French President Emmanuel Macron has urged Europe to assert itself on the world stage, saying it is time to start acting like a “power”.
In the face of growing threats from China, Russia and now the US, he told a group of European newspapers that the continent faced a “wake-up call”.
“Are we ready to become a power? This is the question in the field of economy and finance, in defence and security, and in our democratic systems.
“In another era we might have said it is the moment to ‘assume our majority’,” he said ahead of an EU summit in Brussels later this week.
Macron repeated his call for EU-wide mutualised loans in order to raise hundreds of billions of euros needed for industrial investment.
“The time has come to launch a shared debt capacity to fund our future expense – eurobonds for the future. We need big European programmes to finance the best projects,” he said.
Similar calls in the past have met scepticism from Germany and other countries, who feel France wants to use Europe to bear a financial burden which it alone – because of its failure to reform – is unable to take up.
Macron admitted that France “has never had a balanced model, unlike certain economies of the north, which are built more on a sense of responsibility.
“And we have never had reforms like the ones initiated in the 2010s in Portugal, Spain, Italy and Greece, which are paying dividends today.”
But he said there was growing demand in the world’s financial markets for mutualised European debt, which currently the EU was not equipped to supply.
“The world markets are increasingly afraid of the American greenback [dollar]. They want alternatives…
“For investors everywhere a democratic state of law is a huge attraction. And when I look at the world as it is, we have the authoritarian regime that is China, and on the other side we have the US distancing itself further and further from a state of law.”
According to Macron, the 27-member EU needs €1,2tn (£1tn; $1.4tn) a year to invest in the vital sectors of security and defence, clean energy, and artificial intelligence.
Calling on the EU to “protect” these and other industries, he said: “The Chinese do it, the Americans too. Europe today is the most open market in the world.
“In the face of that, I am not saying we should be protectionist. It’s more a question of being coherent – in other words not imposing on our own producers rules which we do not impose on non-Europeans.”
“Today Europe faces a massive challenge, in a world of disorder,” he said.
“Climate change is accelerating. The US – which we thought would guarantee our security for ever – is no longer sure. Russia was to give us cheap energy for ever, but that stopped three years ago. China… has become a rival that gets fiercer and fiercer.
“Today, we Europeans are on our own. But we have each other. We are 450 million people. It’s huge. For me [becoming a power] is the fulfilment of the European adventure.
“We came together to stop war, we came together to build a market. But we always forbade ourselves to think of power.”
Asked about the latest stand-off with Washington over Greenland, at the end of which US President Donald Trump appeared to back down from threats to annex the Danish territory, Macron said the Europeans should not be fooled.
“At the end of a crisis, there is a cowardly tendency to sit back and say ‘phew’. There are threats and intimidation, and then suddenly Washington gives way. And people think it’s over.
“Don’t believe it for a single second,” the French leader said.
By BBC News
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