La nation européenne
In this work, which is somewhere between an essay and a memoir, the Renew Europe member of the European Parliament Bernard Guetta delivers his impressions from the inner circle of the Brussels institutional bubble, his take on the war in Ukraine and his confidence that there will be true political union in Europe sooner rather than later.
“I had never been in a position to use a power play. I did not even know what it was like to be perceived as powerful, because although my career had accustomed me to talking to heads of state, party or government, I knew their world only from the outside. As a correspondent for Le Monde, director of L’Expansion then of L’Observateur, the editor of major European titles and France’s most listened-to radio station, I had held positions of influence, but I knew nothing about the lives of politicians, their laws, their back-scratching, their networks and power games and suddenly, overnight, I was in the midst of a huge European powerplay with pettiness as fathomless as its reach was broad, even to a planetary level”, writes the MEP, who steadfastly refuses to take off his journalist’s hat altogether (our translation throughout). This at least has the merit of affording the reader a few realistic descriptions of the European Parliament, like this one: “in Brussels, the air conditioning remorselessly freezes half your body solid. In Strasbourg, an energy saving system cuts the lights after 30 seconds without any movement in the room, which means that writing is impossible, unless you wave your arms in the air every three words. In both places, the percentage of pointless meetings is as impressively high as the time wasted in byzantine discussions on amendments that the functioning of the world could quite happily do without. Nor is the Parliament spared its contradictions and imperfections, but it also has everything I love, a long permanent reporting job, a tour of the daily world to which I wasted no time in adding a weekly paper, which is regularly published in five member states of the EU and the Russian press in exile”.
“The European Commission, a vital cog in the EU wheel, is nonetheless just a cog and all the Parliament can do is make amendments, say ‘no’ and campaign in favour of ideas which only the member states can make flesh. The Parliament can fight to have the use of glyphosate banned or stop the sales of petrol cars sooner than the states, or some of them, would like. It can undertake great battles and end up winning them, but its strength lies solely in its power of obstruction, of refusal, if you prefer, of veto in fact, which was given to it by the States, making its agreement indispensable in a growing number of areas. This is by no means negligible. By brandishing the threat of blocking a dossier, the MEPs increasingly force compromises out of the Council and Commission, because they wish to expand their power and co-decision gives them the possibility to do this. Direct democracy (here, the author seems to mean the involvement of citizens through their elected representatives: Ed) advances as a result of this, little by little, but the European Parliament is still a simulacrum of a Parliament, as the States have ensured that the right of legislative initiative is the preserve of the Commission, fearing that the MEPs would be able to impose legislation upon them against their will and that they may end up losing their grasp on power, because they would have to share it”, Guetta explains. This section is a pedagogical act, although something even more fundamental that is denied to the European Parliament is the capacity to levy even the smallest tax. This capacity is more fundamental than the right of legislative initiative, which is sometimes largely ring-fenced by the national governments, as is the case in France under the Ve République. It is fundamental for the credibility of the European Parliament and would, in my view, do much to help the citizens see themselves as Europeans.
“Once many decisions are being made at the European level, political logic and the democratic imperative would require, in a word, the Union to have a federal executive, stemming from the true Parliament that the European Parliament should become. This is where we urgently need to be. If we delay too long in setting out in this direction, then the advantage may soon be claimed, as it was yesterday in Great Britain, by the most senseless demagogues. This is why I am more of a federalist than ever”, the MEP writes, although he confesses that he is not expecting any kind of big institutional night: “these days, I fear that we must not go too fast (…). It could kill off the very idea of the United States of Europe if we tried to reduce the states’ power too quickly by giving the Parliament the same amount of power that they have. Having become an MEP/journalist, plunged into the everyday functioning of the European Union, I have ended up believing the opposite of what I said from the outside when I was just a journalist: I have concluded that it is not a foot on the accelerator, but a series of small, well-thought-out and progressive steps that will get us out of this unsustainable status quo and moving towards the federal institutions that we will need one day”.
With every fresh crisis, Europe develops, Guetta points out, referring to the spectacular progress made in the wake of the pandemic, with the communal purchase of vaccines, the Recovery Plan partly financed with a joint loan and the suspension of the stability pact, but also, since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, efforts made in the field of defence, including the common financing of munitions purchasing. And “since its benefits and its necessity have been proven by the pandemic, then by the return of war the European continent, the Union has become so popular among such a majority that 60% of the British now regret having left the EU”, the author notes, observing that as “72% of the citizens of the Twenty-Seven” felt at the end of 2022 that the European Union was a good thing or a very good thing, “the situation has never been so favourable to a strengthening of European unity". He goes on to argue that “after the common market and the single currency, the European Union has unquestionably entered the third phase, that of the construction of a political union that is now being asserted in the common front of Europeans against Vladimir Putin and their supplies of arms to Ukraine”. But even so, how could anybody disagree with the author that “the discourse on Europe as a power and the need for it cannot be completely convincing until they are concrete reality, until the European Union has truly invested in its Defence and genuinely has pan-European armament industries”. And from discourse to action, the path of conversion seems to be a difficult one, even in France. The path is narrow and a lack of real political will constantly brings us to a finality without end.
In a bid to make progress on the path towards political Europe, Guetta suggests the next European elections in 2024 or, failing that, those of 2029, should be a “launchpad for federal elections that would bring political Europe into being”, by means of the creation of one or more political formations that would spark a debate on pan-European programmes setting out priority projects. He suggests such a programme, featuring seven priorities: (1) pooling and placing under a common command and flag all resources to tackle natural disasters; (2) the creation of European armament industries supported by procurement commitments of the member states; (3) the creation of pan-European universities of excellence; (4) a new European cyber-police; (5) the drafting of a “Blue Pact” to protect the oceans; (6) a policy of common investments in future-facing sectors and cancer treatments; (7) a “Made in Europe” label and a “Buy European Act”. The author considers that at the end of this procedure, Parliament would become indispensable and, in turn, “political union would become an obvious end goal for an ever-increasing number of European citizens”.
From a starting point of Ukraine, to which “we needed to extend a hand (…), not half-heartedly, but fully”, in other words not stop at arming the country to repel the Russian invasion, but also to give it the prospect of accession to the EU, the author, having stressed the problems in granting candidate status to this war-torn country without regard for the others, some of which have been knocking on the door of the European Union for many years, recommends a variable-geometry Europe. Along with a great many other analysts, he expresses concern at the effects of enlargement on the depth of the Union. In order to avoid any regression in political integration, he considers the European Union on a model of a rocket comprising three stages, from “the broadest union to the closest”. “The first of these should be a state of ‘European partnership’, into which we could admit the Balkans, Ukraine, a solidly democratised Turkey and, who knows, when it is ready, a Great Britain that has turned its back on the vanity of its solitude. This would be the stage once represented by the single market, a free-trade zone cemented by accession to the principles of the rule of law and the universal declaration of human rights”, Guetta suggests, seemingly making the – in my view, dangerous – decision to circumvent the European Convention of Human Rights and its jurisdictional machinery, even though this deserves to be revised and reinforced, if anything. The second stage of the rocket would be that of economic and monetary union, featuring current EU policies but with a higher degree of integration, in which all participating states must “have adopted the euro and renounced all forms of fiscal and social dumping”. Finally, the third stage, for which the author happily resurrects the name “European Community”, would be the one “in which a few – the six founding member states and others – would pool their foreign policy, the development of the common defence and future investments”. Like all other models, Guetta’s rocket has advantages and disadvantages that cannot be adequately analysed in just a few lines. The first pitfall, which is common to all models, is its complexity, whereas getting the citizens on board requires an effort towards simplifying and making more readable the talking shop that Europe has become, with its multiple organisations and institutions. The second relates to the incentives that would prompt the member states to move from one stage to the next …
As regards security, the author laments the fact that when the Soviet Union collapsed, “the Americans, the Russians, the Europeans – nobody felt it necessary, urgent, vital, formally to lay down the new borders in the treaties governing future cooperation and establishing rules of confidence and security between all states of the continent”. The war currently being waged is a consequence of this and “once the Russian attack has been pushed back, this should be done immediately, because as long as all the nations of the former Russian Empire have set out their new relations in their new borders in the security agreements between all states of the continent, there will be no permanent peace between Ukraine and Russia, and therefore no true peace in Europe”, he writes, before going on to list the dangers of a prolonged war and the collapse of Russia, which would be a disaster: “a civil war would destroy a nuclear power; jihadist movements would find new sites for action in Chechnya and the neighbouring republics, while China and Turkey would be irresistibly tempted to intervene in the immense chaos ensuing the borders of the European Union”.
“With just a little less complacency for a subject of discontent and a bit more collective determination to build our common future, we could even do far more than what we can do at the moment, as Europe, let us no longer deny it, is already more of a nation than France was before its revolution. Whatever the myopic and the Europhobic have to say on the subject, Europe is a nation in a state of fusion, as France was in the trenches of 14-18”, Guetta states with admirable optimism, before concluding that “my personal belief is that we will succeed in making a renewed European Union into one of the three greats of this century (in other words, as the author puts it, “the vitally necessary balancer of power between China and the United States”), but the task is an immense one and even the requirement for it needs our help”. (Olivier Jehin)
Bernard Guetta. La nation européenne (available in French only). Flammarion. ISBN: 978-2-0804-1967-5. 188 pages. €20,00
Cyber Operations in Russia’s War against Ukraine
This comment note by the Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik concentrating on the first lessons learned from the war in Ukraine in its cyber aspect leads to observations akin to those made by Alexis Rapin, reported in edition 81 of our Kiosk column, in other words the integration of cyber-operations in a basically conventional war continues to be extremely difficult. In the note, Mattias Schulze and Mika Kerttunen explain why, under most circumstances, “it is quicker, simpler, and less costly (…) to neutralise a target with airstrikes or artillery fire, rather than by way of a cyber-effect operation”. “Rather than destroying or inhibiting the Ukrainian military forces or weapon systems, Russian cyber operations targeted the overall will of the Ukrainian people and their capacity to defend themselves. Still, there is little evidence that these operations produce strategic effects such as Ukrainians’ diminished will to resist”, the authors write, adding: “on the contrary, research shows that strategic attacks on civil infrastructure don’t reduce an enemy’s will to resist, but rather spark a rally around the flag effect that generates strong support for the defending country’s leadership”. By way of conclusion, the authors assert that “better algorithms alone will not balance the inherent weaknesses of offensive cyber operations: they require excessive time, our target -dependent, and might simply fail against an agile, proactive defender”. Conversely, “although imperfect, cyber-defence is not futile, even against prolific attackers”. “To be successful, it requires flexibility, speed, forward thinking, useful threat intelligence, and streamline inter-ministerial processes to reduce information silos”, they add. (OJ)
Matthias Schulze and Mika Kerttunen. Cyber Operations in Russia’s War against Ukraine. Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik. SWP Comment NO.23, April 2023. Comment note can be downloaded free of charge from the foundation’s website: https://aeur.eu/f/6mo