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THE STATE OF THE EUROPEAN UNION
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After social dumping, his new fight in this
“Europe that protects” battle is going to be
against fiscal dumping, supporting ways to tax
the digital industry – the so-called GAFA. The
French government welcomes the Commission’s
proposal made in March 2018. A visit of Macron
next year to Ireland could be used as a way to
put political pressure on this GAFA-friendly
country and show public opinion a willingness
to act on this fiscal issue pointed out as a failure
of EU integration.
Another field where the French President
wants to give “Europe that protects” some
teeth is migration. Until now, his policy on this
matter has been articulated mostly domestically.
Macron has openly acknowledged the results of
the latest Italian elections as a warning signal
for a clear EU response able to demonstrate that
Europe can keep the in-coming flows under
control. The Elysée is in a favour of revising the
Dublin regulation for a better burden-sharing of
asylum-seekers across the EU.
“Europe that protects” also means develop-
ing the common Defence policy. With the United
Kingdom about to leave the EU, France under-
stands it must play a new leading role in this field
since it will become
de facto
the sole EU Member
State with nuclear weapons and holding a per-
manent seat at the UN Security Council. With
the fight against terrorism to carry out in African
countries of the Sahel, and an unpredictable
American defence policy towards Europe, the
French president launched his European inter-
vention initiative in his Sorbonne speech, aside
from the newly established Permanent struc-
tured cooperation on defence and security
(PESCO). This unexpected French initiative has
since created misunderstanding among other EU
countries and officials, questioning how – and
why – it will differ from PESCO. In France, the
fear is that a PESCO, joined today by up to 25 EU
Member States of the EU, may become too large
to be efficient. Paris hopes that building a
European intervention in its own right, outside
the EU and open to the UK, will prove by 2024
that it can deliver real protection to the Europeans.
Apart from defence, Macron’s approach to
security is also economic. He supports the idea
of screening foreign direct investment, put for-
ward by the Juncker Commission, in order for
Europeans to secure national interests and re-
spond to less open environments. When travel-
ling to China last January, he tried to act not only
as the French President but to present himself as
Europe’s foremost leader, requesting “reciproci-
ty” in the opening of domestic markets.
Inside Europe, Emmanuel Macron wants to
provide more economic protection and empow-
erment through the euro, the EU’s most inte-
grated achievement yet. Bercy, place of the
French Finance ministry where the President
originally comes from, has developed ideas to
create a euro zone budget meant to be a stabi-
lizer in case of shocks on a country’s economy.
Macron is also in favour of creating a finance
minister for the euro-zone and a parliament for
the monetary union, reviving an old Franco-
German dispute on the kind of economic gov-
ernance to be attached to the single currency.
Restore France’s influence while
addressing French concerns
In pursuing this broad and ambitious “Europe
that protects” agenda, France knows it does
not meet expectations among many European
leaders, including Germany. But Macron seems
to favour deeper integration over unity at all
costs, concrete results than wide but mild com-
promises. Macron’s Europe is inevitably multi-
speed.