"There he goes again. The beleaguered French President Emmanuel Macron recently issued another of his trademark cris de coeur about Europe's future, warning that the European Union has about two years to fix itself or else get creamed economically and geostrategically by the U.S. and China. Who knows, maybe one of these days he'll act like he really means it.
"We are overregulating and underinvesting," Mr. Macron said last week in Berlin. "In the two or three years to come, if we follow our classical agenda, we will be out of the market." Not to put too fine a point on it, but he added that "the EU could die."
Students of Mr. Macron's political career -- someone has to do it -- know such jeremiads are a core element of his method. In a major speech at the Sorbonne in 2017, Mr. Macron warned that anti-EU populism was sweeping Europe and in response establishment politicians "cannot allow ourselves to keep the same habits, the same policies, the same vocabulary, the same budgets." Mr. Macron warned of the "brain death of NATO" in 2019 in a major interview with the Economist magazine, speaking of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
"Our Europe is mortal. It can die," he warned this April in another major speech at the Sorbonne. He was speaking about the economic and military perils facing the Continent. And now this month's major alarum in Berlin.
That's enough "majors" to staff an army. Just don't ask where the major changes are to back up these major speeches.
In 2017, Mr. Macron argued the EU needed to prove to citizens that it could guarantee their national and economic security, or else it would drown under a tide of populist politics. The solution? Among other things, a Continentwide financial-transactions tax to fund foreign aid to deter illegal immigration. Classic Macron: Not only would the tax be economically self-defeating -- the last thing the EU needs is more punitive taxation on investment -- but as a proposed fix for the main problem vexing European voters, it sounded utterly baffling.
Mr. Macron's warning about brain death in NATO was followed by years of inaction on new strategy or military investment in France or much of Europe, until 2022 events in Ukraine forced the Continent's hand. His speech at the Sorbonne this year centered on a plea to end what he called "complicated Europe" of overregulation and also, contradictorily, a pitch for more protectionist industrial policies. The former is likely to go unheeded.
The latter has produced tariffs (which Mr. Macron supports) on Chinese electric-vehicle imports, which will jack up the price of the EVs that EU mandates will force unwilling Europeans to buy.
Mr. Macron deserves mockery here, but his antics also shed light on what's killing Europe. The issue isn't lack of what psychologists call "insight" -- the self-awareness of the patient who knows his thoughts or actions are disordered. Americans harbor a stereotype of foolish Europeans beating the dead horse of socialism, but the EU was devised as a vehicle for free-market liberalization precisely to break Europe out of its statist torpor.
Even Mr. Macron in his more prosaic moments has done important things in France, such as producing a door stopper of a labor-law reform that created new opportunities for the young.
Mario Draghi -- former European Central Bank president and Italian prime minister, and Europe's most serious thinker-politician on economic matters -- recently published a long report explaining the reforms such as deregulation and greater competition the Continent requires to compete with the U.S. and China. European voters get it, too. Given the opportunity to vote for (center-right) parties promising economic reform, voters have done so in Greece, nearly did so in Spain last year, and are on course to do so in Germany next year.
Europe's curse instead is that too many of its leaders fail to do what they know they must. Why this should be so is the great political-economy mystery of the age, harder to answer than you might think.
Entrenched opposition from those groups who fear they may lose out from reform (such as militant government workers afraid of privatization -- frequent antagonists of Mr. Macron) is only part of the explanation. In some ways, Europe's political class suffers a failure of imagination, a difficulty seeing beyond their stale but comfortable intellectual consensus. In other ways, Europe suffers from too much imagination -- in particular, a conviction that Europe must devise an identity for itself opposed to America's brand of capitalism, thereby foreclosing any attempt to import successful policy ideas from across the Atlantic.
Whatever the reasons, too many European leaders keep missing too many opportunities for the reset that could save Europe's economy and restore its self-confidence. Even Mr. Macron, one of Europe's most articulate advocates for change, has ended up as one of its least effective actors." [1]
The problem is opposite to the described. Macron is killing the French way of life as much as he can, so the young could more easily get a crappy job at McDonalds. He is also cutting off the European link to global economy through China, the link, that European good life is based on (thank you, Ms. Merkel). He is an idiot. The EU
could die as a result of his actions.
1. Political Economics: Macron, the Man Who Cried Continental Crisis. Sternberg, Joseph C. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 11 Oct 2024: A.17.
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