HARRISON STETLER
What a difference seven years makes. In September 2017, speaking in the opulent main lecture hall of Paris’s Sorbonne University, French President Emmanuel Macron rolled out his idea of European “autonomy.” With the right reforms, he argued at length, the European project could smoothly navigate the accumulating hazards of globalization. On April 25 of this year, from the same podium at the Sorbonne, Macron gave an equally long-winded speech, this time with a markedly different undertone. “Our Europe is mortal. It can die,” Macron now warned, a line recycled on the cover of the May 4 issue of The Economist. “Europe will fall behind. We are already beginning to see this.”
Macron pored over the dire assessments that now preoccupy the European Union’s political and economic elites: The bloc was being forced to fork out billions on global energy markets; it was digitally dependent on Silicon Valley, missing out on the tech-fueled capital accumulation that had remade the US economy since 2008; and it was overly reliant on Chinese green technologies and critical minerals just when Europe’s energy vulnerability, to say nothing of the bloc’s pledges to reduce CO2 emissions, required a rapid acceleration in the deployment of carbon-neutral technologies. Claiming that GDP per capita growth in the United States had outpaced Europe’s by over 30 percent since the early 1990s, Macron cautioned that if nothing changed, the European Union faced collective “impoverishment.”
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