Seven years after the Sorbonne speech, President Macron spoke again in the university’s Grand Amphitheatre for a speech on Europe on Thursday 25 April 2024.
In seven years, Europe has been profoundly transformed by historic crises: Brexit, the COVID-19 pandemic and Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine.
The European Union has responded through unity, taking swift and ambitious decisions, reducing its dependencies and bolstering its sovereignty.
In seven years, Europe has carried out six major transformations:
1. Financial unity, initially through joint European borrowing, to come out of the pandemic on top;
2. Strategic unity in new fields necessary for protecting our fellow citizens, health (joint vaccine production), energy (joint purchases, reform of electricity market), defence;
3. The foundations of a technological and industrial sovereignty crystallized by the Versailles agenda;
4. The ability to devise, prepare and plan the ecological and digital transition;
5. The control and protection of its borders, through the Pact on Asylum and Migration;
6. Cooperation with its neighbourhood and the whole European continent (in the framework of the European Political Community, for example).
These steps forward have been significant for European sovereignty. But they cannot be enough. At a time when “major transformations… are being played out now”, the President made three observations:
1. At geopolitical and security level, Europe must face up to the world’s widespread rearmament.
2. At economic level, Europe’s economic model risks falling behind amid global competition.
3. At cultural and intellectual level, our democratic, humanist and liberal model is being challenged.
Given these observations, the Head of State added that we must “take massive strategic decisions, accept paradigm shifts, and respond to them with power, prosperity and humanism”.
I.Europe as a power
To build this powerful Europe which protects its citizens and its borders and asserts itself as a balancing power, we must build a “powerful Europe of defence, security and partnerships, because Europe has emerged from its childhood state, in which it sought protection from others. It must now assert itself as an adult.”
To face up to the threat posed by Russia to the European continent and build our defence sovereignty, President Macron proposed to:
- Deepen Defence Europe by building NATO’s European pillar and a common security framework within the European Political Community.
- Continue discussions on the deterrence capability, because it is “by nature a crucial element” of European defence.
- Launch the second stage of the European Intervention Initiative proposed in 2017 in order to build pragmatic cooperation projects between Europeans (e.g. Task Force Takuba in the Sahel, Aspides in the Red Sea).
- Create a European military academy to train future European military and civilian officers in security and defence issues.
- Achieve the goal of a rapid reaction force that deploys up to 5,000 military personnel in theatres of operation by 2025.
- Develop a European cyber-security and cyber-defence capability.
- Strengthen our European defence industry, particularly by creating joint procurement and production capabilities and establishing European preference in our support instruments for defence industries, including by supporting the Estonian Prime Minister’s proposal for joint borrowing.
To make Europe a balancing power, the President made a call to:
- Forge full partnerships with the countries in its neighbourhood, as well as with Africa and the Indo-Pacific region.
- Speak with a single voice in every region of the world, promoting the key priorities of the major global public goods (education, health, climate, fight against poverty).
Building a geopolitical Europe also means an ability to control our borders, thanks to:
- The implementation of the Pact on Asylum and Migration.
- Resolute action with regard to returns and readmissions, combating the economic model of people-smugglers, using all our levers (visas, trade preferences etc.) and mobilizing Frontex.
This powerful Europe is also a Europe that protects its citizens against threats and networks that ignore State borders, by:
- Strengthening the Schengen Council, to make it a real EU internal security council.
- Improving information-sharing between Member States thanks to the Schengen Information System to combat terrorism.
- Obliging online service providers to moderate content and more quickly delete terrorist content.
- Stepping up the joint fight against drug trafficking, particularly in the major European ports.
But “there is no power without a sound economic foundation”.
II.A Europe of prosperity
The President set out the goals of European prosperity:
- To produce more wealth in order to create jobs and improve our living standards;
- To guarantee Europeans’ purchasing power;
- To decarbonize our economies and protect our biodiversity;
- To control our strategic production chains in order to ensure our sovereignty;
- To keep our economy open to the world, while defending our interests.
He said that in order to achieve these goals, which sometimes seem irreconcilable, we must “build a new paradigm of growth and prosperity”
1.Producing more and greener
“We must stop pitting decarbonization against growth”.
-Making ecology an accelerator to relocate factories to Europe, particularly by achieving our battery-production targets (100% European batteries and doubling European semi-conductor production by 2030).
- Becoming the first continent with “zero plastic pollution”.
2. Simplifying
- Modernizing the EU internal market (emergence of European champions, support for industries of the future, European preference).
- Taking on board simplification, by ending automatic regulation and reducing taxes, particularly for very small and medium-sized enterprises.
- Making progress along the path of subsidiarity in order to respect Member States’ powers.
3. Speeding up on European industrial policy
- Deploying a “Made in Europe” strategy by following the approach adopted under the French EU presidency at the Versailles summit (10-11/03/2022) and also called for by the German Chancellor, on reducing critical dependencies.
- To boost this Versailles agenda, deciding to become a global leader by 2030 in five strategic industries: AI, quantum computing, space, biotechnology, and new energies (hydrogen, small modular reactors, nuclear fusion).
- Extending and simplifying IPCEIs (Important Projects of Common European Interest) to more industries (nuclear, critical medicines and chemicals).
Two strategic EU industries will require special attention:
Energy:
- Making the free movement of decarbonized electrons a new freedom of our internal market thanks to the development of interconnections and the modernization of storage networks and structures.
- Strengthening the Nuclear Alliance, which already has some 15 partners.
- Relying on three levers: sobriety, renewables and nuclear power.
- Building “atomic Europe” by ensuring European sovereignty over the whole cycle and building a European reactor supply.
Agriculture and food:
- Supporting agricultural and food sovereignty for Europe, including for fisheries.
- Supporting the CAP budget and simplifying its operation, protecting our farmers against unfair practices (including through a European food assembly), establishing a genuine customs force, and improving revenues.
4. Overhauling our European trade policy on the basis of reciprocity
- Modern trading agreements that are fair and comply with our standards.
- Reciprocity strategy, with the systematic introduction of mirror clauses in all trade agreements and mirror measures in existing and future European regulations: “if goods don’t meet key standards, they mustn’t be able to enter the EU as if nothing were wrong”.
- Displaying carbon footprints on products to show that “Made in Europe” products are better for our planet.
- Extending and improving the carbon border tax.
- Strengthening our economic security instruments such as the protection of intellectual property and also of sensitive infrastructure (cf. Nexus Institute speech at The Hague, 11 April 2023).
5. Winning the battle for innovation and research
- Devoting 3% of our European GDP to research by taking a step towards breakthrough innovation (European Innovation Council) and strengthening the Horizon Europe programme.
- Moving towards a European DARPA.
- Finding alternatives to dangerous phytosanitary products.
- Equipping ourselves with a European research and investment plan to find treatments for cancer, Alzheimer ’s disease and other neurodegenerative diseases, rare and orphan diseases, through an alliance of European research centres and shared projects.
- Investing in training and work to attract and retain our talent.
- Strengthening the Scale-up Europe initiative to help our innovative start-ups by supporting talent mobility.
6. Bringing back investment to Europe
- Ensuring that our monetary, budgetary and financial model meets our financing needs.
- Including a growth or indeed decarbonization target in our monetary policy targets.
- Talking to our European partners about a massive injection of joint public investment and increasing the European Union’s capacity for financial action, at least doubling it.
- Developing new EU own resources, without ever putting the burden onto European citizens (carbon border tax, ETS, financial transaction tax, multinationals’ profits, ETIAS).
- Building a savings and investment union to mobilize European savings to serve our collective ambitions, inter alia through the creation of a European savings plan.
- Revising the application of prudential standards to avoid over-regulating compared to the rest of the world.
III. A humanist Europe
A Europe that defends our liberal democracy by:
- Strengthening budget conditionality linked to the rule of law: no European money without adhering to our fundamental principles.
- Strengthening our capabilities to combat external disinformation and destabilization activities;
- Moving towards transnational lists for European elections.
- Organizing citizens’ panels and reducing the number of signatures required for the European Citizens’ Initiative.
- Extending qualified majority voting in tax and foreign policy matters.
A Europe shaped by knowledge, culture and science:
- Greater integration of university alliances and the creation of joint European diplomas.
- Boosting Erasmus with apprenticeships and vocational training to reach 15% of European apprentices on mobility schemes by 2030.
- Creating European museum alliances and European library alliances.
- Making Arte the benchmark European audiovisual platform.
- Building the Europe of Trains, which will draw on the success of the Interrail Pass and improve European intercity connections.
- Introduce the culture pass Europe-wide.
- Defending our principles and values with a democratic digital system by protecting our children online against the actions of child sex offenders and against early and mass exposure to content prohibited to minors (age of digital consent at 15 years, age checks) and banning online hate speech.
A Europe of equality and solidarity:
-Continuing the fight for gender equality, in particular by including the right to voluntary termination of pregnancy in the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union.
- Creating a “European solidarity programme” supported by the European Social Fund to support States in their policies to tackle food insecurity and lack of access to healthcare and housing.
- Promoting at international level the debate on taxing the super-rich.
Asserting a “certain idea of Europe” based on our cultural and natural heritage by promoting a European ambition for our seas, oceans and forests.
This is the new agenda for a powerful, geopolitical, forward-looking, progress-making, democratic Europe of freedoms that President Macron will promote at the June European Council in order to define, with his counterparts, the European Union’s strategic priorities for the next five years.