Last week, President Emmanuel Macron delivered a widely anticipated speech — not in Granada or Kyiv, as his team had hinted in previous months, but in the same amphitheatre of Sorbonne University where he gave an address in 2017. This is also where, in 1882, the historian Ernest Renan delivered a famous lecture, “What is a Nation?” amid France’s struggle with territorial loss and the emergence of a hard-edged Germanic definition of nationhood.
Renan concluded that nations, like people, were not eternal and predicted that on this continent they would be replaced by a European confederation. Echoing this sentiment, Macron warned that Europe, too, may not be eternal and faces the possibility of demise.
To counter this threat, he laid out an impressive set of big ideas and technical proposals. However, he failed to articulate a clear strategy or grand bargain to unite the rest of Europe behind his vision. He said the world order was now openly challenged by China and the US, both intent on confrontation and ready to undermine the global multilateral system. This is a profound challenge for the old continent.