The EPC Is a Good Idea, but It Will Not Succeed If the Europeans Continue to Be So Naive Toward America.

The American obsession has never changed: to prevent Europeans from coming together without them.

At the very moment when a European summit was held in Prague to launch the 44-country strong European Political Community, many leaders in the world would like to do away with the European Union.

Vladimir Putin's Russia, first of all, for whom the European Union is a counter-model and a hope for its people. Xi Jinping's China would like to get rid of a cumbersome economic rival and a political agitator who denounces its turpitude. The United States, which has always regarded the European project with skepticism and hostility and to whom the war in Ukraine has given wings, pushed them to go so far as to incite German industrialists to move their factories to the United States, where energy is structurally cheaper - any opportunity is good to weaken a competitor.

The United Kingdom would see the dismantling of the European Union as the ultimate justification for Brexit, and the return of the possibility of resuming its centuries-old game of balance between continental countries. Let us not forget also the populist forces in Poland, Hungary, Italy in France, and Germany. On the far right, and the far left, everywhere everyone dreams of socialism, or nationalism, in a single country …

At the same time, conversely, more countries than ever dream of becoming members, from Albania to Ukraine, from Armenia to Serbia. Many of them, including Ukrainians and Moldovans, were even present at the European summit in Prague on October 6, 2022, to discuss a European Political Community, larger than the European Union, dedicated to political and military collaborations.

Emmanuel Macron's idea is right: we cannot wait to bring these countries, which are so threatened, into the European fold that they will have to go through the decades required by the pre-accession and accession procedures. Similarly, we cannot accelerate the accession of some without admitting all of them, i.e. ten countries, further blocking the community institutions, where almost all important decisions are taken by unanimity. A new, more flexible institution would therefore be welcome. But we should not forget that this is exactly what was tried, in vain, in 1989.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the collapse of the Warsaw Pact and Comecon, the twelve members of the European Union were faced with the same dilemma as today: enlarge as quickly as possible? To whom? To try to avoid a too massive, and too fast, enlargement, which would have killed the then still fragile euro project, France launched two ideas: a European Bank of Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) and a European Confederation.

The Americans did everything, successfully, to kill these two projects. The dates are worth remembering: on September 6, 1989, François Mitterrand proposed the creation of a Bank common to all the member countries of the European Union and Comecon; and on December 31 of the same year, he proposed the creation of a European Confederation bringing together all the countries of Western and Eastern Europe in a new political institution.

The Europeans approved of France's idea. But the Americans did everything they could to distort these two institutions by opening them up to all the member countries of the OECD, including, of course, themselves. When the EBRD was created in June 1991, the Americans were all-powerful. That same month of June 1991, the founding meeting of the confederation in Prague was, in the same way, distorted by the presence of the Americans, Canadians, and Japanese. The European confederation project was stillborn, while the EBRD gradually lost its specificity as a unifying institution for the two parts of Europe.

Today, nothing has changed. Still the same American obsession: to prevent the Europeans from coming together without them. As long as the main European countries have not understood that the United States never acts, as is normal, according to its sole strategic interests, no European political project will make sense.