A glorious spectacle was laid out for President Macron in London last week, full honours, heralds, red carpets, a royal feast at Windsor Castle (1070AD), wreath-laying in Westminster Abbey (1042AD) and, note this, a speech to both Houses of Parliament. Since Britain’s disastrous Brexit, France is the first European country to be honoured with a state visit. This was quite deliberately given precedence, ahead of President Trump’s state visit in September, so controversial it has been cunningly scheduled for three days when parliament is not sitting, avoiding the certainty that some MPs would publicly insult him by walking out.
The symbolism and the contrast between these two events tells the story of the remarkable European changes under way. Two rogue world leaders, Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, have woken Europe out of its complacent slumber, shaken awake by the invasion of Ukraine and Trump’s ending of the solidarity of NATO. Alone, Europe must defend itself and unite, if it can, around liberal democratic values it alone is left to represent in the world.
That is a heavy moral and financial burden: is Europe up to it? Penurious Britain is among many countries that will struggle to put up 5 percent of GDP for our common defence. Right-wing parties of various degrees of extremism, some bordering on fascism, threatening the values at the heart of the EU’s foundation. Slovakia and Hungary have been obstructing the latest sanctions against Russia for the Ukraine invasion, despite EU foreign policy high representative, Kaja Kallas, warning that “Sanctions are necessary to starve Russia of the means to wage this war, and the European Union will keep raising the cost”. Can you have a union when some join the enemy?
Britain’s shameful rejection of the European ideal is being hastily forgiven, now that the old central core of Germany, France and the UK needs to regroup. Creating a Europe united less by geography or trade than by human rights and democratic ideals allows the exciting notion of including Canada or others who choose to share the resistance to dictatorships. But can that be done without expelling those who no longer share those values?
A Europe led by Germany’s AfD, France’s National Rally and Britain’s Reform would fall apart. Defending what, against whom, for what purpose? Possibly, Italy’s Georgia Meloni has shown that in power they would shift away from their most extreme positions. But if Europe is now to strap on its expensive armour and summon up its troops, ready for war, its young soldiers will need to know what they are fighting for. There would need to be no fifth columnists undermining the collective endeavour.
One overwhelming problem confronts all the continent: immigration. Keir Starmer made a first step arrangement with Emmanuel Macron to exchange migrants, tokenistic, but significant. Migration is the poison the far right feeds on: to keep them at bay, Europe needs to agree to reform the ECHR. It was written at a time when asylum was seen as something sought by a few political refugees fleeing personal persecution, not to allow mass movements of all from war-torn or poverty-stricken countries. Better for centrists to grasp this now with a Europe-wide reform of rights, not wait for political opportunists to win elections on Trumpian solutions.
Yesterday, Chancellor Merz was in London to sign a wide-ranging pact promoting cooperation on defence, economic growth and tackling illegal migration. The treaty features a mutual assistance clause specifying a threat to one nation would be regarded as a threat to the other, the founding principle of NATO no longer guaranteed by the wayward US president. As with the Macron agreement, let’s hope this is the new foundation. Britain is not likely to formally rejoin the EU any time soon, but this mutual warmth makes inching towards a Swiss or Norwegian relationship look plausible. A EuroTrack poll this week found the forgiving people of the EU extraordinarily enthusiastic about Britain rejoining. That is an encouraging sign of a need to bond again around shared values.
This warmth is reciprocated these days by the British people, many more wanting to return, with an even larger majority regarding Brexit as a bad error. President Macron will have felt that sense of relief: Britain, under a very different government, is at last coming to its senses. But I can only hope that Macron and Merz have wise aides who keep most of the British newspapers out of their sight: the majority of them are owned by Brexiteers and xenophobes, with the Daily Mail and The Daily Telegraph offering poison of their own. They are more extreme than ever, increasingly supporting Nigel Farage: the Daily Telegraph’s Europe editor claimed Macron had arrived at the summit “to accept Starmer’s Brexit surrender”. Rarely has so much of the British press been so far out of touch with most voters.
Here’s a sample of the deep bitterness the Brexiteers feel as they see the economic damage their campaign brought to Britain, always looking for reasons why it would have worked if only it had been done in the right way, with the right (unobtainable) deal. These days they sound like Marxists explaining why the USSR was never a proper communist country, the way Marx intended. Macron brought with him a promise to loan the Bayeux tapestry to the British Museum, to travel to Britain for the first time in 900 years, a greatly celebrated gesture – but not by the likes of John Redwood, recent Conservative MP and ferocious anti-European, who complained sourly that it “reminds us of the invasion and the way so many English were forced into serfdom by the Normans”.
All that is the past. The future for Britain is in Europe, or as close as possible, building a unity with France and Germany around defence because it has become a matter of our mutual survival, and the survival of the precarious values that created the European Union.
This is a joint column with IPS Journal
Polly Toynbee is a commentator for The Guardian newspaper. Her latest books are a memoir, ‘An Uneasy Inheritance: My family and other radicals’ and 'The Only Way is Up: how to take Britain from austerity to prosperity'.
