seven are not in competition, “on the contrary”, because there will be sovereignty on a continental scale only on the basis of the “values that unite us within the Council of Europe”.
“I strongly believe that it is in the Council of Europe that fractures can be repaired, because it is the place where European consciousness is built and debated”, he added.
Debates involve tensions, as was the case with PACE sanctions imposed on the Russian Federation after its annexation of Crimea in 2014. The fear of seeing this country leave the COE was real. It would have been catastrophic in the eyes of the French President, because “seeing one of our members move away from the foundation of common values would have been a victory for those who do not believe in these values”.
While he questions the “effectiveness” of the sanctions voted by PACE and rejected by Moscow, Mr Macron does not deny the importance of Member States' compliance with their commitments. If they do not, the COE must indeed react, and this is the whole point of the new “joint mechanism” currently being discussed between PACE and the Committee of Ministers, the COE’s executive body chaired until November by France. The French President is more than supportive and hopes that it will be “operational in January”.
Europe also faces a “new collective situation”, he said in the second part of his speech. The principles and values that unite us are also “undermined by the transformations we are experiencing”: the enslavement of the world, the weakening of multilateralism and, within the continent, terrorist threats, digital, climate and demographic transformations, the crisis of capitalism...
These are all phenomena that “occur together in our societies” and in the face of which “two contradictory paths” are being asserted: that of withdrawal into oneself and that of “the illusion that the people are not as they are”. Another way is to build, he believes, the one that consists in “thinking to create an area of freedom and rights in our world as it is”.
A principle of reality that it advocates in terms of maintaining order in the context of demonstrations whose nature has changed (see the yellow vest crisis), combating disinformation, controlling migratory flows to be implemented without altering the right of asylum.
In his view, it is a question of “making our democracies stronger” and, here again, the COE's role must be central.
“These ethical tensions make your work profoundly new and historic”, he told parliamentarians. “The great Europe is being built here”, including through controversy, because far from being a “weakening”, it is a “luxury of the rule of law and democracy”. (Original version in French by Véronique Leblanc)