Beneath the din of the COVID-19 crisis, there are rumblings of a new Europe.

Beneath the din of the COVID-19 crisis, there are rumblings of a new Europe.

https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/

  It sounds like a cliché to say that it takes a crisis for Europe to act, but in the case of COVID-19 there’s truth to it. In a new essay for the Atlantic Council, Clément Beaune, France's minister for European affairs, offers one of the most detailed visions yet from a top European official about what a post-COVID Europe could look like.

The European Union’s adoption this summer of an economic-recovery package, including an agreement to share debt, represents “the most important boost to European integration since the euro,” Beaune argues, as well as “the return of a golden triangle” in “the French-German partnership and an ambitious European Commission.”
 

The case for a ‘power agenda’

But while the pandemic has shown the EU to be “responsive in the economic sphere,” Beaune notes, it has also exposed the bloc as “largely powerless” to coordinate border restrictions and “practically nonexistent” on health matters such as common quarantine measures and vaccine research.
 
The EU, he maintains, must develop a new “power agenda” to navigate “the stark world that the Europeans are rediscovering,” shaped not just by the coronavirus crisis but also by “tremors from the China-US clash.” 

Even as he places the Franco-German engine at the core of this new European project, Beaune does not paper over the disagreements between the two countries on Eurozone reform and the Nord Stream II pipeline. Noting French President Emmanuel Macron’s conviction that “Europe is not the dilution of, but the condition for, French sovereignty in today's world,” Beaune explicitly links France's attachment to its power, identity, and independence to European global power. 

"This strengthening of France through Europe has taken on a worldwide dimension,” he writes. “How can strategic industrial sectors, from the electric battery to essential medicines, be developed through national self-sufficiency rather than European autonomy? How can the trade agreements governing globalization be achieved in a single country?"

The bottom line: Pursuing this agenda will present significant challenges, Beaune acknowledges. Europe will need to reconcile “the language of power” with “the grammar of cooperation." It will need to reassess its passion for enlargement, instead setting clear borders and strengthening standards for accession. And it will need to reckon with its complex network of leadership. Invoking Henry Kissinger, Beaune notes that “Europe nowadays has several telephone numbers, but no direct line.”

- Benjamin Haddad and Eileen Kannengeiser, Future Europe Initiative