Germany and France are pooling sovereignty. Where does that leave Britain?
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The Treaty of Aachen will be signed by President Macron and Chancellor Merkel on January 22. Depending on your standpoint, it may either be a defiant riposte to the menace of nationalism, or the European Union’s last hurrah. It promises a new level of Franco-German sharing of sovereignty, thereby establishing a model for a future United States of Europe.
The Treaty will break new ground on joint diplomatic and military missions, as well as cross-border cooperation in energy, health, business, environment and transport. Joint councils of experts will guide economic, defence and security policy.
France, which after Brexit will be the EU’s sole remaining permanent member of the UN Security Council, is committed to lobby for Germany to be given similar status — a long-term goal of Berlin’s foreign policy. This is the price for Mrs Merkel endorsing a treaty that delivers Macron’s election promise to revive the EU’s goal of ever-closer union.
The Aachen Treaty, signed in the symbolic city which was once Charlemagne’s seat of government, is not unprecedented. Konrad Adenauer and Charles de Gaulle signed the Élysée Treaty in 1963, which put an end to centuries of mutual hostility. Successive French and German statesmen, from Giscard d’Estaing and Helmut Schmidt to Helmut Kohl and François Mitterrand, have made grand gestures in the name of Franco-German unity. The relationship has often been described as the “locomotive” or “engine” of European integration; the euro, for example, would have been inconceivable without it.
Yet many other EU member states resent the way in which Paris and Berlin often take the lead and present the others with a fait accompli. The southern “Club Med” countries and the eastern Visegrad bloc both seek to provide counterweights to Franco-German control — usually without success. This latest attempt to present a unified liberal front against the rise of populist parties across the EU throws down a gauntlet which will doubtless be picked up by those who hate the Macron-Merkel vision.
Here in Britain the Aachen Treaty cuts both ways. Those who are engaged in a last-ditch bid to stop Brexit will cite the Franco-German example as one to follow: why should the British be excluded from such experiments in pooling sovereignty? Surely it makes sense to cooperate on issues of common concern, including migration (which the Aachen Treaty tiptoes around). If Europe is heading in a federalist direction, they will say, then Britain needs to be closely aligned with it — for example by remaining within the single market and customs union.
Brexiteers, by contrast, will see in Aachen a sign that the EU and the UK are on fundamentally divergent paths. There is no way that even the most Europhile British government could sign up to a federal treaty that diluted sovereignty on every major issue. Such a renunciation of independence, they will argue, really would be, in Hugh Gaitskell’s words, “the end of Britain as an independent nation-state…the end of a thousand years of history”.
As Parliament debates the Withdrawal Treaty this week, is it too much to expect that MPs should glance across the Channel to the ancient cathedral of Aachen, where the idea of Europe may be said to have emerged? There they will see the two other great nation states of our Continent joining forces. But they do so as nation states: the Treaty of Aachen is bilateral, not European. The British should take heart from this fact. The nation state is still the driving force of politics. Everything else flows from the physical and spiritual forces that these great powers, the French and the Germans, represent. We British should have just as much confidence in our own ability to shape events on a European and global scale.
