Post Segments
With each passing day, the European Union increasingly resembles a technocratic reincarnation of the Austro-Hungarian empire in which Germany plays the role of the Austrian rider, and France, that of the Hungarian horse. In Washington, Moscow, or Beijing, the coming Brexit can only reinforce the perception that, as the centre of gravity of the world continues to shift from the euro-atlantic region to the indo-pacific zone, the European Union is doomed to be nothing more than a plebeian version of the Habsburg Kakania immortalized by Robert Musil.
In Anglo-Saxon think-tanks, the analogy between today’s European Union and yesterday’s Austro-Hungarian empire has become de rigueur ever since the publication of the memorable ‘Perhapsburg’ of Wess Mitchell in 2008.[i] In Europe itself, a dissolution of the EU in the next 10-to-20 years is considered ‘very likely’ or ‘fairly likely’ by a majority of Germans, French, Austrians, Hungarians, Italians, Dutch, Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Greeks, Romanians.[ii] Even at the College of Europe (the school for Eurocrats), the question of European disintegration is no longer taboo.[iii]
In France, since the 2005 referendum and its resounding No to the constitutionnalization of EU treaties, a curious dialogue of the deaf has been allowed to develop between the elites and the masses. At the risk of caricaturing: French élites are by now aware that the benefits of EU integration have long reached the point of diminishing returns and that the costs of EU introversion keep increasing exponentially; yet, these same elites cling to the idea that the European Project as ‘the last great design’,[iv] the only remaining opium of the masses for an otherwise ungovernable rabble. Meanwhile, 52% of the French would vote against Maastricht today, 58% think the European Project is doomed, and only 29% see the EU as a ‘source of hope’; yet, if there is no grassroots momentum in favour of a Frexit, it is because the same masses would – all things considered – rather stick to the devil they know and continue to be ruled by German elites (via Brussels) rather than give full powers back to what are widely seen as France’s corrupt and incompetent elites.[v]
President Macron is unlikely to call for a Frexit anytime soon. But in the coming years, as he continues to make the predictable noises about the centrality of the ‘Franco-German couple’ and the need for ‘European sovereignty’, Macron is also quietly going to strengthen the French-British entente cordiale while continuing to turn away from Europe’s sandbox politics and toward the Open Sea. As we shall see, France’s Indo-Pacific Pivot may be less than a full-fledged Frexit, but it is definitely more than a hedging strategy in the event of a European dis-integration.
The incredible shrinking « European Project »
As befits an ‘amphibious’ country, France’s foreign policy has oscillated for centuries between its continental and maritime tropisms.[vi] With the onset of decolonization in the 1950s, it looked as though the maritime cycle had forever run its course and that France, reduced to a little Hexagon, had no other choice but to conduct a continental foreign policy.
Upon his return to power in 1958, De Gaulle initially thought that a future French-led European Union would constitute a possible substitute for the imperial French Union and by the same token rescue the idea of a Greater France. That said, even on the eve of the signing of the 1963 Franco-German Elysée Treaty, De Gaulle was not afraid to contemplate the possibility of a future velvet divorce from Germany or, for that matter, from the whole European Project: ‘One must always consider all possible scenarios…. France has existed for centuries without the Common Market, and can live without it. If our partners were to show that they don’t want a common agricultural policy, common aid to Africa, a common defence and a common foreign policy, the Treaty of Rome could be replaced by a simple free-trade agreement…’.
A year later, De Gaulle reiterated his point, this time with a Churchillian twist: ‘We have lived for centuries without the Common Market, we can live for many more centuries without it. We’ll do free trade. Contrary to the claims of the imbeciles who pontificate about Europe, our industrial expansion does not need a Common Market—it needs le grand large’, the Open Sea. And when his confidant Alain Peyrefitte reminded him that the Treaty of Rome made no provision for withdrawal, De Gaulle exploded in characteristic barrack-room language: ‘C’est de la rigolade ! Vous avez déjà vu un grand pays s’engager à rester couillonné, sous prétexte qu’un traité n’a rien prévu pour le cas où il serait couillonné ? Non ! Quand on est couillonné, on dit ; « Je suis couillonné. Eh bien, voilà, je fous le camp !’[vii] But none of De Gaulle’s successors has had his pragmatism—or self-confidence.
By the time of the monetary crisis of November 1968, it had become clear that Germany, not France, was now the leading power in Europe. In the spring of 1969, De Gaulle, in the course of a private lunch with British ambassador Sir Christopher Soames (Churchill’s son-in-law, as it happened), tried to enlist British support for a transformation of the Common Market into a free-trade zone governed by a four-power directorate : France, UK, Germany, and Italy (ironically enough, De Gaulle’s latest scheme was strangely reminiscent of the « Plan G » advocated by Harold Macmillan ten years earlier.)[viii] But two months later, having lost a referendum on an unrelated issue, De Gaulle abruptly resigned, and nothing came out of the Soames Affair.
Throughout France’s Thirty Glorious Years’ of economic transformation (1945-1975), the French Left managed to keep alive the idea that it was possible for France to ‘break away from capitalism’. Two years after the 1981 election of socialist president Mitterrand, though, it finally dawned on the non-Marxist Left that ‘socialism in one country’ was the surest way to take France down the Albanian route. The reformist and technocratic Left symbolized by Jacques Delors then decided that, somehow, some kind of breakaway from capitalism remained possible through a change of scale. With a vigorous relaunch of European integration and the emergence of a social Europe, it was said, France should be able to retain its generous social benefits while at the time remaining competitive economically.
While the fall of the Berlin Wall and the ensuing reunification of Germany began to cast doubt about the possibility of turning Europe into a Greater France, the ever-resourceful Delorian crowd came up with a master narrative guaranteed to mobilize the French Left : it was now argued that, far from marking the End of History, the end of the Cold War between capitalism and communism was actually the beginning of a new Cold War, this time between two kinds of capitalism: the Franco-German model and the Anglo-American model.[ix] Never mind that neither the Germans nor anyone else outside France had ever heard of a ‘Rhineland model’ before. Published at the time of the 1991 Maastricht summit, Michel Albert’s Capitalisme contre Capitalisme became overnight the Bible of French elites, and, in the short-term at least, its hyperbolic narrative enabled the pro-Maastricht camp to (narrowly) win the referendum of 1992.
Fast forward to 2020. In retrospect, it is clear that, for the past thirty years, while French elites were struggling in vain to create a Europe-puissance in the world, German elites had embarked on an altogether different project: the creation of an Allemagne-puissance in Europe. The net result, in a nutshell ?
First, on the military front, the creation of a Eurocorps in 1994 led the French to believe in the dawn of a new era for Europe on the world stage. As one French observer enthusiastically put it at the time: ‘the presence of the Eurocorps on the Champs-Elysées on Bastille Day will not be a media stunt …This French-German Corps of 45,000 soldiers represents a considerable step forward in the establishment of a common defence, without which there will never be a common foreign policy.’[x] Twenty-five years later, however, Berlin continues to veto any use of the Eurocorps. In Angela Merkel’s memorable words, ‘the Eurocorps is not the Afrika Korps’.[xi] So much for l’Europe-puissance, then.
Second, on the economic front, the monetary union, though initially a French idea, ended up being implemented on German terms. And it did work pretty well for l’Allemagne-puissance. According to a 2019 study by a German economic institute, ever since the introduction of the euro in 1999, the biggest winners in terms of prosperity have been Germany (a gain of 1,893 billion euros) and the Netherlands (346 billions), and the biggest losers, France (3,591 billions) and Italy (4,325 billions).[xii] As German economy minister Wolfgang Schauble himself admitted, only half of the colossal export surplus accumulated by Germany in recent years is due to the competitiveness of its industries – the other half is due to the very existence of the euro.[xiii] As for France, the only ‘advantage’ of the euro has been to make it easier for the French government to get into debt, thereby aggravating France’s dependency on Germany.
Third, on the political front, the past twenty years have seen the end of the once sacrosanct French-German parity within the EU Parliament (2001) and the EU Council. Until 2015, French elites could argue that, despite this major concession, time was actually on France’s side: given the demographic differential, France’s population would eventually overtake Germany’s, and France should be able to regain the leadership in Europe …circa 2050.[xiv] Since the 2015 migrant crisis, however, Berlin has officially decreed that until 2060, Germany will need to bring in annually some 260,000 immigrants. And so it is that in the coming years, the world may witness the unseemly spectacle of Germany and France enlisting hordes of Turkish and Algerian migrants in a demographic Cold War of sorts, at the end of which the winner will be able to triumphantly declare ‘My Umma is bigger than yours!’
Whether it be on monetary, military, or migratory issues, centrifugal forces are today at work in Europe as never before, not only between North (New Hanseatic League) and South (Med7), but between East (Jagellonian Europe) and West (Carolingian Europe). Within Carolingian Europe, the tensions between France and Germany over the past thirty years have been such as to lead former foreign minister Hubert Vedrine to declare bluntly that ‘the Franco-German couple has no longer existed since German reunification.’ Even within the Macron government itself, there is today a tug-of-war between the German-wannabe economy minister Bruno Le Maire, who genuinely relishes the prospect of a neo-Kakanian empire[xv], and foreign minister Jean-Yves Le Drian, the main architect of the Indo-Pacific Pivot since his days as defence minister (2012-17), and who is reportedly no great friend of the ‘Françallemagne’ crowd.[xvi]
To be sure, a dis-integration of Europe is not preordained. Absent a major internal or external crisis, a post-Brexit EU should be able to muddle through for a number of years. That said, demographically, a post-Brexit Europe will represent less than 5% of the world population; economically, its combined GDP will be smaller than that of the United States; militarily, its defence budget will be smaller than China’s; diplomatically, this neo-habsburgian Empire will continue to have no greater ambition than to be the favorite doormat on which the neo-ottoman sultan Erdogan wipes his babouches. In short, with the departure of the UK, the EU is bound to become so irrelevant in world affairs that, if the Austro-Hungarian economist Joseph Schumpeter himself were to come back today, he would undoubtedly conclude that only a creative destruction of sorts can regenerate Old Europe.
France, the Open Sea, and les Anglo-Saxons
Throughout the twentieth century, the relation between France and les Anglo-Saxons has known its ups and downs.[xvii] In 1919, Clemenceau’s dreams of an Atlantic alliance piloted by the US, UK and France failed to materialize when the U.S. Senate refused to ratify the Anglo-American Treaty of Guaranteee promised by Wilson and Lloyd George. Yet, a generation later, the tripartite relation had become so close that three countries constituted an informal directorate both within NATO and within SEATO (the « NATO of the East » created in 1954). Upon his return to power in 1958, De Gaulle initially called for a strengthening of this directoire à trois in the framework of a new ‘Global NATO’. Contrary to a widespread perception in France, les Anglo-Saxons were actually quite open to his idea, and the discussions between Paris, London, and Washington continued until 1962. Yet, due mostly to De Gaulle’s clumsiness, the dream of a Greater France in the framework of a Global NATO went nowhere, though the three powers continue to act as the informal directorate of the West (the so-called P3) within the framework of the UN Security Council.[xviii]
A generation later, French elites had grown so accustomed to think of France as a purely continental Hexagon that they failed to notice that, with the entry into force of the new Law of the Sea (1994), France, thanks to its overseas territories, had acquired the second largest maritime domain in the world, 75% of it in the Indo-Pacific. At the time, the Chirac government was so engrossed with the idea of creating an Europe-puissance that it failed to realize the importance of this new frontier in the age of the territorialization of the oceans and the maritimization of the economy. As late as 1996, the French government was still dreaming out loud of creating a 300,000 men strong, European land army independent of NATO![xix]
It was not until 2009 that France’s officialdom began to realize that their country was no longer a little Hexagon but an Archipelago of sorts on which the sun never sets.[xx] France’s rediscovery of the Open Sea, its reintegration of NATO’s command structure, and its strengthening of Franco-British relations (through the Lancaster Accords of 2010) should be seen as three inter-related phenomena. In retrospect, to be sure, one can only regret that Nicolas Sarkozy and David Cameron were not bold enough to re-activate the Macmillan-De Gaulle scheme. A joint Frexit-Brexit campaign would have been a spectacular way for these two ‘sweet enemies’ to signal the beginning of a beautiful friendship.[xxi] That said, it is worth noting that since 2014, France’s gradual pivot toward the Indo-Pacific has developed in parallel with Britain’s gradual return East of Suez.[xxii]
In 2017, a politically inexperienced Emmanuel Macron, eager to relaunch the moribund Franco-German couple, publicly pledged to do whatever it takes to upgrade the Elysée Treaty of 1963. But since Germany was not the least interested in sharing its hegemony with France, Paris had to make all sorts of unilateral concessions in order for Berlin to agree to pretend that, with the signing of the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle (January 2019), the Franco-German couple was given a new lease of life. The ink on the Treaty was hardly dry when a clearly orchestrated campaign came out of Berlin aimed at the French on the theme: if you really care about ‘European sovereignty’, then start by sharing your UN seat and your nuclear force de frappe. For many French Europeanists, this unexpected German campaign was a long-overdue epiphany.
Since his flamboyant Europeanist speech at the Sorbonne in October 2017, Macron’s juvenile enthusiasm for the European Project has significantly cooled. His growing impatience with Brussels sandbox politics, and his increasing interest in the Open Sea, are nowhere better illustrated than in a December 2019 speech which deserves to be quoted at length:
‘Whenever we consider our national history from the perspective of the longue durée, France has alternatively turned its back on its maritime dimension or embraced it … Every time it has turned its back on its maritime destiny in order to cultivate some continental obsessions [sic], every time it has been afraid of the open sea [le grand large] and refused to face the fact that it was a maritime power, France has regressed. Every time it has embraced its status as a maritime power, France has managed to conquer new frontiers, be it in terms of knowledge or geopolitics … France is Europe’s leading maritime power, and its status as an archipelago-state is a unique geopolitical asset which makes France a global partner, an Indo-Pacific power as much as a European power … And I intend to see that France continues to exercise its full responsibilities vis-à-vis our maritime neighbours [sic], be it Australia, Japan, and India, but also America and China …
I say it with great conviction, the twentieth century, in many respects, was continental, with its wars, its challenges, its way of thinking about borders … The twenty-first century will be maritime. That’s where the geopolitics of commerce and connexions will play out tomorrow. It is in this realm that France will have to define itself, to live with its allies, its neighbours, and perhaps its enemies. It is in the context of the maritime domain that we will have to rethink our existence, our food resources, our technological research …The 21st century will be maritime, I am deeply convinced of that …’[xxiii]
While Macron’s disenchantment with the European Project is in sync with French public opinion, his growing interest in the Indo-Pacific is in sync with the rapidly evolving geopolitical environment.
On the economic front, the idea of expanding the G7 has been around in transatlantic circles as far back as 2014, and began to gain traction with the institutionalisation of the Indo-Pacific Quad in 2017. Nowadays, Paris, London, and Washington appear to be on the same page regarding the need to turn the G7 into a G10 including India, Australia, and South Korea.[xxiv]
On the military front, the idea of a Global NATO, in one form or another, has been around for longer still. In the wake of Putin’s speech at the 2007 Munich Security Conference, most U.S. analysts wrongly concluded that the main challenge facing the West was a resurgent Russia. In transatlantic circles today, by contrast, China is the new Russia.[xxv] It is of course too early to tell what will come out of the modern-day Harmel Group currently redesigning the new Strategic Concept of the Atlantic alliance. Some observers are calling for the creation of a NATO-China Council; others are in favour of better coordination between the Euro-Atlantic Quad (US, UK, France, Germany) and the more recent Indo-Pacific Quad (US, Japan, India, Australia); others still favour what would essentially amount to a reinvention of SEATO in the form of a full-fledged IPTO (Indo-Pacific Treaty Organization).[xxvi]
Like the famous Harmel Report of 1967, the new Strategic Concept is likely to advocate a combination of containment and engagement. But one thing is sure: compared to the Cold War era, the maritime dimension this time round will be more important than the land component. In that respect, one interesting question is whether Britain’s legitimate interest in taking the leadership of a maritime version of the Framework Nation Concept[xxvii] will lead to greater cooperation, or competition, or even confrontation, with France.
One thing is certain: over the past decade, the world has entered an era of rivalry between China and the West in which the European dimension is no longer relevant.[xxviii] For when all is said and done, Europe is no more an optimal zone in military affairs than in monetary matters.
On the monetary front, the future rival of the dollar as a reserve currency is bound to be the Chinese remimbi, not the euro whose international position has steadily declined since the 2008 financial crisis (from 28% to 21% of the world’s reserves). On the military front, the Chinese navy, which produces every four years a number of ships equivalent to the entire French navy, has been regularly cruising in Mediterranean waters for more than a decade, and is reportedly eyeing the Mers El-Kebir naval base once occupied by France and then by the Soviet Union. So much for the idea of European strategic autonomy on the maritime front. If the Atlantic alliance did not exist, it would have to be invented. And if the Alliance had become ‘brain dead’, as Macron asserted, well – it would simply have to be reinvented.
[i] Wess Mitchell, ‘Perhapsburg’, The American Interest, November 2008, https://www.the-american-interest.com/2008/11/01/perhapsburg/, and “Empire by Devolution: What Today’s EU Can Learn From Franz Josef I’s Empire,” Orbis, Summer 2008. See also Harvard historian Niall Ferguson’s entertaining « 2021 : the New Europe », Wall Street Journal, November 19, 2011, https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052970203699404577044172754446162 ; Ambassador Robert Cooper, ‘The European Union and the Habsburg Monarchy’, Eurozine, December 10, 2012, https://www.eurozine.com/the-european-union-and-the-habsburg-monarchy/; Admiral James Stavridis, ‘The EU is looking like Europe’s next failed empire’, Bloomberg, September 20 2018, https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-09-20/the-eu-is-looking-like-europe-s-next-failed-empire?srnd=opinion
[ii] Daniel Boffey, ‘Majority of Europeans expect ‘end of EU within 20 years’, The Guardian, 15 May 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/may/15/majority-of-europeans-expect-end-of-eu-within-20-years;
[iii] Lucas Schramm, ‘ European disintegration : a new feature of EU politics’, College of Europe Policy Brief 3.19, May 2019, file:///C:/Users/The/Downloads/schramm_cepob_3-19%20(3).pdf.
[iv] For a typical illustration, see diplomat Gilles Andréani, ‘Le dernier grand dessein,’ Annuaire français de relations internationales, vol XV, 2014, http://www.afri-ct.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Article_Andreani-2.pdf
[v] As France’s leading intellectual Marcel Gauchet shrewdly pointed out, ‘L’Union européenne a accru nos problèmes’, L’Arène nue, May 30 2016, http://l-arene-nue.blogspot.com/2016/05/lunion-europeenne-accru-nos-problemes.html
[vi] Tony Corn, ‘La Longue Durée et le Grand Large : identité française et politique étrangère’, Revue des Deux Mondes, September 2020, https://www.revuedesdeuxmondes.fr/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/19-La-longue-duree-et-le-grand-large.-Identite-francaise-et-politique-etrangere.pdf
[vii] ‘It’s a joke! Have you ever seen a great country willing to carry on being screwed because a treaty has no provisions for the case of being screwed? No! When you’re screwed you say “I’m being screwed. Right, I’m buggering off!”’ [editor’s translation] Alain Peyrefitte, C’était De Gaulle, Quarto/Gallimard, 2002, pp.359 et 863-864
[viii] See Benjamin Grob-Fitzgibbon, Continental Drift : Britain and Europe from the End of Empire to the Rise of Euroscepticism, Cambridge University Press, 2016 ; Claire Sanderson, Perfide Albion ? L’affaire Soames et les arcanes de la diplomatie britannique, Publications de la Sorbonne, 2011.
[ix] Michel Albert, Capitalism vs. Capitalism : how America’s obsession with individual achievement and short-term profit has led it to the brink of collapse, Four Walls Eight Windows, 1993.
[x]Yves Cuau, ‘Vive l’Eurocorps !’ L’Express, 9 juin 1994, https://www.lexpress.fr/informations/vive-l-eurocorps_598271.html.
[xi] Germany is so adamantly opposed to any joint-venture with France in Africa that in January 2017, as French president Hollande was attending a French-African summit in Bamako, the German government decided to publish a report obliquely disparaging the Françafrique concept and calling for Berlin to take the lead in creating a special EU Commissioner for African Affairs. Africa and Europe – a new partnership for development, peace and a better future : cornestones of a Marshall Plan with Africa », Federal ministry for cooperation and economic development, January 2017. https://www.bmz.de/en/publications/type_of_publication/information_flyer/information_brochures/Materialie270_africa_marshallplan.pdf
[xii] Alessandro Gasparotti et Matthias Kullas, 20 Years of the Euro : Winners and Losers, Centrum fur Europaische Politik, February 2019, https://www.cep.eu/Studien/20_Jahre_Euro_-_Gewinner_und_Verlierer/cepStudy_20_years_Euro_-_Winners_and_Losers.pdf
[xiii] Wolfgang Schauble, ‘We all wish Macron success’, Spiegel online, 12 May 2017, https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/interview-with-wolfgang-schaeuble-we-all-wish-macron-success-a-1147461.html
[xiv] See ambassador Pierre Maillard, De Gaulle et le problème allemand : les leçons d’un grand dessein, F-X de Guibert, 2001 (p.265), and ambassador Bernard de Montferrand, France-Allemagne : l’heure de vérité, Tallandier, 2011 (p.118).
[xv] Bruno Le Maire, Le nouvel Empire : l’Europe du vingt et unième siècle, Gallimard, 2019.
[xvi] If we are to believe the Paris correspondent of Die Zeit Georg Blume, L’ami indésirable : la fin d’une histoire ?, Paris: Saint-Simon, 2019, p.18.
[xvii] For a general overview, see Andrew Williams, France, Britain and the United States in the twentieth century, 1900-1940 : a reappraisal, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, and Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, Allies in crisis : meeting global challenges to Western security, Yale University Press, 1990.
[xviii] On Clemenceau’s dream of an Atlantic alliance, see Peter Jackson’s path-breaking Beyond the balance of power : France and the politics of national security in the era of the First World War, Cambridge University Press, 2017 ; on De Gaulle’s proposal, see Sebastian Reyn’s illuminating Atlantis Lost : The American experience with De Gaulle, 1958-1969, Amsterdam University Press, 2011.
[xix] Barry James, ‘Juppé calls for a large European Army capable of acting without U.S.’, International Herald Tribune, March 14, 1996.
[xx] Blue Book ; a national strategy for the sea and oceans, Prime Minister’s Office, December 2009, file:///C:/Users/The/Desktop/Blue%20Book%20for%20the%20Oceans%20(GOF%202009).pdf
[xxi] Robert and Isabelle Tombs, That Sweet Enemy : the British and the French from the Sun-King to the Present, Pimlico, 2007.
[xxii] James Rogers, ‘European (British and French) geostrategy in the Indo–Pacific’, Journal of the Indian Ocean Region, 9,1, 2013 ; Anna di Mattia and Julia M. Macdonald, An Anglo-French “Pivot” ? The Future Drivers of Europe-Asia Cooperation, GMF, 2014, file:///C:/Users/The/Desktop/DE%20L’HEXAGONE%20A%20L’ARCHIPEL/France%20&%20UK%20in%20IndoPacific%202014%20GMF.pdf ; François Godement, France’s Pivot to Asia, ECFR, May 2014, http://www.ecfr.eu/page/-/ECFR101_FRANCE_ASIA_BRIEF_AW_1.pdf ; Jean-Claude Peyronnet, Christian Cambon, Reprendre pied en Asie du Sud-Est, Senat, 2014, http://www.senat.fr/rap/r13-723/r13-723-syn.pdf: Hadrienne Terres, La France et l’Asie : l’ébauche d’un « pivot » à la française ?, IFRI-Paris, avril 2015, http://www.ifri.org/fr/publications/enotes/asie-visions/france-lasie-lebauche-dun-pivot-francaise ; John Hemmings, Global Britain in the Indo-Pacific, Henry Jackson Society, May 2018, https://henryjacksonsociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/HJS-Global-Britain-in-the-Indo-Pacific-Report-NEW-PRINT.pdf
[xxiii] Emmanuel Macron, Déclaration sur la politique de la mer, Montpellier, 3 décembre 2019, https://www.vie-publique.fr/discours/272249-emmanuel-macron-03122019-politique-de-la-mer. The two main official documents are Stratégie française dans l’Indo-Pacifique, Ministère de l’Europe et des Affaires Etrangères, August 2019, https://www.diplomatie.gouv.fr/fr/dossiers-pays/asie-oceanie/la-zone-indopacifique-une-priorite-pour-la-france/ , and La France et la Sécurité en Indo-Pacifique, Ministère des Armées, May 2019, file:///C:/Users/The/Downloads/La%20France%20et%20la%20s%C3%A9curit%C3%A9%20en%20Indopacifique%20-%202019%20(1).pdf
[xxiv] Jean-Dominique Merchet, « Pour relancer le G7 en crise, la France pense à le transformer en G10 », L’Opinion, October 2, 2018, https://www.lopinion.fr/edition/international/diplomatie-relancer-g7-en-crise-france-pense-a-transformer-en-g10-164047; Oliver Wiseman, ‘Brave New Britain,’ City Journal, July 8, 2020, https://www.city-journal.org/rise-of-global-britain.
[xxv] Tony Corn, « The revolution in transatlantic affairs : promises and perils of a Global NATO », Policy Review, August 2007, https://www.hoover.org/research/revolution-transatlantic-affairs
[xxvi] Matthew Karnitschnig, ‘For NATO, China is the new Russia’, Politico, April 4, 2019, https://www.politico.eu/article/for-nato-china-is-the-new-russia/ ; Fred Kempe, ‘NATO’s China Challenge’, Atlantic Council, December 2019, https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/content-series/inflection-points/natos-china-challenge/ ; Garima Mohan, ‘Europe in the Indo-Pacific : a case for more coordination with Quad countries’, GMF, January 2020, http://www.gmfus.org/publications/europe-indo-pacific-case-more-coordination-quad-countries ; James Rogers, The Indo-Pacific : an enlarged perspective, Henry Jackson Society, March 2020, https://henryjacksonsociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/HJS-The-Indo-Pacific-%E2%80%93-An-Enlarged-Perspective-Report-web.pdf
[xxvii] Michael John Williams, « New British carriers can transform Europe’s NATO naval capabilities », Atlantic Council, 7 April 2020, https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/new-british-carriers-can-transform-europes-nato-naval-capabilities/
[xxviii] Tony Corn, ‘L’Europe à la dérive : l’Atlantique et le monde atlantique à l’époque d’Elizabeth II,’ Le Débat, 176, September-October 2013, https://www.academia.edu/9095405/_LEurope_%C3%A0_la_d%C3%A9rive_lAtlantique_et_le_monde_atlantique_%C3%A0_l%C3%A9poque_dElizabeth_II_Le_D%C3%A9bat_176_septembre_octobre_2013
