The New York Review of Books - USA (2022-05-12)

May 12, 2022 49

increase defense spending, for finally

listening to the French. “I told them

you can’t stay in this situation where

you are denying the geopolitical stakes

of the European project,” he said.

“[They] have to take on more respon-

sibility. Macron has been suggesting

this.”

The EU would appear to be moving

in Macron’s direction. Last month, it

ratified a “strategic compass,” which

proposes a “quantum leap forward”

in defense. By 2030, the EU will start

building a “Rapid Deployment Ca-

pacity” with five thousand troops, and

it will stage “live exercises on land

and at sea.” (Frontex, the EU border

patrol, which has been known to vio-

lently push back migrants, falls under

a separate bureaucratic category.) This

investment is intended to make Eu-

rope less reliant on the United States

for its defense, and many hope that it

will have a more cohesive identity and

purpose.

On a practical level, much remains to

be determined about how this auton-

omy will be achieved. First, there’s the

question of France’s place in the EU

itself. “France, in a way, is the biggest

obstacle” to European defense, says

Sven Biscop, head of the Europe in the

World program at the Egmont Institute

in Brussels. He notes that the French

have tried to push for cooperation of

forces, rather than their integration,

keeping them separate even when Eu-

ropean forces have to work together.

“Why not make a European cyber

command from the start, when we

have the chance, or a European drone

command?”

But w h at E u r o p e d o e s i s i n s o m e w ay s

bound by what France does. If Macron

loses, the picture may look very differ-

ent. Le Pen no longer calls for France

to hold a referendum on EU member-

ship, as she did in 2017. But much of

her presidential manifesto, which in-

cludes ID checks at the French border

and reducing French participation in

the EU budget, would be a de facto

“Frexit,” according to Le Monde. She

calls for a “European Alliance of Na-

tions” to gradually replace the Euro-

pean Union, and she would withdraw

France from NATO’s integrated mili-

tary command. She no longer openly

talks about modeling herself on Putin,

but her party was forced to destroy the

1.2 million pamphlets it had printed

with a picture of her shaking his

hand.

Her anti- European sentiments are

shared to some degree by most of the

candidates who came behind her in

the polls. Zemmour campaigned for

French sovereignty. Late last year,

when the Arc de Triomphe was dec-

orated with the EU flag to celebrate

France’s six- month rotating presidency

of the European Union, the Répub li-

cains’ presidential candidate, Valerie

Pécresse, called for it to be taken down,

claiming that it erased French identity.

Euroskepticism is not just a phenom-

enon of the right. Mélenchon shares this

distrust of European institutions.^4 At a

recent rally in Les Lilas, northeast of

Paris, electoral materials noted his par-

ty’s stance against common European

defense. “This crisis is also a reminder

that, militarily, Europe is subservient

to NATO’s objectives. The expansion-

ist policy of Putin’s regime cannot jus-

tify this state of affairs,” said a flyer.

François Ruffin, a filmmaker and

member of Mélenchon’s party, France

Unbowed, in the National Assembly,

concluded his remarks by saying that

even if Mélenchon won, his goals would

be impeded by lobbying groups, the

European Commission, and the Euro-

pean Central Bank. Those institutions,

he said, would have to ask for “mercy”

from Mélenchon. The crowd cheered at

this. It seemed that “Europe” remained

synonymous with many of their criti-

cisms of Macron—obscure, distant, a

system that puts elite interests first.

Although the EU may be putting

forth strong statements about the fu-

ture of Europe and its autonomy, not all

of these decisions are binding, as Bis-

cop explains. The EU has been trying

to “create a strong political framework

that makes it increasingly difficult for

the member states to do nothing” about

defense. But it cannot force them to co-

operate. “There is an obvious political

pressure today. We have terrible im-

ages [of Ukraine] in the media and the

whole population is watching and so it

is normal to have a reaction,” says Mar-

tin Quencez, an analyst at the German

Marshall Fund in Paris. Policymakers

now speak about investing in the con-

flict. “In a year or two, where will they

be and what will their policy priorities

be?” he says. “We’ll see.”

4.

The French traditionally have had lit-

tle love for Europe. “Remember when

we lost the referendum on the Euro-

pean Constitution in 2005? People

were not European,” François Bayrou,

the Pau mayor and Macron ally, says.

“They had the feeling that ‘Europe’

was only people who wanted to prevent

them from living [the way they wanted

to]. But Ukraine changes everything.”

Would the people in Pau stop caring

about what’s happening abroad if the

war dragged on? “Think again,” says

Bayrou.

The biggest agricultural coopera-

tive in Pau makes two thirds of its

annual profit in Ukraine and Rus-

sia. With dozens of people working

[in Ukraine], that’s a lot of fam-

ilies. The globalized world is no

longer a compartmentalized world.

He cited other companies in the area

that were seeing their work affected by

the war. Safran, an aeronautical com-

pany that supplied Ukraine and until

recently Russia, had a factory nearby.

The French oil and gas company Total,

he noted, also has a large presence in

Pau. The war in Ukraine, he said, was

not far away at all.

But Alain Vaujany, a former high

school principal who now works on

creating international partnerships as

a member of the city council, said that

looking abroad was not really part of

the local culture. Many of the city’s

partnerships with foreign cities had

ended during the Covid crisis. Still,

he suggested, the people of Pau had a

special affinity with the Ukrainians be-

cause the Béarn, the once- independent

region in which the town is located, was

annexed by France in 1620, just as Rus-

sia had done to Ukraine in the past and

is trying to do again today.

At Macron’s event in Pau on March

15, the Palois (as the city’s residents are

called) seemed mixed in their response

to the European question. Cécile, who

works in international development,

said she thought that Macron’s engage-

ment in Europe was a strength. Julien,

a young man studying cybersecurity,

who was voting for the first time, was

more drawn to the candidate’s manner

and presence: “I think he’s confident,

he’s serious, and he [talks] without

necessarily having a text in front of

him.” Julien works part time advising

the local governmental council, which,

he worried, could come under indirect

cyberattack.

Across the hall, Lucas, eighteen,

was also keen to vote for the first time.

He is in a preparatory class to study

to be an engineer—he hoped to work

in one of the defense companies near

Pau. Asked if he felt European, he said

that he felt “first of all French and es-

pecially Gersois because I come from

the Gers,” the département next to Pau.

He conceded that this made him “au-

tomatically French and European too,

but that comes second.”

Afterward, Macron was at the local

préfecture, talking to Putin. People had

gathered; some news crews were wait-

ing to see when he might come out. A

woman walked by and complained that

the poor in France were not getting the

same kind of treatment as Ukrainian

refugees.

Among those who were standing

outside was Luba, a Ukrainian woman

with a yellow coat and a blond bob who

has been in Pau for about ten years,

since she moved there after college to

improve her French. When Russia at-

tacked Ukraine on February 24, she

said, she had stood outside the mayor’s

office with her daughter. They decided

that if they stayed until 8 PM, Kyiv

wouldn’t fall. In the days following, she

founded an organization called Vesna

64, named after the Ukrainian word for

“spring” and the number of the local

département. With other Ukrainians in

the region, as well as Russians, she had

sent medication, baby food, and other

supplies to Ukraine. She was now help-

ing to organize refugees coming to Pau.

So far, forty- eight children and seventy

adults had arrived. She was happy with

the willingness of the Palois to pitch in.

While we waited, she got a phone

call: a group of four refugees would

be arriving the following Tuesday. She

told the caller that she would be able

to meet them at the train station. She

wanted to be able to reassure them.

Macron didn’t emerge from the pré-

fecture. “I had hoped that it would

be in Pau, with this phone call, that

war would end,” Luba texted the next

morning. It remains to be seen if Ma-

cron’s other initiatives will be more

successful. Q

—April 14, 2022

SKELETON

Streaming Netflix is the opposite of action, a nap

kept low-burning on the margins as if not

existing I don’t exist as if slipped from the yoke of life simple

lazy the hours pass until the active life, its people and tethers

ether-wisp into a faint of memory, a trace. The small art and craft of

talk, how did we manage it? Some things stayed the same, like our nostalgia for

Obama, like insomnia. Faraway places became more and more like this place.

Nights were felt as a stream of departures in the hive.

—Deborah Landau

(^4) See Madeleine Schwartz, “Bike Lane
to the Élysée,” The New York Review,
March 24, 2022; and James McAuley,
“A Failure of Imagination,” The New
York Review, April 21, 2022.
McAuley 46 49 .indd 49 4 / 14 / 22 5 : 41 PM