French president Emmanuel Macron welcomes President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen prior to their meeting in Paris, on June 3, 2022 (Photo by JULIEN DE ROSA / AFP)
When it comes to the EU’s China policy, the seeming dissonance between Macron’s appeasement and von der Leyen’s hawkishness is in fact a well-rehearsed symbiosis.
Emmanuel Macron’s half-censored interview with POLITICO aboard the plane back from his state visit to Beijing was a bombshell of geopolitical gossip just when the world needed it most. As China conducted bombing raids over Taiwan and encircled the island with its navy, the French president seemed to signal that some—if not all—of Europe’s leaders will remain equidistant in the escalating Sino-American dispute over Taiwan’s status, admittedly in pursuit of some version of “strategic autonomy.” One cue to make sense of the interview harkens back some 70 years, not to World War II itself but to the oft-resurgent historiographic quarrels over France’s exact role vis-à-vis the Nazi machine in 1939-1945. Granted, the Nazi parallel ill-befits Xi Jinping’s China in most ways, but the positioning dynamics across the West prompted by China’s rise are not altogether dissimilar. While it could hardly occupy any portion of French territory even if it wished to (and with the Holocaust still dwarfing China’s policy of massively interning its Uyghur minority for now), Europe is similarly torn between appeasement and confrontation in ways that evoke just such a parallel.
The parallel is rooted in France’s and Europe’s dissonant approaches to the enemy. While the Vichy regime chose neutrality in the war and appeasement of Germany by lending logistical support to its genocidal masterplan, General de Gaulle rallied France’s colonies and its onshore resistance cells to strike when it mattered. As the war receded into memory, historians and the truth-seeking public were left wrestling with a burning question: by which of the two conducts should France be judged? With most of the country in thrall to résistencialisme (the ludicrous belief that most of its people had not collaborated but in fact resisted), the distinguished historian Robert Aron reinforced this fallacious feeling by arguing that the two stances weren’t so much in contradiction as in symbiosis. In tune with the triumphalism of the immediate postwar, Aron’s famous monograph Histoire de Vichy (1954) coined the metaphor of the shield and the sword (le bouclier et le glaive). By cultivating an appearance of neutrality that buffered anti-Nazi activity, Vichy hadn’t so much undermined the resistance as enabled its struggle against the common German enemy.
A similar contrast between the textual content of edicts and pronouncements and the actual substance of policies seems at work in the EU’s posture vis-à-vis China. On one hand, Macron’s weekend interview telegraphed Europe’s ambition to carve itself out a role as a sovereign pole in an increasingly multipolar world order, thus avoiding being “dragged into” the American hegemon’s confrontations with a rising China, in the French president’s own words. His remarks contrasted sharply with those of other EU leaders, not least his companion on the trip, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. In a speech to the European Policy Center and the Mercator Institute last Thursday, shortly before joining Macron’s state visit, von der Leyen announced the Commission’s plans to subject the bloc’s ties with China to a strategy of ‘de-risking.R
The Shield and the Olive Branch
French president Emmanuel Macron welcomes President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen prior to their meeting in Paris, on June 3, 2022 (Photo by JULIEN DE ROSA / AFP)
Emmanuel Macron’s half-censored interview with POLITICO aboard the plane back from his state visit to Beijing was a bombshell of geopolitical gossip just when the world needed it most. As China conducted bombing raids over Taiwan and encircled the island with its navy, the French president seemed to signal that some—if not all—of Europe’s leaders will remain equidistant in the escalating Sino-American dispute over Taiwan’s status, admittedly in pursuit of some version of “strategic autonomy.” One cue to make sense of the interview harkens back some 70 years, not to World War II itself but to the oft-resurgent historiographic quarrels over France’s exact role vis-à-vis the Nazi machine in 1939-1945. Granted, the Nazi parallel ill-befits Xi Jinping’s China in most ways, but the positioning dynamics across the West prompted by China’s rise are not altogether dissimilar. While it could hardly occupy any portion of French territory even if it wished to (and with the Holocaust still dwarfing China’s policy of massively interning its Uyghur minority for now), Europe is similarly torn between appeasement and confrontation in ways that evoke just such a parallel.
The parallel is rooted in France’s and Europe’s dissonant approaches to the enemy. While the Vichy regime chose neutrality in the war and appeasement of Germany by lending logistical support to its genocidal masterplan, General de Gaulle rallied France’s colonies and its onshore resistance cells to strike when it mattered. As the war receded into memory, historians and the truth-seeking public were left wrestling with a burning question: by which of the two conducts should France be judged? With most of the country in thrall to résistencialisme (the ludicrous belief that most of its people had not collaborated but in fact resisted), the distinguished historian Robert Aron reinforced this fallacious feeling by arguing that the two stances weren’t so much in contradiction as in symbiosis. In tune with the triumphalism of the immediate postwar, Aron’s famous monograph Histoire de Vichy (1954) coined the metaphor of the shield and the sword (le bouclier et le glaive). By cultivating an appearance of neutrality that buffered anti-Nazi activity, Vichy hadn’t so much undermined the resistance as enabled its struggle against the common German enemy.
A similar contrast between the textual content of edicts and pronouncements and the actual substance of policies seems at work in the EU’s posture vis-à-vis China. On one hand, Macron’s weekend interview telegraphed Europe’s ambition to carve itself out a role as a sovereign pole in an increasingly multipolar world order, thus avoiding being “dragged into” the American hegemon’s confrontations with a rising China, in the French president’s own words. His remarks contrasted sharply with those of other EU leaders, not least his companion on the trip, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. In a speech to the European Policy Center and the Mercator Institute last Thursday, shortly before joining Macron’s state visit, von der Leyen announced the Commission’s plans to subject the bloc’s ties with China to a strategy of ‘de-risking.R