© REUTERS/Thilo Schmuelgen

It was a mixed day for both France and Germany. It was snowing in Paris. Montmartre was under five centimeters of snow. And the public interest in what was happening in Aachen quickly evaporated. 

The applause in the German border town came only from the selected guests. Outside of the Aachen town hall, the yellow vests protested, demanding the resignation of the French president and the German chancellor. There were also a few blue, pro-European balloons drifting in the damp winter air around the marketplace. 

But when Emmanuel Macron and Angela Merkel finally left the hermetically sealed ballroom of the town hall for the auditorium of the nearby high school, in order to carry out a so-called citizens’ dialogue with yet another group of selected French and German participants, they marched straight through the marketplace. They didn’t stop by the unselected participants, didn’t wave once, shook nobody’s hand, and didn’t hold hands. 

It seemed as if they didn’t dare, in public on the marketplace, to look to the right or the left. The chants of the yellow vests resounded behind them. It appeared that the president and chancellor were running away from them. Yet the leaders had all the time in the world. They had let exactly 56 years pass before adding this Aachen Treaty, a supplement, to the Élysée Treaty signed by their predecessors Charles de Gaulle and Konrad Adenauer on January 22,^,1963.

Founding a Friendship

The Élysée Treaty once founded the Franco-German friendship. When it was signed, De Gaulle and Adenauer did not wade into the jubilant crowd either. But in the years since, everyone has agreed that the Élysée Treaty in particular contributed significantly to the reconciliation between French and Germans. So with the president and chancellor now showing up to renew the peace process of 1963, aren’t there enough reconciled French and Germans around to cheer their leaders on, or at least politely applaud? 

Evidently not. Apart from the yellow vests and the balloon-holders, there were hardly any people there. Not even curious bystanders were on the marketplace. The German public network ARD did show the signing live on TV—certainly by order of the political bosses. In France, though, the BFM network quickly went elsewhere. The snow in Paris was simply more important on this day. 

The president and chancellor seemed to feel that too as they made their businesslike crossing of the marketplace, without gestures or expression. Yet this could have been a moment of triumph—no, in fact, it had to be. For the first time in history, France and Germany assured each other of mutual military aid in a crisis or a war, not as part of a union or larger alliance but as nations themselves. Article 4 of the Aachen treaty states that France and Germany will “provide aid and assistance by all means at their disposal, including armed forces, in case of aggression against their territory”. 

Franco-German Commitment

That means that even if NATO, about whose cohesion many have speculated since Donald Trump was elected US president, breaks up; even if the European Union, which is on its way to losing one of its most important member-states in the United Kingdom, keeps unraveling, it wouldn’t change a thing about this Franco-German commitment to help each other with “all means at their disposal”! For the Aachen Treaty now guarantees that. 

So France would risk nuclear war if it helped Germany. Previously the Germans had always imagined America playing this role in an emergency. Now the words of this treaty demonstrate a new, European security doctrine. Both countries’ goal is now to “strengthen Europe’s capability to act autonomously.” In plain English that means: in the future we want to carry out our own wars, if we really have to. It means that the president and chancellor would be, if necessary, the new supreme commanders of Europe. Still, where was the sign of power from the leaders in Aachen? Where did they show their new common strength? 

“Merkel and Macron sign without conviction,” ran the headline in the leading conservative French daily Le Figaro on the morning of January 22. Without conviction. That summed it up. This day lacked the gesture, the idea of action that would have showed the citizens of both countries: France and Germany are powerful and strong together! That would have showed: everyone has to beware of us, Russians, Chinese, the Americans, too, if it comes to it! We will defend ourselves! 

It didn’t have to be a military gesture. Perhaps simply throwing out an American and a Chinese spy, for example. The president and chancellor could have given the impression that they were serious, that actions would follow their words. But apparently we are not there yet. They preferred to argue about whether a jointly developed fighter plane, that won’t be ready to deploy for another ten years, may be exported to Saudi Arabia or not. Even though they don’t know which sheikh will be ruling then. 

The president and chancellor really should have demonstrated strength on this day, but they didn’t. “Strength is decisively important in politics”, Niccolo Machiavelli once said. One doesn’t have to be a Machiavellian to recognize that. Thomas Gomart, a director of IFRI, the French institute for international relations, cited the old Florentine in his book L’affolement du monde (The Panic of the World). Why, then, did the president and chancellor forego any demonstration of their strength? Didn’t they have anything to counter the world’s panic, its headlessness?

No wonder that most commentators left and right of the Rhine quickly moved on to other things. The right-wing extremist Marine Le Pen spread rumors that the treaty included the German annexation of Alsace and Lorraine. Because there was so little interest, she was able to tell tall tales and get off scot-free. The president and chancellor, in any case, acted as if they had more important things to do at the moment. 

Lacking Romance

One section near the end of Macron’s speech was so heavily improvised that hardly anyone understood him. The president cited the vain Germaine de Stael, who liked to claim in her day, the 19^thcentury, that she would use a German word as soon as she couldn’t think of a French one. In so doing he demonstrated his intellectual laziness. For every French who wants to show off his knowledge of Germany likes to cite de Stael, who was an early master of this sort of bravado. 

Unfortunately, Macron didn’t stop there. He explained that it was precisely the “untranslatable” that drew French and Germans together. It brought about romantic moments. People had to “cherish the irrational as a magical moment” of the Franco-German friendship. He had probably worked on this part of the speech until 4am the night before. (He supposedly always works so long.) And he clearly could have used more romance. 

Chancellor Angela Merkel was not much better. She emphasized again and again that this was mostly about work and duty; she is not always so tritely German. What counts, the chancellor said in Aachen, is the “decisive will to actually fill the treaty with life.” That was supposed to mean: people, the work really begins now. But she didn’t say what she would do to make that all happen. Rather, she added, “Yes, we have this unconditional will. I commit myself to it.” As if any French had ever doubted the conscientiousness of the German chancellor. 

This far and no further—that was the lasting impression of Aachen. As if in the future, despite all the nice commitments on both sides, things could only go backwards. Anyone who does such a poor job of selling Franco-German unity as Macron and Merkel did on this day doesn’t really believe it in themselves. 

The post A Gray Day in Aachen appeared first on Berlin Policy Journal - Blog.

© REUTERS/Vincent Kessler

The mood is changing in the Franco-German relationship. Spring has sprung in Berlin and Paris; in the elite Prenzlauer Berg neighborhood and on the Bastille square, the change of season is tempting residents outside to the café terraces. Senior government officials and diplomats sit among them. Warm feelings for one another could blossom, and President Macron’s seminal speech on Europe last autumn at the Sorbonne could finally prompt them to take joint action.

But the opposite seems to be the case. Bitterness and anguish are once again on the horizon. The elites of both capitals look back at a year of lofty statements and joint plans only to realize, with either glee or solemn acceptance, that nothing ended up happening at all. The naysayers already have the upper hand: “Didn’t I tell you guys? You can’t rely on Paris.” Or: “Je vous disais toujours, Germany was never going to take action.” Those in Paris and Berlin seem to prefer talking about new enemies—Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and Xi Jinping—than about their traditional remaining allies. There is little sign of the reaction these four villains ought to trigger: strengthening the countries’ respective national ranks and, subsequently, the Franco-German alliance.

The Return of Lethargy

Nothing better epitomizes the return of Franco-German lethargy than the reaction of both sides to Macron’s proposal to renew the 1963 Treaty of Friendship between Germany and France. The treaty is the historic, intergovernmental foundation for the reconciliation of France and Germany after the Second World War. It is a masterpiece of two great politicians: Charles de Gaulle and Konrad Adenauer. Who would want to reformulate that legacy? Who can reconcile German soft power and French nuclear power? Who will forge German civilian-power thinking and French military-power thinking into a durable European alliance against the threats of the 21st century?

I raised these questions in April with Pascal Bruckner in the Café de la Poste, an establishment in the Parisian district of Marais. Bruckner is among France’s “new philosophers,” who have long since begun to age. He is one of the most-translated French authors in the world. Still, he’s never above polemics. So I suggested he write a new Élysée Treaty, France’s less cumbersome name for the historic document. Bruckner laughed—he barely knows Germany, he said. That’s irrelevant, I responded, since no one else seems to be leading the public debate, and someone has to kick it into gear with a bit of common sense. Bruckner squirmed. He had just, in our conversation, committed himself “fully and completely” to Macron, and probably sensed that he could indeed help his president if he picked up where Macron left off in the Sorbonne speech and got behind a new treaty with the Germans. But major Parisian intellectuals like Bruckner are vain and egotistical; they don’t allow others to dictate their topics. The fact that Bruckner had not immediately rejected my suggestion and wanted to think it over was already a great success.

On one point, however, Bruckner was very clear: Enemies form alliances, he said, naming Trump, Erdogan, and Putin, and this ought to prompt Macron and his German partner, Chancellor Angela Merkel, to do the same by standing firmly together. France’s new philosophers have always had a tendency to plow the great field of foreign policy with simple moral messages. During the Cold War they used sharp rhetoric to resist Germany’s Ostpolitik. Forget Wandel durch Handel, as Germany’s then-chancellor Willy Brandt put it. For Bruckner and his most famous comrades-in-arms, André Glucksmann and Henri Bernard-Lévy, it was all about resisting the “power of evil” in the form of the Soviet Union. Every military build-up was considered legitimate. They consistently took the side of eastern dissidents, from Lech Walesa to Vaclav Havel.
Courage and Humanity

To some extent, Macron has followed in their footsteps over the past year, but with a twist—he has unequivocally declared Germany a force for good in the face of the new global state of disorder. One may recall his appearance at Berlin’s Humboldt University on January 10, 2017. “I’ve already said it once, but I’ll repeat it here: German society has confronted the mass arrival of refugees with admirable clarity, with courage and humanity,” Macron said at the time, in the heat of France’s presidential election campaign.

It was on that January day, if not earlier, that Macron declared his allegiance to the good Germany. He repeated it in every campaign speech. He never took the podium without his “German friends.” For Macron there were never any other allies, say, the Italians or the Spanish, who were quite as important. No, the good guys at his side were, above all others, “les amis allemands.”

Word got around. A new Franco-German impetus for the EU seemed possible. Macron’s electoral victory moved closer and, when the newly elected president took office and began courting the German chancellor more forcefully than ever before, the Franco-German pair seemed, at their summit meeting on July 13 in Paris, almost on par with the world’s greatest powers.

The German federal election in autumn 2017 did little to disturb the feeling of gentle euphoria on both sides of the Rhine. On the contrary, the fact that Germany was governed by a caretaker cabinet for months after the election explained perfectly why no action followed Macron’s speech at the Sorbonne shortly after the German election, where he had once again made the Franco-German awakening seem close enough to touch. After all, Macron was just waiting for Merkel, whose fourth term as chancellor was never really in doubt. In the spring, at Easter, they would really get going together.

Until Merkel’s re-inauguration on March 14, 2018, the optimists held onto hope. After that, however, the euphoria to the west and east of the Rhine began to evaporate. It is as if all participants suddenly realized, at the ring of an alarm clock, that they had been dreaming for a year. As if Merkel’s new term came with the understanding that the time for lofty speeches by the French president was over, and it was time to get back to the hard work of day-to-day business. In other words: enough with the chatter about a big eurozone budget!

Back Burner Thinking

Macron proposed a eurozone budget worth several per cent of eurozone GDP in August 2017. One per cent of eurozone GDP is 130 billion euros. Officials from the German Finance Ministry, who did not want to be named, responded immediately by stating that spending more than 25 billion on new measures for the eurozone was not on the cards. This sort of back burner thinking seems to be shared by the new German Finance Minister Olaf Scholz. Macron has already dialled back his expectations. It will be “a few years” before a eurozone budget is devised, according to people close to Macron who have watched the beginning of Merkel’s fourth term unfold.

Evidently, the long winter, which for government-free Berlin was also a winter of political wrangling, drained Franco-German energy. But there was no rest for the wicked. Trump kicked off his trade war. Putin and Erdogan kept playing their games in Syria. Xi had himself elected president for life. And Paris and Berlin had no response. That called the doubters into action.

From the Hôtel Matignon in Paris’ 7th arrondissement, where the prime minister governs, one can already anticipate the backlash against the president’s German-friendly plan. The memories are still fresh; it was exactly the same during the refugee crisis in 2015. Francois Hollande, the lord of Elysée Palace at the time, did not hesitate to get behind Merkel’s decision to open Germany’s borders to refugees stranded on the Balkan route. But his prime minister, Manuel Valls, revolted. Valls would later visit a refugee camp in Munich to declare his opposition to Germany’s asylum policy. A coherent Franco-German position on refugees, one that every EU citizen could understand, remained elusive.

That could well be different in spring 2018. Paris and Berlin want to put forward a joint concept for a European refugee policy at the European Council summit in June. So far, however, it does not look like it will be well-received.

Scholz’ first appearance as German finance minister on the seventh floor of the French Finance Ministry—with a view of the Seine and the Notre Dame cathedral—was a humiliation for the French esprit. Before further decisions could be made, Scholz announced, expert groups had to meet and do the ministers’ homework. He was referring to the European banking union, introduced back in 2014. For years, the French have considered the completion of the banking union through a common European deposit insurance scheme the closest minimum target for the further integration of the eurozone.

So to the French, the issue had long been settled. Not for Scholz. The man quibbled, as if both sides hadn’t been negotiating this since 2009, as if most of the work had been left for the new German finance minister to do. Scholz held a lengthy press conference with his counterpart Bruno Le Maire. At its conclusion, a French journalist—who apparently had not understood Scholz’s message—asked if he, the German social democrat, would nevertheless be the man in the German cabinet to push for further integration of the eurozone. Scholz answered with one word: “Ja!” But at this stage hardly anyone present was buying it. If they had, the question wouldn’t have been necessary.

Gaining the Upper Hand

The Germany-skeptics in Paris are even stronger after lost opportunities like that. Macron had muzzled them for a year. He had installed only obvious friends of Germany at Elysée Palace. Above all there is Philippe Etienne, the former French ambassador in Berlin, whom Macron made his Sherpa for the G7 and the G20 and thus his most important foreign policy coordinator. This made it clear that Paris was seeking to close coordination with Berlin on every foreign policy decision. Etienne and the other advisors around Macron spoke fluent German—a novelty that needed no diplomatic explanation.

Macron’s Prime Minister Edouard Philippe speaks good German too. But he comes from the political school of Alain Juppé, who wanted to run against Macron in the last presidential elections, though he lost in the conservative primaries and bowed out early. Juppé has a reputation as an exemplary pro-European, but he is a southern Frenchman through and through and Germany has always been foreign to him. Many of Juppé’s former employees are now in Philippe’s circle of advisors in the Hôtel Matignon. The fact that resistance to a seemingly naïve, pro-Berlin president is brewing there should not surprise anyone.

Macron’s Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian might also condone opposition to Macron’s German-friendly policy. In Paris one hears stories that he once enjoyed bashing Germany in his home province of Brittany. In the autumn of 2016, in the turbulence that followed the British vote to leave, Le Drian, then defence minister, held a press conference with his German counterpart, Ursula von der Leyen. He agreed to enhance Franco-German defence cooperation, but many military experts in Paris were reluctant to believe him. For he had previously, on a visit home to Brittany, aired his conviction that France’s military superiority over Germany was actually a blessing, and ought to be preserved.

So Le Drian is probably a Germany-skeptic—just as Scholz is presumably a France-skeptic, compared to the avowed Macron fans Sigmar Gabriel and Martin Schulz, who are no longer relevant within the SPD. The anti-French grumblers have a long tradition. They are a force to be reckoned with. The they inserted a Bundestag preamble to the 1963 Franco-German Treaty of Friendship that emphasized their country’s alliance with the United States. With that, the treaty was stillborn. De Gaulle announced France’s withdrawal from NATO shortly afterwards.

Today one wonders which preamble the German Bundestag would put before a new version of the treaty, which, according to current plans, the president and chancellor are to sign in January 2019. Will the Bundestag, at the request of the right-wing AfD and the pro-business FDP opposition parties, specify that a balanced German budget is a precondition for any increase in the eurozone budget? Or will it, at the request of the Greens and the Left, stipulate that Germany will take no responsibility for any future use of nuclear weapons by France?

Turning the Tide

There is still time to turn the tide. High time! Pascal Bruckner and Durs Grünbein, who most certainly read and esteem one another, should write a new Elysée Treaty together—and why not as a poem? Sigmar Gabriel and François Hollande should, as retired politicians, write a new Élysée Treaty—they have already teamed up to save Greece from Wolfgang Schäuble and his intention to toss the country out of the eurozone. But CEOs Joe Kaeser of Siemens and Henry Poupart-Lafarge of Alstom should also write a treaty of friendship—they are currently negotiating the merger of their respective companies and yet continue to compete for every contract.

Ultimately it comes down to the question of whether, after 1963, after German reunification, after the financial crisis of 2008, after the rise of China and Putin’s Russian renaissance, after Brexit and the Trump vote, there is wisdom in Franco-German unity. The Brit Gideon Rachman, columnist at the Financial Times, seems to believe there is. He sees the EU as the “only real mechanism for trying to find solutions to pan-European problems that are legal, humane and equitable.”

That is exactly what the Franco-German friendship should aim to do. With regards to how best to go about it, well, the elites in Prenzlauer Berg and on the Bastille ought to rack their brains this spring. There ought to be quarrels and sparring between Paris and Berlin. If that is the case, Emmanuel Macron and Angela Merkel could soon reap the rewards. For that to happen, however, the German side may have to adopt some of France’s arrogance: the arrogance to say, we, Germany and France, are the force for good. That is something many Europeans would understand.

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