Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
It takes two to tango. A plague on both your houses. Six of one, half a dozen of the other. The British have a deep stock of phrases that seek to divide the blame for any human conflict. This suggests a fair-minded people, and might explain (or be explained by) their mostly tranquil domestic history.
It is also dishonest. In some if not most conflicts, one side is guiltier. When Britain and France fell out after Brexit, the fault lay with consecutive prime ministers in London, who demanded the benefits of EU membership without membership itself, then sulked when this fantastic wish was laughed out of the negotiating room. The relationship improved somewhat under Rishi Sunak, who showed that one could support Brexit without behaving like an insecure jingo. Emmanuel Macron’s state visit to Britain this week has warmed things up further.
Two impressions stand out from the French president’s tour. First, what a good sovereign King Charles has been. Even aside from his skill at the ceremonial niceties, what happened to all the architecture criticism and anti-modern quackery that some had dreaded he would use his platform to air?
Second, at least in the medium term, the fate of Europe rests in large part on Britain and France. Nearer the end of this decade, if the ambitious defence-spending plans of Germany and other Nato members are honoured, Russia could be facing a Europe that is simply too formidable to test. There might also be a less Kremlin-friendly president in the White House. Even if just one of these two developments were to take place, the continent would be unrecognisably safer. Until then, the circumstances might never be more propitious for Russian aggression.
Most big countries in Europe are not well-positioned to deter it. Germany is a more generous military donor to Ukraine than is France, according to the Kiel Institute. It is borrowing and spending a fortune for its own armed forces. But it is doing so from such a low base that it will take years to manufacture the new kit and train the new recruits. Even then, there is no telling if Germany would deploy armed personnel to its east and under what rules of engagement, given the historic sensitivities. The country has no nuclear power plants, let alone nuclear deterrent, or (for what it matters) permanent seat on the UN Security Council.
Poland spends an exemplary share of GDP on defence, but that GDP is still much smaller than Britain’s or France’s. Its population is not much more than half of their 70mn each. As for Spain and Italy, there is nothing like distance and protective mountain ranges to make one view Russia with more equanimity than, say, a Finn could manage. At the Nato summit last month, Spain’s prime minister dragged his feet about the club’s new defence spending target — to the open irritation of Donald Trump, whom some European liberals found themselves cheering under their breath. It is not clear how the continent ever resolves this north-south split in threat perception and defence readiness. Europe’s nominal population is around 500mn. Given attitudes in the Mediterranean, the continent’s effective weight in defence terms might be rather less.
Of all Europe’s big countries, then, two bear a disproportionate burden until (literally) the cavalry arrives nearer 2030. Even after that point, the reality of conflict might have moved the fulcrum of European politics on a lasting basis from the Rhine to somewhere nearer the Channel. In a peaceful continent, the France-Germany relationship was unambiguously the most important. In a war-footing Europe, that cannot be quite as true. There is just no doing without the UK: either its armed power, its intelligence assets or what the defence world would call its “strategic culture”, which can’t be bought off-the-shelf. Britain is the biggest military donor to Ukraine after the US. Regardless of whether the Anglo-French relationship is “special”, as Macron claimed this week, it is necessary.
Even the bickering between the two sides, a peacetime luxury, has a lot to do with the contempt that familiarity breeds. Britain and France have almost exactly the same population, a similar GDP and therefore more or less equal per capita income. Both have a disproportionately huge capital — a “primate city”, in the jargon — as a result of being unified and centralised states for centuries longer than Germany or Italy. Both lost a world empire at around the same time, and it remains an open question who took it worse: France, which fought the inevitable in Algeria and Indochina, or Britain, which out of devotion to a mostly symbolic “Commonwealth” missed the first wave of a European project that it might have shaped.
But the most important similarity is that, while much of postwar Europe told itself that it had transcended such archaic things as hard power, Britain and France never did. They remain the only nuclear states in democratic Europe. If the continent is to defend itself with less American help than it has been used to, the Anglo-French relationship might be the core of the continent. Some other European countries have the martial culture but not the scale. Some have the scale but not the martial culture. Until that changes, sheer necessity forces Britain and France together. But it is possible to detect a trace of enthusiasm during the state visit, too. A Europe in which security rather than prosperity is paramount allows two decline-haunted countries a shot at the big time again.
