There were warm smiles, prolonged handshakes, pomp and circumstance at Windsor, and emotive references to past alliances when Emmanuel Macron made his State Visit from 8-10 July. But when he and Keir Starmer led the 37th Franco-British Summit it was an encounter between floundering leaders of floundering countries whose relations have been routinely prickly, not least when they were pledging undying friendship.
Both men are deeply unpopular following a run of political failures. Each won the support of a humiliatingly small percentage of the electorate, essentially because clever but arrogant Macron was not Marine Le Pen, and dull Starmer was not Rishi Sunak. Neither would have been credible leadership candidates when the likes of Blair, Chirac, Wilson or Mitterrand – let alone Thatcher or De Gaulle — dominated politics at the head of still functioning mass parties. Their shaky legitimacy testifies to our democratic malaise.
In office, Macron’s plan to control the national debt led to disaster, including the Gilets Jaunes uprising during which twelve people died, and culminating in political paralysis following his wilful gamble on parliamentary elections. His self-important activism on the world stage is embarrassing. Towards Britain he remains resentful at Brexit and Aukus, which provoked an undignified international tantrum. His desire to pay Britain back shows in his extreme demands over fishing, attempts to exclude the UK from EU defence procurement, and even the petty cancellation of celebrations for the tenth anniversary of the 2010 Lancaster House Agreement. As for ‘stopping the boats’? Vous plaisantez! As expected the ‘one in one out’ agreement is a bad joke which will not decrease overall numbers even at the absurdly low level of operation. The French have no interest in stopping the cross-Channel flow, and to do so would be extremely unpopular across the political spectrum in France.
Starmer, in contrast to Macron, took office with no plan at all. His fluctuating decisions make no sense, most obviously dithering over welfare reform and a visibly self-harming fiscal policy. His expensive and vacuous ‘reset’ with the EU demonstrates the weakness of a timid demandeur and inspires no confidence for the conduct of future diplomacy when some detail is finally thrashed out with an unyielding EU.
The personal limitations of two politicians define the latest episodes in the saga of neighbouring states which nevertheless share fundamental interests. The 1995 Chequers Declaration stated that there was no situation in which a threat to the vital interest of one was not a threat to both – a position accepted even before the First World War.
Yet France and Britain have followed different and conflicting strategies for over a century. Paradoxically, the differences stem from a common predicament: both countries have been trying for over a century to punch above their weight. By the mid-19th century, both were medium-sized states in a world that was seeing the rise of much bigger entities. Napoleon had seen this coming long before. Colonial empires were no substitute for core strength, and even drained resources – ‘millstones round our neck’, thought Disraeli. Shock defeat by Germany in 1871 proved that France was no longer the Continent’s military and economic hegemon, and caused profound and lasting cultural and political trauma. Britain’s ‘Splendid Isolation’ seemed less splendid after the Boer War, with Russia, Germany and the United States growing stronger. Its power and security rested on control of the seas, and those days were numbered due to German and American naval expansion.
Choices made when Victoria reigned still underlie policy today. France (population in 1900 38 million) was obsessed by somehow countering German power (56 million and with a stronger economy). Britain (population 41 million), long since determined to avoid enmity with America (76 million), began prolonged wooing to make it an ally. Two world wars confirmed these fundamental choices. France, aware of the fragility of victory in 1918, proposed European integration as the future way to control Germany; and in the 1950s it resumed this policy with the Coal and Steel Community, later the Common Market and finally the European Union. Britain, having helped to engineer America’s reluctant entry into the First World War, and having been spared an interminable and devastating stalemate with Nazi Germany by America’s alliance in the Second, made the ‘Special Relationship’ its diplomatic religion. France and Britain had been Europe’s principal colonial empires, and the loss of those empires – of dubious practical benefit, but sources of comforting prestige – strengthened their respective Eurocentric and Atlanticist priorities.
But there was a very significant difference, due largely to the gigantic influence of Charles de Gaulle. Under his Presidency the French reacted against their steep loss of power and status (through the debacle of 1940 and bloody defeats in Indochina and Algeria) by shameless self-assertion: de Gaulle characteristically decided that ‘France must act like a Great Power precisely because she no longer is one.’ This involved provocative gestures such as expelling the military headquarters of NATO and proclaiming support for Quebec nationalism. European leadership would restore France’s world role, including determined neo-colonialism in Africa and the Pacific. The French ruling elite is unashamedly Gaullist in spirit, proud of its overseas possessions and the global reach they confer.
The British elite followed the opposite path, of which the Chagos islands fiasco is the latest manifestation. A loss of self-confidence combined with a lamentable loss of confidence in Britain itself led Harold Macmillan and most of his successors to embrace ‘management of decline’ as sophisticated policy. They begged to enter the Common Market (Britain was ‘the sinking Titanic’ and Europe ‘the lifeboat’), downgraded the Commonwealth, and embraced a subordinate role as America’s faithful auxiliary – Greece to America’s Rome, as Macmillan hopefully put it. Currying favour with Washington as its ‘bridge’ to Europe was a major reason for joining the EEC and for loathing Brexit.
The French worked ruthlessly to harness the EU to their national strategy, including bullying Germany into accepting the Euro. But the British establishment never developed a clear idea of what ‘Europe’ was for, other than as their comfort blanket: having a ‘seat at the table’ was an end in itself, while asserting British national interest was bad taste to ‘good Europeans’. Ironically, the only significant British contribution to the ‘building of Europe’ came from Margaret Thatcher.
Today, the fundamental strategies that Britain and France have pursued for over a century appear equally bankrupt. The ‘Special Relationship’ has been exposed by Donald Trump as sentimental whimsy. France’s determination to make ‘Europe’ its global pedestal has collapsed with the utter irrelevance of the EU over Ukraine and the Middle East. Trump’s bombing of Iran while Britain, France and the EU were vainly negotiating with the Iranians pitilessly exposed French and British illusions. Starmer and David Lammy, like Macron and his Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot, dared not even say whether they supported the attack on Iran or opposed it, repeating lamely that ‘we were not involved’—impotence masquerading as policy.
Both countries face similar predicaments. They have overspent the ‘peace dividend’ and allowed their armed forces to wither. Ironically they are Western Europe’s principle military powers – proof not of their strength but of Europe’s weakness, vulnerable to a Russia whose GDP is no greater than Italy’s. Like most of their neighbours, both have committed the lion’s share of national income to insatiable welfare systems and oversized bureaucracies. Both have public-sector lobbies formidable at the ballot box and on the picket line. Both are handicapped by certain ethnic minorities whose loyalties lie elsewhere. Both seem near the limit of taxation and borrowing. Britain has, to crown it all, adopted a more ruinous ‘Net Zero’ policy. So neither can expect economic growth to alleviate their problems.
Both countries have long been obsessed with national decline. Some of this is the inevitable reflection of the historic emergence of much bigger states. Yet they remain Great Powers, albeit the smallest in size of the Security Council Permanent Members. Recent diminution in power and influence is due not to geopolitical inevitability but to political choices, aggravated in Britain’s case by its elite’s palsied embrace of national self-abasement.
So what do Starmer and Macron have to talk about? Both now pay enthusiastic lip-service to the pressing needs of defence. Both speak loudly while carrying a small stick. No one is listening any more. Both countries may have come to the end of an era in which their strategy was derived from history and buoyed by the prestige and influence inherited from past greatness. The ineptitude of their present leadership merely makes this cruelly obvious. If they wished to play a meaningful part in the future of the world, they could work seriously on a Franco-British ‘special relationship’. The foundations are already there, in the Lancaster House Agreement, including on nuclear weapons development, which the recent National Security Strategy rightly describes as ‘unparalleled in Europe’. But as long as Macron and Starmer are in charge, Britain is almost certain to lose more than it gains. The emphasis on coordinating the two countries’ nuclear deterrents may just be words, repeating what already exists. But it is worrying, given their weakness in other negotiations, that Starmer will give future French governments an excessive degree of control over our present and future nuclear deterrent. The problem is that the French usually know exactly what they want: but the British don’t. Moreover, we have no idea who Macron’s successor will be. It could be a pro-Russian government of the extreme Right or the extreme Left.
Might eventual successors to Starmer and Macron one day build a relationship that matches the sentimental rhetoric and enhances Europe’s security and our own? Will it be too late? The signs are not encouraging.
So what was this State visit for? An ego-trip for Emmanuel Macron, and another sign of our present government’s desperation.
Robert Tombs is co-author of That Sweet Enemy: The French and the British from the Sun King to the Present. John Keiger is the author of France and the World since 1871.
