‘What is needed today is a militant humanism, one that is saturated with the conviction that the principle of freedom, tolerance and doubt must not allow itself to be exploited and overtaken by a fanaticism that is without shame and without doubt. If European humanism has become incapable of a vigorous revival of its ideas; if it is no longer able to make its soul self-conscious in a pugnacious alacrity of life, it will go to ruin and there will be a Europe whose name will be no more than a historical expression and from which it would be better to take refuge in neutrality outside of time’ (Thomas Mann, Achtung Europa 1938).
So wrote Thomas Mann to the Europeans on the eve of the deflagration of the Second World War as the disgrace of the Munich Accords between Neville Chamberlain, Eduard Daladier, Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini that – in the absence of the representatives of Czechoslovakia – opened a path on which France and the United Kingdom were convinced that they had obtained a lasting peace by accommodating the expansionist aims of the Third Reich in the German-speaking Czechoslovak territories that instead gave rise to a Nazi-Fascist war of conquest over the entire European continent.
The announcements by Donald Trump, James David Vance and Keith Kellogg on the hypothesis of negotiations with Vladimir Putin’s Russia – as the central theme of the Munich Marketplace Security Conference and the prelude to the future Donald Trump-Vladimir Putin meeting in Riyadh between the US’s Marco Rubio and Russia’s Sergei Lavrov in the absence of the representatives of Ukraine and the European Union – inevitably brought back memories of the 1938 Munich Accords.
The hypothesis of a unilateral concession of all the Russian-speaking territories of Donetsk, Zaporizzja and Cherson to the Russian Federation as well as the definitive recognition of the occupation of Crimea and Luhansk is in fact reminiscent of the surrender of France and the United Kingdom to Nazi expansionism in the knowledge that Vladimir Putin will demand the demilitarisation and neutrality of Ukraine along with the organisation of uncertain presidential and legislative elections in a territory devastated by the Russian war of conquest.
The plaintive litanies of European leaders – who have supported Ukraine financially and militarily far more than the United States these past three years but have been unable to imagine a shred of a peaceful and secure future to guarantee its independence and inviolability at the same time as the independence and inviolability of its European neighbours bordering Russia – have not produced any concrete results.
Nevertheless, the illusion of those who thought that the diverse group of willing heads of government, surprisingly invited by Emmanuel Macron to the Elysée Palace on 17 February, would pave the way for an embryonic common European defence has evaporated like snow in the sun.
The miracle of the European intergovernmental reawakening, outside the decision-making fetters of the European Union, which had even been hoped for by Antonio Costa, having freed himself for the occasion from the cumbersome hat of President of the European Council, did not happen because the willing gathered in Paris by Emmanuel Macron
- squabbled over the proposal by the non-EU Keir Starmer to send ‘substantial national armies’ to Ukraine, when it would have been necessary to militarily guarantee the eventual peace agreement between the US and Russia, with only apparent generosity that the British newspapers put at 25/30000 men of whom ten thousand French and ten thousand from Her Majesty,
- have renewed the clash between ‘frugal’ and ‘spendthrifts’ over the decoupling of military spending from the new, stricter Stability Pact,
- they once again buried the hypothesis of Eurobonds and European debt to jointly finance increased investment in weapons and war technology, leaving Donald Trump and the trusty Mark Rutte, who demanded an average level of military spending from the Europeans that would be higher than that of the United States, high and dry,
- have ostentatiously manifested the protection of national interests between those who want to maintain dependence on industry across the Atlantic and those who would like to lay the foundations for European strategic autonomy.
The President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, for her part, did not open the door to the hypothesis of a common defence by unsuccessfully proposing in Munich to use the national escape clause of Article 26 of the Stability Pact to help states’ budgets without hypothesising joint procurement, integration or standardisation of production, with good reason for a progressive common defence.
Beyond the disagreements confirmed at the inconclusive Paris summit on 17 February, in the debate on future European defence there remain unresolved the decades-old congenital flaws that were already discussed at the time of the European Defence Community (EDC) in 1952-1954, which were not overcome then and which are still not addressed today by governments, the European Commission and political forces because of the hostility to ceding the second part of national sovereignty after monetary sovereignty, and which we summarise here in six questions:
- is it a question of establishing a single army despite linguistic differences with a supranational organisation and a loss of autonomy or of maintaining national armies with the exception of limited common structures?
- will the men and women called up for military service have a European or national military-political education whatever the choice between a single army or several national armies?
- will the military budget be a single one as far as expenditure is concerned and will it be financed by national contributions or by own resources or will it be the sum of national budgets except for the European standardisation of procurement and production?
- will the member states retain the power to declare aggression against one of the member states, to order mobilisation, to declare war or to make peace, or will a supranational political authority be set up in advance or in parallel to which the European armed force or the national armed forces will be answerable?
- will the creation of a common military instrument to achieve humanitarian and rescue, peacekeeping and crisis management objectives including peace restoration, inspection of compliance with international treaties and the fight against terrorism require more expenditure with the exception of industrial investment in new technologies or will it achieve effective interoperability between armed forces and between intelligence services with less expenditure?
- will common defence and European political power constitute two separate problems, the former of which may precede the latter because of the urgency of the international situation, or will they be tackled and resolved as a single problem as logic and democracy would dictate?
Leaving behind the now contingent but nevertheless decades-long debate on European defence as an instrument in support of freedom and security, let us now return to Thomas Mann’s initial idea of militant humanism because we are convinced that the solution to the six questions we have summarised above cannot be contained in an appeal to a group of governments, however willing they may be, but in the mobilisation of public opinion and in particular of the younger generations to rediscover together the value of solidarity and justice.
The European response to Donald Trump’s ‘Make America Great Again’ programme cannot be the equal and parallel slogan ‘Make Europe Great Again’, replacing the nationalism of states with an unlikely and dangerous European nationalism with the idea of a sovereign European homeland that is bound to increase international chaos and conflict.
The way forward is rather that of a growing European strategic autonomy in research, in the development of new technologies starting with renewable and alternative energies and the infosphere, in social and environmental convergence as an objective to ensure competitiveness, in international cooperation with countries that export raw materials and labour, in lifelong learning and in intergenerational solidarity, knowing that all this requires a substantial multiannual budget financed by own resources and common debt to invest in European public goods and not in a set of national projects as happened with the NGEU.
Giving substance to a sustainable project of international governance and shared sovereignty – inspired by the 2030 Agenda – the European response to Donald Trump’s sovereigntyism and Xi Jinping’s imperialism must rediscover and relaunch the political and cultural value of the Ventotene Manifesto in its international dimension of struggle against absolute sovereignties.