“Everything should be on the table in this situation,” proclaimed the leader of the Swedish Democrats, a member of the nation’s governing coalition. Similar views are being aired in the press. “The umbrella is gone,” writes one of Sweden’s largest daily newspapers, referring to the American nuclear deterrent, urging Stockholm to consider acquiring nuclear weapons itself.

This might seem surprising, not least given the long-standing Nordic reputation for gentle diplomacy. In truth, though, Sweden is an ideal candidate for joining the nuclear club, quite aside from the nuclear-armed opponent on its doorstep. Boasting one of the most sophisticated arms industries in Europe, a robust civilian nuclear power sector, and indeed an abortive scheme to build a bomb during the Cold War, Sweden has everything it needs to go nuclear — even though Nordic proliferation could be the death knell for the whole Nato alliance.

If America’s commitment to Europe no longer seems credible, the Nordics also can’t rely on partners closer to home. Certainly, the Nato goal of raising allied defense spending to 5% of GDP seems distant, while the continent’s stagnant economies, burdened by ballooning welfare schemes, show little appetite for higher defense budgets. Spain is emblematic of this attitude, with Madrid spending just 1.28% of GDP on its military. Calls to raise this level to 5% were dismissed by Pedro Sánchez, Spain’s Prime Minister, as “disrespectful”, and who instead pledged not to cut a single cent from welfare spending. Italy is in a similar position, while even France, the strongest proponent of European strategic autonomy, is unable to mend its bloated pension system.

In other words, the Nordic countries find themselves alone, menaced by a threat they view as existential. For most other European countries — with the exception of Poland and the Baltics — the Russian danger feels remote. Few expect Putin’s tanks to roll into Berlin or Rome. The Nordic countries, on the other hand, see Russia as a clear and present danger, and for good reason. Swedish intelligence has long warned of Moscow targeting Swedish territorial integrity. Norway reports that Russian aircraft have violated its airspace for the first time in a decade, that preparations for sabotaging its water system could be underway, and that Russian GPS-jamming is making an airspace incident increasingly likely. Just two weeks ago, Finland caught a ship suspected of sabotaging undersea cables in the Baltic. The pressure, in short, is rising, pushing the Nordics to consider more drastic security options.

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And internally, too, Sweden has reasons to go nuclear. The expertise accumulated in its civilian nuclear sector — control over the fuel cycle, reactor physics, supply chains — provides a solid foundation for military development. Another advantage is Sweden’s world-class manufacturing base. Unlike much of Europe, it never embraced the idea of a post-industrial society, and its defense sector is among the most modern and well-rounded around, producing everything from submarines to fighter jets. Saab has extensive experience with aviation, missile systems, and command and control; BAE Systems Bofors provides deep expertise with warheads, and explosives.

This engineering know-how dovetails with Sweden’s broader financial health. Of course, a military nuclear program is an expensive undertaking. Yet bucking the EU’s trend, Sweden has already increased its defense budget by 28% since 2023, with plenty of space for more. That makes Stockholm, alongside the other Nordics, financial outliers. They’re not gerontocracies laden with debt. Their pension systems, unlike those crushing Southern Europe and France, were prudently designed to adjust to changing demographic and economic conditions. Just as important, their fiscal health is stable. Financing a nuclear project would not be an insurmountable financial burden.

These economic strengths are also echoed elsewhere. In recent months, after all, Sweden has become something of a monetary safe haven, with a convenience yield lower than Switzerland’s. In layman’s terms, markets are eager to buy Swedish government bonds even at very low yields, effectively paying a premium to park capital in this famously stable jurisdiction. Borrowing to finance a nuclear program would therefore not be a problem for Sweden, especially if it shared the burden with the other Nordics.

As one Norwegian researcher bluntly declares, now that the US has lost the will to defend Europe, the only solution is a northern alliance equipped with a nuclear deterrent. Former Danish defense minister Jeppe Kofod has also proposed a Nordic defense union with the Bomb at its core. Commentators in the Swedish press are themselves discussing the idea, though whether Scandinavian jealousies can be tempered to create a joint nuclear umbrella remains an open question.

Yet perhaps the greatest challenge to acquiring the Bomb would be psychological. Sweden’s national identity is closely tied to pacifism, and Stockholm has long been an outspoken supporter of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). One could argue, however, that trading ideological commitments for national survival is not an unreasonable price to pay. Nuclear states do not fight with each other. As the deterrence theorist Thomas Schelling famously put it, the threat of the Bomb leaves something to chance, making one nuclear power extremely reluctant to roll the dice against another nuclear state.

All the same, the pursuit of a nuclear deterrent would be a radical development. The theorist of nuclear proliferation Jacques Hymans argues that it was not the NPT that prevented nuclearization around the world — but rather the absence of determined elites. Go-getting leaders like Charles de Gaulle or David Ben-Gurion are scarce. Still, existential threats, of the sort that Israel once faced, are precisely what inspire leaders to eschew dependence on a distant ally.

Sweden has an instructive record of policy independence. During the pandemic, for instance, it diverged from the Western consensus by rejecting lockdowns. In the Cold War, security concerns led Stockholm to explore the development of nuclear weapons. From 1947 onwards, the country’s ministry of defense saw the nuclear option as the most reliable way to stave off the Soviet threat. A decade later, the push for a Swedish deterrent accelerated as the military pressed for its development — most notably Supreme Commander Nils Swedlund, who despised political bargaining and viewed the issue as key to Swedish security.

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As Tony Jonter explains in his book on Sweden’s earlier effort to build the Bomb, political elites ultimately halted the project, which was opposed by the peace movement, feminists, and parts of the military. Yet as Jonter discovered later, it’s unclear whether the program was truly cancelled — or instead driven underground. Certainly, parts of the military remained skeptical about the effectiveness of the NPT and regarded nuclear weapons as a necessary backup. These rumors persisted for years. As late as 1994, The Washington Post noted that Sweden had preserved structures and components essential for producing nuclear weapons.

One can speculate whether a Nordic nuclear umbrella — perhaps also including Germany — is even viable. A similar structure has never been tried in the past, and the path of overt proliferation is probably a non-starter. Building a bomb in full view of the world would almost certainly provoke a military response from Moscow.

Yet as Sweden’s Cold War experience suggests, another scenario could involve following the Israeli model of nuclear opacity: developing a deterrent in secret while signaling its existence ambiguously once acquired, in a way that shapes adversaries’ behavior. Even here, of course, Israel could not have secured its own bomb without the tacit consent of the Nixon administration, and it remains an open question whether a Trump administration would follow a similar path here. “Immediately after the Cold War, one of the biggest instincts of the United States was to stop smaller countries from getting nuclear weapons, and that interest is still there,” says Sumantra Maitra, a consultant and expert on international relations. “I don’t think the Americans would be very happy to have Swedes with their fingers on the nuclear button, just like we didn’t want post-Soviet countries to have nuclear weapons.”

A third option, then, would be to imitate Japan. Over the years, Tokyo, through both official and unofficial channels, has made clear that it retains the technical capability to build a bomb, and the credible threat of nuclearization has been sufficient to extract firm security commitments from the United States. Latent capability, a so-called “technical deterrent”, could persuade Washington to provide the kinds of guarantees it now seems reluctant to offer.

De Gaulle once remarked that nuclear weapons make alliances obsolete. This is not quite true, as the Japanese example shows. Yet the Nordic pursuit of the Bomb would unequivocally mean one thing: Nato is just a façade, obscuring a reality of sovereign states with varying interests, defense constraints, and threat perceptions. Whatever happens next, anyway, the frantic fluidity of Northern Europe’s security environment means that the time to choose is now — if the choice hasn’t already been made. The rising threat level, coupled with the Nordic countries’ penchant for contrarian decision-making, suggests they are ready to follow in Japan’s footsteps. Either way, Europe’s future will increasingly be decided in its north, dog sleds or not.

In fact, argues Dan Wang in his first book, Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future, the two political rivals are very similar. Pragmatism, crude materialism, a can-do attitude, fascination with the technological sublime, and elites distrustful of “the people” — all these examples bring them closer than we think. And yet, after spending years exploring China’s technological rise, Wang argues that one key difference nonetheless separates the two nations. While the highest offices in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) are staffed with engineers, Washington is the capital of a lawyerly society — a distinction that could yet decide our century.

According to Breakneck, the rise of America’s lawyers begins in the Sixties. This narrative can be anchored in data. As Jonathan Rauch notes in The Growth of the Parasite Economy, the proportion of lawyers in the general population remained stable from 1870 to 1970. Then it doubled. This is precisely the period when, according to thinkers as varied as Tyler Cowen and Peter Thiel, the “great stagnation” begins: an erosion of America’s productive forces that set the stage for a retreat into virtual worlds and a narrowing of technological progress to advances in software.

A lawyerly society excels at obstruction. The dynamism seen in China is impossible in America’s vetocracy, which is bent on blocking any new innovation. Yet if the US lawyered itself into stagnation, China grew at breakneck speed. Since the Eighties alone, it has built the equivalent of two American highway systems. Its high-speed rail network is 20 times larger than Japan’s. Shanghai, where Wang spent most of his time in China, added between 2003 and 2013 as many subway tracks as the entire New York City system. This relentless pace is hard to imagine for Westerners. “When my parents emigrated,” Wang explains, “China’s economy was growing above 10% a year. If they had stayed in [their home town of] Kunming, they would have felt like they were living in a new city roughly every seven years — that’s how long it takes for the economy to double”.

The dominance of lawyers also shapes how the US conducts its relations with China. The so-called tech trade war didn’t take the form of export controls out of nowhere. Rather, Wang explains that “America reacted to China’s technological rise with a series of legalisms” — from tariffs and export controls to “investment restrictions from previously sleepy offices deep in the bowels” of government. This lawyerly approach had unintended consequences.

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For if it cut China’s leading tech firms off from their American chip suppliers, it ultimately encouraged self-sufficiency. “Beijing has long crowed about achieving technological self-sufficiency,” Wang tells me. “For the most part, Chinese companies had brushed off these enjoinders: after Trump, they grew more committed to self-sufficiency to save their own operations.” Washington went all in on a legalistic trade war, while Xi doubled down on filling the Politburo with engineers. In the end, the effects of this legalistic offensive on China’s technological momentum were questionable — if not the very opposite of what was intended.

According to Wang, meanwhile, concentrating the fire of sanctions on cutting-edge chips is misguided. This is a rare view in the United States, where what remains of economic dynamism flows downstream from data centers. But as Wang warns, the idea that progress in AI will translate into decisive advantage on the geopolitical chessboard isn’t necessarily true. “Beijing is always pursuing a portfolio approach to technological competition,” he explains. “They never target a single technology or industry. Made in China 2025 targeted 10 major industrial segments. While they catch up on AI, they are also doing everything that includes industrial robotics, advanced electronics, unmanned vehicles, and everything else that might be useful for warfare.”

Though the American establishment tries to convince itself that nothing is more important than achieving AGI before China does, in other words, Wang suggests that, from Beijing’s perspective, this race is only a sideshow — especially as “America’s weaknesses in manufacturing continue to deepen”. One is almost tempted to go further: Trump’s reindustrialization agenda is faltering precisely because investment pours into AI instead of manufacturing.

All the while, Wang argues that China’s engineer-minded elite consciously chose to reject “technology with American characteristics” — the “fictitious” economy of digital platforms and finance. What many commentators in the West assail Xi Jinping’s “tech crackdown”, then, the President himself interprets these actions as part of a contest between two models: the CCP’s effort to reorient the economy away from innovation in virtual and financial domains, and to ensure that the brightest students pursue engineering rather than careers in profitable but unproductive quant funds.

Despite all this, Wang remains an optimist about America’s ability to recalibrate. “There’s no reason that we cannot gradually increase the share of engineers or economists within the top ranks of the American government,” he says. “In fact, the share of lawyers in the US Congress has already steadily declined over the past century.” And even if there’s no way to escape the lawyers’ clutches, he nonetheless suggests that America’s legal culture can be shifted. When FDR ruled America, after all, lawyers were “dealmaker types” — ambitious radicals who built the Hoover Dam and rearmed for world war.

And if the US needs to correct course, the Chinese engineering state is not without flaws. In the Seventies, when an influential CCP rocket scientist returned from the West, he carried with him the blight of environmental doomerism. Convinced that the population bomb could destroy China, he persuaded Communist leaders “that population trajectories could be as firmly controlled as missile trajectories”. This was the beginning of the one-child policy. Hundreds of thousands of forced abortions ensued, along millions more sterilizations.

Regional officials had their quotas and hitting them became the only thing that mattered: women were handcuffed and transported to clinics where the children were ripped from their bodies. “One-child policy and zero-Covid are the expected outcomes of an engineer-run state,” Wang says. “The engineers were terribly literal-minded when they allowed a missile scientist to help design population policy, and then to order mass abortions in order to stop families from having more than one child. There’s also a literal-mindedness when they prohibited people from leaving their homes in order to halt the transmission of a virus.”

I ask Wang if such monumental missteps could impact the long-expected invasion on Taiwan. “For the most part,” he responds, “the literal-mindedness has been a restraint against miscalculations abroad. It is fully fair to say that Beijing has displayed little bellicosity for nearly the entirety of the past five decades. Xi in particular has displayed a considerable degree of strategic patience as well as a willingness to beat the occasional tactical retreat. So I expect that Beijing’s interventions will deliver greater suffering to its own people than to others”.

Over the years, we’ve heard much of China’s coming collapse. The narratives change, but the prognosis remains the same. Whether it’s the demographic slowdown, the crisis in the real estate sector, or, lately, industrial overcapacity, the commentariat’s pessimism may actually make Western leaders less alert to the scale of the challenge. Wang, for his part, is clear: Chinese technological momentum is unstoppable, and trade restrictions cannot halt it, as its industrial ecosystem is just too vast and displays extraordinary ability to adapt. The UN projects that within five years, 45% of the world’s industrial capacity will be concentrated in the People’s Republic.

Yet if China looks unassailable from without, there is something rotten in the state of Xi. The phenomenon of “rùn” — moving out of China to escape the unpredictability of the CCP — is an unmistakable sign of malaise. Some view this trend as limited to a particular slice of the millennial generation in major cities, squeezed by tanking real estate values and the influx of Gen Zers into the job market. Wang disagrees. “There are three groups of Chinese who have been obviously disgruntled by the regime over the past few years”, he says. The first are the wealthy, who resent having their businesses “smashed” and their properties devalued. Considering thousands of millionaires may have left the country in 2022 alone, it’s a fair point.

The second unhappy tranche, Wang continues, are “creative types” — “who have seen their art or journalism strangled by the censors, and who are hanging out in Thailand smoking dope.” But perhaps the most telling group are those Chinese willing to fly to Ecuador before crossing into the US on foot. “One of the most incredible facts,” Wang adds, “is that the United States was apprehending up to 40,000 Chinese nationals at its southwestern border in certain months in 2024”.

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How, in the end, to explain this unhappiness — as purely a function of economics or the feeling that the “Chinese Dream” is being crushed by the inhuman hand of the engineering state? “It’s hard to say how the broader masses of people in China feel,” Wang responds. “But I think it is still striking that many Chinese wish to take leave of the great rejuvenation that is undertaken in their name.”

There’s an irony here. If China is so strong as some describe it, then there is no point in competing. Yet if it’s ridden with problems that will lead to inevitable collapse, then we can just sit back and watch events unfold. Both perspectives converge on apathy. One of Breakneck’s merits is Wang’s ability to lead us back to the narrow path of realism. Yes, engineering states may instill pride with its capacity to build, but their lawyerly rivals are less prone to cruel aberrations. The first drains creative impulses out of society, the second stimulates them.

Even so, there is one area where nuance is a luxury America can scarcely afford. Capacity to build is decisive on the battlefield, a place without room for lawyerly deliberation. In war, hardware matters more than software. Recent years starkly remind us of this truth. The war in Ukraine exposed shortages in munitions production that would not allow the US to sustain a protracted conflict. For a superpower that protects the oceans in the name of free trade, the collapse of shipbuilding is astonishing: in 2022, China had 1,500 ships under construction, while the Americans had only five. The America of “Freedom’s Forge” — when broad engineering competence enabled total industrial mobilization to defeat both Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan — feels very distant now.

Still, Wang remains an optimist when it comes to America’s future. After all, China’s astonishing development is a reflection of strengths that America has lost, but may yet recover. He is far less sure about that third potential power: Europe. “On the one hand,” he says, “I see that China will deindustrialize Germany. China is moving into many of German industry’s core competencies, especially in the automotive sector, and we can see that its exports to China have been shrinking. On the other hand, I expect that American companies in finance, services, and tech broadly speaking will outcompete their European counterparts as well.” As for the Europeans themselves, Wang suggests, they’ll be left hawking luxury goods to our century’s winners, whoever that turns out to be.

The data confirms Sauvy’s warning: one in four EU citizens is now of retirement age, a problem echoed across the Channel. This demographic shift marks the emergence of a liberal gerontocracy, a system that quietly disarms many of the fears inherited from the 20th century. In a continent with fewer young people, those historically most willing to fight or revolt, the likelihood of wars and revolutions has diminished. But this same imbalance carries its own cost, forcing a retreat from geopolitical ambition and driving a reconfiguration of the continent’s social model.

Demographically speaking, Europe has long been shrinking. The EU’s total fertility rate slid to a record low 1.38 births per woman in 2023, while the share of citizens aged 65 and over has jumped to over 21% percent, a figure on course to pass one in three by mid-century. At the same time, Europe treated security as something that could be outsourced to the Pentagon. After the Soviet Union collapsed, the average NATO member’s defense bill crumbled too, to just 1.46% of GDP by 2014. Western Europe’s standing armies were cut almost in half, from 2.7 million uniformed personnel in 1990 to about 1.5 million by 2011, even as budgets for equipment and logistics have also tumbled.

Nowhere is the tension between geopolitical ambitions and demographic and fiscal reality more bewildering than in France. For if the country is leading the rhetorical charge for strategic autonomy, the numbers tell a starkly different story. Whatever he might claim, this isn’t Emmanuel Macron’s Europe — it’s Angela Merkel’s, where she warned years ago that preserving the “European way of life” would require scaling back social spending. In other words, to save the welfare state in the long run, it must first be trimmed. What defines Europe today is not the dream of positioning itself between the US and China, but the hard fact that the EU makes up just 7% of the world’s population and 50% of its social spending.

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Macron’s Gaullist rhetoric and Trump’s push to raise NATO’s defense budget to 5% are, to a large extent, related. Both call for Europe to become more self-reliant in the existential domain of defense. But neither Paris nor Washington have yet reached the logical conclusion of this line of thinking. For Europe to rearm, it must either take on even more debt, which it is in no position to handle, or else tear down the welfare state. Both paths are untenable, unless some form of upheaval makes them unavoidable.

France and Germany are the engines of European integration, and without their determination, strategic autonomy is out of the question. Berlin, however, has never been enthusiastic about the idea. When Macron called for the EU to build its independence, in a speech to the Sorbonne eight years ago, Merkel demurred. Genuinely European autonomy has never appealed to Germany, which stands to gain little from it except damaging relations with its main markets in Washington and Beijing. Just last month, Europe’s capitulation to Trump on tariffs was welcomed by Chancellor Friedrich Merz, who justified the unfair deal as “better than escalation”.

Could France ignore the Germans and steer Europe toward strategic autonomy? Here, Paris faces resistance not only from Berlin, but also the Mediterranean gerontocracies. Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez knows that strategic autonomy comes with an eye-watering price tag for Spain’s aging society, where nearly 60% of the national budget is devoted to social spending. He called the 5% defense spending target “disrespectful” and “unnecessary”, perhaps unsurprising when his government currently allocates just 1.3% of its budget to armaments. And, already, the gradual rise in defense spending has already led to cuts in education funding and workforce training subsidies, two areas where young Spaniards stand to lose the most.

In this, Spain enjoys the tacit support of Italy. Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has criticized the “Rearm Europe” programme — renamed Readiness 2030, it eases EU fiscal constraints to allow for increased defense investment — arguing that the funds should instead go towards border protection and cybersecurity. For its part, Italy faces similar economic problems as Spain, including a worsening housing shortage and structurally high youth unemployment, where a quarter of Italians are out of work. All the while, some 40% of the country’s wealth is concentrated in the hands of pensioners. No wonder, then, that over 150,000 Italians left the peninsula in search of work last year.

It may have left the EU almost a decade ago, but Britain is no exception here either. As in the Mediterranean gerontocracies, redistribution flows not from rich to poor, but from precarious youth to the asset-rich elderly. Britons over 60 now own almost 60% of the country’s housing stock; the homeownership rate for those under 35 has fallen to a meager 6%. It’s no surprise, anyway, that so many young people, right across Europe, view the future in bleak terms, postponing family formation until they can free themselves from economic vulnerability — a moment that, for too many, may never arrive.

Can France shoulder the burden of strategic autonomy alone? Even increasing defense spending to 5% of GDP would not fundamentally transform the country’s army. For decades, it has operated as a drastically reduced force, what one French officer has described as “Lilliputian in scale”. As it stands, the French army could defend a front line of only about 80 kilometers, roughly the distance from Dunkirk to Lille. No less important, France will soon face a strategic dilemma: expand its conventional forces or prioritize the modernization of its nuclear deterrent? Whatever it chooses, European strategic autonomy will suffer, as both elements seem essential to future geopolitical independence of the continent.

Then there’s that pan-European trend. Quite aside from these military considerations, and the apathy of its neighbors, the fact remains that France is the very epitome of a gerontocracy. Next year, the cost of servicing the national debt will exceed spending on education, even as the budget deficit has just crossed the €100 billion mark. These are hair-raising numbers, but in a gerontocracy, only one principle of political economy holds: pensions are untouchable. When Finance Minister Éric Lombard remarked that it was “illogical” for French pensioners to enjoy a higher standard of living than the average working-age citizen, for instance, he faced sharp criticism. A similar outcry followed a proposal from the minister of labor that pensioners receiving more than €2,000 a month should contribute more to the national budget. In gerontocracies, though, pensioners are the most powerful voting bloc. In France, they make up 40% of the electorate, and the logic of clientelism prevails over economic reason.

Here, too, things are ominously similar across the Channel. In Britain, the electorate over the age of 60 forms a larger voting bloc than the entire 18-34 population combined. And since turnout rates rise with age, this group ends up casting nearly 40% of all ballots. No wonder the infamous “triple lock” has become a political third rail for parties right across Westminster.

As for France itself, can a country where 70% of people believe their standard of living is deteriorating really commit itself to a thoroughgoing military transformation — especially when these fears are amply backed up by the numbers? As recently as 40 years ago, the average Frenchman was about as wealthy as the average German. Today, though, he is on average 15% poorer.

Even worse, the welfare state increasingly depends on contributions from the productive segment of society to sustain itself. One major method of extracting this wealth is through the heavy taxation of labor. In this regard, France ranks second-last in Europe: if you earn a gross salary of €5,000, your employer must actually pay €10,800. Nor is any of this helped by immigration. According to estimates from one think tank, newcomers cost France around €75 billion annually. OECD data paints a similar picture, suggesting that immigration does not, in fact, deliver a net economic benefit for the French exchequer. Public sentiment reflects these worries: 71% of French citizens oppose further immigration.

The wastefulness of the French system is slowly stirring anger among the productive class, with the internet an increasingly popular medium of dissent. The popular “Nicolas qui paie” (Nicolas who pays) profile uses memes to highlight the scale of France’s social spending, and the tax burden that drains the middle class’s income. “Nicolas” stands in for the average, middle-class millennial — his British peers prefer “Nick” — who feels he’s unfairly footing the bill. This frustration has been fueled by the breaking of a core promise of the postwar Western model: that children would live better than their parents. Gerontocracy, it goes without saying, represents the precise opposite.

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“Nicolas qui paie” gives voice to a generation squeezed by twin demographic trends: “le grand vieillissement” (the great aging) and “le grand remplacement” (the great replacement). It speaks for those forced to pay not only for one of the most generous pension systems in Europe, but also for the social spending driven by the EU’s migration policy. More to the point, this growing frustration brings Macron’s paradox into full view. Elected as the youngest president in the history of the Fifth Republic, he laid out his vision in a book called Revolution: yet he owes his rise to the electorate most resistant to change, what sociologist Christophe Guilluy calls the “protected class” of pensioners and public-sector workers.

Given all this, it’s little wonder that revolt is brewing. Certainly, disillusionment shows up in opinion polls, with barely a quarter of young French people saying they trust the democratic system. In the UK, too, 61% of young people believe that a strong leader unconstrained by Parliament or elections could “fix” the country. Taken together, such generational anger could reshape Europe’s political order. If young voters feel their voices carry little weight in liberal gerontocracies, they may look for authoritarian alternatives.

It’s clear, then, that Europe needs radical leaders willing to reverse the logic of gerontocracies, shifting away from draining the productive class to fund the grey electorate and migrants, and toward supporting the younger generation in building for the future. Reform must strike at the heart of liberal gerontocracies: overhauling the pension system; managing immigration; admitting only those who can strengthen the economy; cracking down on welfare fraud; and eliminating wasteful subsidies for renewables.

Yet cuts alone are not enough. The only viable path forward is growth. That will require deep internal reform — starting with the removal of EU trade barriers that, according to the IMF, act like a 45% tariff on goods. This must shadow an ambitious deregulatory agenda, one that challenges the bloc’s identity as a “regulatory super-power”. European gerontocracies may not notice what they’ve become, but leave things as they are and others soon will.

In practice, though, escaping Washington’s tentacles may prove hard. After all, America has reasons to keep Europe pliable, even as the terrifying strength of ICBMs mean the continent’s two nuclear powers may be reluctant to share. And though other states have tried to venture out from beneath the US umbrella, the White House can make or break a nuclear program — even if proliferation could ultimately create a durable balance of power.

European worries over their US ally are nothing new. France’s secret nuclear program was launched as early as 1954 — before Charles de Gaulle returned to power — as a hedge against the possibility that Washington might prove unreliable. Learning of the Eisenhower administration’s plans to scale back its strategic commitment to Europe, the then German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer also reacted with alarm, signaling through diplomatic channels that West Germany might be compelled to develop nuclear capabilities should American security commitments prove untrustworthy.

These days, though, the tenor of debate feels different: not least in the number of German politicians who have echoed Merz in calling for a pan-European nuclear deterrent. Former Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer is one example here; Manfred Weber, leader of the CSU, is another. Even the late Wolfgang Schäuble, a well-known budget hawk, suggested that Germany would be willing to finance a French nuclear umbrella. Over the Rhine, meanwhile, Emmanuel Macron has repeatedly proposed “Europeanizing” France’s force de frappe, a point also made by former French presidents including Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy.

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In practice, though, escaping the US umbrella is easier said than done. Consider technology. Unlike Paris, London’s atomic arsenal is not fully independent. British submarines carrying nuclear warheads must return regularly to the US for maintenance: the technology is essentially American. What further undermines the credibility of Britain’s deterrent is that, last year, a second consecutive test of a nuclear-capable missile failed.

There’s a broader point when it comes to weapons capable of annihilating entire countries too: sovereignty. There is an inherently national dimension to the bomb that de Gaulle clearly understood: it concerns the very existence of the state that possesses it. In France, after all, opposition parties are outraged whenever Macron hints at opening a discussion on the “European dimension” of the dissuasion nucléaire. The entire political spectrum, from Le Pen to the far-Left, believe it’s crucial to national sovereignty, and therefore can’t be shared. Extended deterrence, then, remains a liberal myth. In a potential nuclear showdown, Macron would surely not risk Paris for Vilnius, just as Trump would not be willing to sacrifice Los Angeles for Tallinn.

Nor is that the only way sovereignty matters. In 2023, the historian Sumantra Maitra articulated the “Dormant Nato” concept, which amounts to a coherent articulation of Trump’s strategy toward the Western alliance. Tellingly, Maitra’s theory only briefly touches upon the issue of nuclear deterrence. It advocates stopping Nato expansion and shifting the burden of Europe’s defense onto Europe itself. That’s understandable: with Asia now Washington’s primary focus, the Europeans must take care of themselves, especially as they have the resources to spare. Yet despite recommending disengagement, Maitra argues that the US nuclear umbrella would continue to protect Europe.

Maitra is the epitome of a realist, and must recognize that extended deterrence is an illusion. So how can this strategic ambiguity be explained? Ultimately, it preys on European naivety. The belief that America has existential stakes in the transatlantic partnership is deeply ingrained in the Old World. Take Olaf Scholz, who opposed discussions about a European nuclear deterrent out of fear of straining relations with Washington.

It is likely that once the war in Ukraine ends, Europeans will revert to their stubborn belief that they live in a low-threat world, trusting that if the worst occurs, America will come to the rescue. This is convenient for Washington, as it seeks to maintain control over escalation within its alliance system, even under a “Dormant Nato” scenario. Nuclear proliferation in Europe would disrupt this, neatly explaining why Maitra’s America First pragmatism includes the empty nuclear guarantee.

Not everyone is as naive as the Europeans. Every country in Asia understands that the world has become dangerous. Japan retains latent nuclear breakout capabilities, maintaining uranium enrichment facilities and tonnes of weapons-grade plutonium. That is enough to build thousands of warheads. For years, this “technical deterrent” has allowed Tokyo to pressure Washington into reaffirming its security guarantees while also serving as an insurance policy in case Japan is ever abandoned by its ally.

Though South Korea doesn’t possess plutonium, it is the biggest civilian nuclear player outside of China and Russia. For years, a majority of the population has supported the idea of an independent deterrent. The nuclear-armed North Korea and China’s growing aggressiveness have created a strong societal consensus on the issue. Keep in mind that South Korea is also the only non-nuclear-armed country to have successfully fired submarine-launched ballistic missiles. This fact, as nuclear proliferation specialist Vipin Narang has put it, “makes one wonder” about what Seoul could do under pressure.

Of course, open nuclearization would not only provoke outrage and sanctions, but also trigger a strong response from geopolitical rivals. For this reason, countries that factor nuclear insurance into their strategic calculations are likely to follow Israel’s path of covert proliferation. Isolated among adversaries, and thousands of kilometers from its closest ally, Israel has opted for nuclear opacity: while its bomb has never been officially acknowledged, its looming presence nonetheless shapes the actions of other states.

In Israel’s case, reliance on scientific talent and the principle of kdushat ha-bitachon — “the sanctity of security” — played a crucial role. The latter ensured that the Jewish State’s nuclear program remained above partisan disputes. While Europe may not lack gifted scientists, it is difficult to imagine the same level of determination and unanimity among its political elites.

But such resolve can, again, be found in Asia. Through the Seventies, faced with growing doubts about US security commitments, Taiwan launched a secret nuclear program. When Washington found out, Jimmy Carter ordered it shut down. Soon after, he terminated the defense treaties linking Washington to the island. Taipei was given only 24 hours’ notice, and was thrown into a state of total diplomatic shock. A few years later, Taiwan revived its secret nuclear scheme. This time, a defector revealed it to the Americans, who again pressured Taipei to dismantle it. Future historians may well regard this decision to be as important as the opening to China.

What Taiwan missed, in short, was the tacit support of the US. When Israel developed its nuclear arsenal, it dealt with Richard Nixon, who chose to look the other way. For their part, Nixon and Henry Kissinger did not view proliferation as inherently destabilizing. Instead, they differentiated between friendly and hostile states. Kissinger believed that, in the end, every regional power would establish its own nuclear deterrent.

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One can clearly ask: should proliferation be a desirable goal? The main argument in favor points to the Cold War, a period of “long peace” during which no direct conflict between great powers occurred. Many theorists argue that we owe this stability to the so-called “nuclear revolution” — the bomb fundamentally modified the behavior of political elites in nuclear-armed states. Even the most irrational leaders start to act with prudence when confronted with the awesome threat of total annihilation. “The very fact that war could be total, in the sense of destroying both sides, means that the conflict of interest cannot be total,” says Robert Jervis, one of the key thinkers on the nuclear revolution.

To rephrase, nuclear powers just do not go to war against each other. A case in point is Pakistan and India. Before they acquired nuclear weapons, many feared that New Delhi and Islamabad would destroy each other. Yet contrary to expectations, peace ensued. According to former Singaporean diplomat Bilahari Kausikan, this may be the path to future stability in Asia: ensuring a balance of mutually assured destruction between the US, China, Russia, the two Koreas, and Japan, effectively freezing the geopolitical chessboard. “This path will be fraught with tensions and even danger,” Kausikan has noted. “But the end result will be stabilizing for the region.”

Perhaps. But the future of the nuclear revolution will ultimately depend on the instincts of whoever is in the White House. The choice between Nixon’s bold pragmatism and Carter’s risk aversion will shape the world order for years to come, whatever Friedrich Merz may wish.

Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of the far-Left, declared flatly that giving Morton the post amounted to annexation of Europe by the US. Marine Le Pen echoed him, indignant at an EU “that does not work on behalf of the interests of the European peoples”. Geoffroy Didier from the centre-right Les Républicains, expressed astonishment that, at a time when the EU should be curbing the power of US monopolies in Europe, such an important position was being granted to their lobbyist. The Macron government was equally united in its opposition.

Addressing l’affaire Morton, Macron once again insisted that Europe needs strategic autonomy, as well as “intellectual autonomy”, arguing that the appointment of an American with ties to Big Tech “does not necessarily represent the most coherent decision”. The largest groups in the European Parliament also rallied around France and sent a joint letter to the European Commission demanding the withdrawal of Morton’s nomination and stressing that strategic posts in the EU should be reserved for Europeans. Objections to the American candidate were also voiced from within the EU itself, where five commissioners — including Josep Borrell and Thierry Breton — wrote a letter to President von der Leyen.

How did Morton unite a continent so fractious and diverse? Symbolically, because she represents a challenge to Europe’s attempt to establish civilisational parity between itself and America — Macron’s fabled “autonomy”. But specifically because she was seen as a champion of the American tech oligopoly. As Matt Stoller, author of Goliath: The Hundred Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy, has noted, “competition or consumers are secondary in Morton’s thinking. This is why the Obama antitrust authorities facilitated the dominance of big business when she was in the administration there.” He points out that it was during the Obama administration that Big Tech consolidation occurred and “Scott Morton played a role facilitating [it]”. This is also the reason, according to Stoller, why she did not find a position in the Biden administration, as she was viewed as not being assertive enough towards Silicon Valley.

Yet the affair can also be seen as a settling of scores between France and Margrethe Vestager, the Danish Commissioner for Competition who defended Morton as simply the best person for the job. According to Politico, Morton’s resignation has severely eroded Vestager’s political capital. And Paris already harboured resentment towards Vestager for opposing a proposed merger between France’s rolling stock giant Alstom and Germany’s Siemens Mobility in 2019. Following her decision, Minister of Economy Bruno Le Maire had expressed outrage that the European Commission would deliberately obstruct the emergence of “European champions”. Instead of defending Europe, he added, the Commission “serves the interest of China”.

Serious concerns remain that the next candidate for chief economist, an Austrian with American citizenship, Florian Ederer, will clash with Paris as well. He has admitted his own scepticism about loosening the rules around industrial policy and said “the guiding principle should be protecting competition and not protecting competitors”, even if it disadvantages European companies. This is the new division between Paris and Brussels: a division between the market-brain that still predominates at levels of the EU and the strategic realpolitik emanating from the Palais de l’Élysée.

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Macron's grand European delusion

By Krzysztof Tyszka-Drozdowski

For Macron, meanwhile, the fact that he was able to mobilise opposition against the American candidate is the first real success of his vision of Europe. But in doing so, he has extended the fear of loss of sovereignty to the rest of Europe’s leaders — who already live surrounded by headlines auguring continental decline. According to the IMF, the eurozone economy grew about 6% in the last 15 years, compared with 82% in the US. And crucially, not only is the Old Continent becoming poorer relative to the New, but the essential basis of sovereignty and strength in the 21st century, technology, is its Achilles’ heel: among the 20 largest technology companies, only two hail from Europe.

Does the EU have the means and will to resolve this? Or is its margin for manoeuvre limited only to symbolic victories, such as the rejection of Morton? The big, ambitious projects that were supposed to form the core of the EU’s technological sovereignty have largely failed. Like its unsuccessful Eurochip project and delayed and overpriced Project Galileo scheme, the GAIA-X project, supposed to provide Europe with its own online cloud, also seems doomed to failure.

The story will likely be the same with the upcoming AI Act, which is being suffocated by Brussels’ bureaucracy. The EU sees itself as a regulatory superpower and wants to shape the future of AI not by fostering innovation, but by imposing its regulatory standards on the entire world. There are many indications suggesting that, unlike in the area of internet privacy, the so-called “Brussels effect”, projecting European standards across the world, will not prevail. Instead, rigid regulations are hurting European companies, which are losing the chance to compete with their competitors from the US, China or even the UK. Last year, in one report, more than three-quarters of British start-up companies claimed that, if they were subject to the restrictions, the impact would either be negative or prevent them from doing business altogether.

So, while Macron can claim a symbolic victory over Morton’s resignation, it hides a deeper problem for the proponents of strategic autonomy, namely the lack of vision on how to accomplish it. Devoid of one, it risks remaining a mere slogan, little more than a manifestation of sterile anti-Americanism. In the early Eighties, Georges Suffert addressed the French in his book Les Nouveaux Cowboys, which stemmed from his observations of Silicon Valley. “I am going to tell you why you don’t like Americans: they play, they putter about assembling a world, and before long you will no longer know how to play in it.” The big question for Macron’s grand strategy after l’affaire Morton is: can Europe rule, let alone play in, this new world?

Europe, Maxence argued, was a myth “that was worshipped all the more strongly the more distant it seemed”. At that time, it was associated with Aristide Briand, who led five French governments after the First World War. A “United States of Europe”, according to this “Briandist” vision, represented an imminent future that would relegate conflict between nations to the past. Today, this vision is the political alibi most eagerly used by Emmanuel Macron.

Macron’s neo-Briandism is based, above all, on the belief in “couple franco-allemand”. But lately, relations between France and Germany have fallen into a crisis. The annual government consultations between the two countries, scheduled for the end of October, have been postponed until January next year. Yesterday, Germany foreign minister Annalena Baerbock travelled to Paris to try and recover the situation, holding meetings with her French counterpart and, unusually, Macron himself. But whatever their outcome, she will be unable to rescue a relationship which has always been defined by French foreign policy delusions.

Central to their discussions was defence co-operation — a key part of the neo-Briandist dream of “strategic autonomy” — on which a rift has opened between France and Germany. In March, under the auspices of the French presidency, EU heads of state signed a declaration in Versailles pledging increased investment in European defence. A stark rebuttal of this French vision came with Germany’s decision to buy F-35 fighter jets from the US, though there are signs of cooperation over the development of the new FCAS fighter jet system. Meanwhile, the project of a European anti-missile shield, put forward by Scholz, also disregarded the work of the French aerospace company Thales and its Italian partners on the existing Mamba anti-missile system. But perhaps the greatest injury was caused by the German proposal for “harmonisation of arms exports within the EU”, which would have meant a ban on sales to non-EU and non-Nato countries, depriving the French of important customers.

China is the other issue fracturing the Franco-German couple, symbolised by Scholz’s visit to Beijing earlier this month. He went in defiance of Paris, which not only intended it to be a joint trip, but also wanted it to take place later so as not to grant legitimacy to Xi right after his propagandising Party Congress. Scholz’s actions here should not come as a surprise. He embraces the vision of German businessmen, who believe that Germany needs China, rather than strategic autonomy. In the very first phone conversation between Scholz and Xi, they agreed that economic relations between the two countries must deepen. This direction in Berlin’s policy was further confirmed by the recent sale of shares in the port of Hamburg to the Chinese.

But perhaps nothing has undermined the myth of the “Franco-German couple” more than Scholz’s rescue plan for German industry. Its scale — €200 billion — has frightened the French and other European leaders, who fear it will further compound Germany’s industrial advantage. Paris’s anxiety stems from the fact that it does not have the resources to respond to Germany’s neo-mercantilist challenge. A source close to Macron stated bluntly: “they want to crush us”. Liberal philosopher Pierre Manent noted immediately after Macron’s election in 2017 that the French “want to marry the Germans”, and called this desire “strange”. If this behaviour continues, he presciently warned, France would risk complete economic, political and intellectual vassalisation. But the French subordination to Germany did not begin with Macron — it is one of the prevailing narratives of modern French history.

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A key step towards this vassalisation was the adoption of the euro. The terms France agreed to amounted to a gift to Germany, so determined was François Mitterand to draw Germany into an integrated Europe, whatever the cost. Oskar Lafontaine, one of the SPD’s leaders, admitted years later that the euro was a system that favoured his country’s economic power, as German-exported goods would have been much more expensive without the common currency. French elites believed that the monetary union would provide a magical incentive for structural reforms and saw the euro just as the Italians did: a vincolo esterno, an external constraint forcing them to adapt. They did not anticipate that the only thing they would have to adapt to would be Berlin’s demands.

France’s position vis-à-vis Germany worsened further in 1997, when Paris introduced a 35-hour working week. The then-Chancellor Gerhard Schröder described it as “excellent news for German industry” and, beginning with the Schröder era, German unilateralism and neo-mercantilism became explicit. A period of fait accomplis was inaugurated by the Hartz reforms, which Schröder did not discuss with European partners. Imposed soon after the introduction of the single currency, they tipped the scales of the eurozone permanently in favour of Berlin (although some do question their importance).

Again, in 2011, Merkel did not talk to her counterparts when she decided to abandon nuclear power, which “destabilised the French nuclear industry”, as pro-nuclear campaigners have put it. But the most striking example of Berlin’s unilateralism came in 2015, when Merkel single-handedly decided that Europe should open its borders to an unprecedented influx of migrants. Despite this, Macron remained a firm believer in the myth of the “couple franco-allemand”. During his first campaign, he promised reforms to restore trust with Germany, and travelled to Berlin on his first visit after assuming office. In 2018, during his speeches at the Sorbonne and in Athens, he went so far as to propose that the “couple” transform the EU into a tighter federation. Merkel, however, showed no enthusiasm for these ideas, never substantially addressing them.

In an interview with The Economist in the autumn of 2019, the French president restated his position, arguing that Nato was in a state of “brain death” and that the EU’s task should be to regain “strategic autonomy”. And more recently speaking to Les Échos, Macron repeated his credo: “I believe in the strength of the couple franco-allemand and in our ability to implement an ambitious strategy.”

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But Macron’s true attitude toward sovereignty is historically ambiguous, and undermines any of the grand gestures he makes. In 2010, when he sat on the Commission for the Liberation of French Growth set up by then-President Sarkozy, he proposed getting rid of France’s nuclear deterrent. “It serves no purpose. Germany doesn’t have it,” said Macron according to Marc Endeweld’s book, L’Emprise. And while today Macron considers reindustrialisation as inherent to strategic autonomy, over the years he has been an important actor in the deindustrialisation of France.

He is not the only culprit here, and this process began long before him, during the economic shocks of the Seventies. But it accelerated from 1995 to 2015, driven both by neoliberal politics and the myth of Europe. A case in point is Pechiney, world leader in the transformation of bauxite into aluminium. In 2000, as Nicolas Dufourcq explains in La Désindustrialisation de la France, it was strong enough to wrest control of its market through consolidations. However, the European Commission blocked these attempts and thereafter Pechiney went into decline.

A lack of assertiveness to protect Pechiney was accompanied by a particular intellectual climate among French elites. They had allowed themselves to be captivated by the ideology of “fabless”, whose main propagator in France was Serge Tchuruk, then CEO of Alstom. He argued that the days of industrial manufacturing were over, and claimed that a new age of post-industrial economy and society without factories was beginning, with companies only involved in design and production outsourced. Dufourcq, himself an entrepreneur and currently the director of the Banque Publique d’Investissement, argues that this had a deplorable effect: by the Noughties, Parisian elites were clueless about real industrial strategy.

This is Macron’s intellectual background. And he has followed its example: when he held the office of finance minister, Alstom was sold, the phone company Alcatel was bought by Nokia, Technip (an engineering and construction company in the energy sector) ended up in the hands of the American FMC, and Lafarge, specialising in building materials, became the property of the Swiss Holcim.

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The fate of Alstom is emblematic. It was one of the most important French conglomerates, the main contributor to France’s post-war reconstruction, whose extensive operations — from railroads to nuclear — can only be compared with Germany’s Siemens or the South Korean chaebols. Even before Macron was appointed finance minister, he piloted the Alstom case from his position as secretary to President Hollande. Back then, he commissioned an analysis from the US consulting firm AT Kearney, whose recommendation was to sell Alstom to General Electric. When minister Arnaud Montebourg tried to voice his opposition and proposed a partial nationalisation of strategic assets, Macron reportedly countered: “We are not in Venezuela!”

In 2021, in an act of contrition, he announced the repurchase of a portion of Alstom. The price the French will come to pay will be higher than what they sold it for. And this brings to mind Jean-Pierre Maxence’s other remark about Briand. He was praised, the French writer notes, for being capable, “but his ability consisted primarily in feigning victory whenever he suffered defeat”.

Macron’s neo-Briandist delusions obscure his underlying powerlessness. In 2018, IFOP conducted a multiple-choice survey asking who holds power in France. Remarkably, 54% of respondents pointed to the “financial markets”, while 49% chose “multinational corporations” and “the president” equally. The French public senses that the office of the president, despite the immense prerogatives with which the institutional framework of the Fifth Republic endows him, no longer commands the destiny of the country.

Contrarian sociologist Emmanuel Todd argues in his Les Luttes des classes en France au XXIe siècle that France has entered “a fascinating and fictional era”, which he calls “La Grande Comédie”. It has as much to do with real politics as The Phoney War had to do with real war. The main task of the French political system has become to organise fictions concealing the fact that the President has lost his influence over the course of national affairs. Judging by Macron’s recent statements about the Franco-German couple and Europe, the great comedy will only continue.

It began with sit-ins and protests of small, far-Left groups at Nanterre University on the outskirts of Paris. Their actions only interested a small minority of students. Everything changed on 3 May, when these groups met in the courtyard of the Sorbonne. Hearing a rumour that an extreme Right-wing militia was coming to attack them, they prepared to fight. The dean called the police, resulting in the arrest of several activists, including Daniel Cohn-Bendit. The brutality of the clashes took everyone by surprise. Simultaneously, a series of strikes occurred in factories. As the situation escalated, the government started to panic.

At the end of May, it tried to reach an agreement with the striking workers, but to no avail. President de Gaulle disappeared from the country for 24 hours. The government hung in the balance, but the General returned and dissolved parliament, calling elections for the end of June. Gaullists won in landslide, strikes and student protests lost popular support. They died out.

In June, Michel Foucault watching France from a perch in Tunisia, wrote to one of his correspondents: “From here it looks like a great mystery.” More than half a century later, there is no consensus either on the causes or on the meaning of those events. Were the students motivated by economic anxieties? Or was this a cultural revolution? The question boils down to whether the underlying cause of the youth revolt was precarity or abundance.

The baby boom meant that there had never been as many students in French universities as there were in 1968: 508,000 in the academic year 1967-68 — the equivalent number in 1950-51 was only 135,000. The worries of students in the humanities, who made up the majority of the protesters, was supposedly linked to the scarcity of teaching jobs available to them.

Louis Gruel, a Maoist who took part in the May riots, rubbished this explanation in his La Rébellion de 68: Une relecture sociologique. Not a single demand or pamphlet published in 1968, Gruel notes, raised the issue of the future of students on the labour market. The devaluation of diplomas came much later. When Gruel conducted a survey among former activists, none recalled that concern for the future propelled them to protest.

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By Krzysztof Tyszka-Drozdowski

France was not exactly on its knees economically in the late-Sixties. It was the second half of Les trentes glorieuses, a three-decade stretch of uninterrupted GDP growth, expanding by an average of 5% a year throughout the period. Full employment prevailed; the working class had seen its purchasing power increase; younger generations had every reason to believe that they would be better off than their parents.

In reality, only a small fraction of the young demanded a revolutionary abolition of consumer society and “putting power in the hands of the imagination”, as one May slogan went. In September 1968, the IFOP asked students what was most important to them: the revolutionary transformation of society, reform of the university or passing the exams. Only 12% of students prioritised the downfall of capitalism.

The pretence of a spiritual revolution against capitalism, however, deceived many Catholics. The intellectual wing of French Catholicism, from Maurice Clavel to Jacques Maritain, fell hard for the revolution. Students, claimed Maritain, were fighting on the streets because they were “systematically deprived of reasons to live”.

Revolutionary zeal erupted with even greater force among priests than among Catholic intellectuals. Around 1,500 priests abandoned their vocation in 1968. Monastery councils re-organised themselves; decisions would now be taken collectively. In one of them an old Dominican, a translator of Aristotle, asked permission to purchase the philosopher’s works. The council concluded: “authorisation denied, Aristotle is out of date”.

The philosopher Raymond Aron measured his own bewilderment in May ‘68, by wondering what would emerge from the chaos. He recognised the student’s criticisms of French society, but was alarmed by their failure to articulate a counter-ideal. Like the protests following the death of George Floyd, chaos became a goal in itself. As Martin Gurri described America’s violent summer of 2020, the protests of French students in 1968 were “an exercise in pure negation, in the repudiation of the status quo without an alternative in sight. At this point, the question of nihilism becomes impossible to avoid.”

Hollow philosophy followed hollow political action. There was an extraordinary outpouring of major philosophical works in France at this time. Foucault’s Words and Things (1966) and The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969); Jacques Derrida’s Writing and Difference and Of Grammatology (1967). There was Jacques Lacan’s Écrits in 1966; Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition (1968), and Logic of Sense (1969).

In La Pensée 68, Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut take a critical look at the thought that accompanied the May revolt. What strikes them is that “philosophies of difference”, as they were called, ossify after the rebellion into a new conventionality. They break with the style of French thought, rejecting its clarity and replacing it with a cult of paradoxes, while constantly striving for unreasonable “complexity”. The ideas of Derrida, Foucault or Deleuze by no means represent the fruit of French intellectual life. They borrow heavily from Freud, Nietzsche, Marx and Heidegger. French philosophy becomes nothing but a radicalised outgrowth of German thought.

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The Leftist movements that arose in May 1968 did not disappear. But instead of carrying out a revolution, they squabbled among themselves. Above all, feminism, which flourished as never before, came into conflict with Maoism. Feminists from the Mouvement de Liberation des Femmes (MLF) rejected the dogmas of revolutionary struggle as understood by Maoists. They founded their cause not on theories but on experience, supposedly more truthful than the concepts championed by men.

“The activists spend their time fighting for others, for workers or for immigrants,” says one feminist quoted by the sociologist Jean-Pierre Le Goff. “Let us talk about ourselves, and let the workers talk about themselves.” MLF-style feminism represented the culmination of the spirit of May ’68. It carried the demand to abolish the barrier separating what is private from what is public, to its ultimate conclusion. While revolutionaries assumed that the personal was irrelevant to the cause of the liberation of the proletariat, for French feminists politics begins with feelings. For many it ended there.

Decades later, we can begin to see the events of May as a larger turning point within Left-wing politics. The nature of revolution changed. It ceased to be a collective project based on economic considerations, pursued to change society. Revolution became privatised, reduced to the domain of inner lives. For the Left, this utter futility was compensated, in the words of the philosopher Régis Debray, by the “intensity of imaginary struggles”.

The ‘68 generation moved from Maoism to marketing. Guy Hocquenghem, 22 at the time of the revolts and a participant in them, observed that his former comrades swapped joints for cocaine, and scooters for sports cars. They created a “mafia” occupying the most important positions in French society.

“The eternally young,” he wrote, “‘the class of 68′, blocks with great determination the path for everything born after them”. They have turned contestation into a consensus that is neither Left nor Right, but gathers the worst elements of both. It is no surprise that in France, baby boomers and soixante-huitards have become Emmanuel Macron’s most reliable supporters.

Contrast Macron with Charles de Gaulle. The old general never defined Gaullism, but in his memoirs he described it as “an instrument of struggle and renewal”. The riots of ‘68 convinced him that France needed to reinvent itself. As Arnaud Teyssier has argued, de Gaulle’s response to the botched revolution on the streets was a revolution of his own.

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He ordered a referendum in 1969 which proposed major changes to France’s institutions. De Gaulle wanted to give the new, broad middle-classes the chance to participate more fully in the Fifth Republic. More authority to the regions; a new second chamber to replace the elitist Senate.

When the French rejected his project, the General resigned. He believed France had chosen stagnation. He sensed that without completing his proposed revolution, France would once again be ruled by an oligarchy of unrepresentative political parties. Only in the last five years has that oligarchy dissolved in the acid bath of its own contradictions.

By the end of the Sixties, the French, having flirted with revolution, abandoned the idea altogether. They did not want a revolution from the Left, nor did they want de Gaulle’s revolution from above. The young were as reluctant to change the world as to rebuild France’s institutions. They were focused on the present, and indifferent to both the past, and what lay ahead of them. France chose stagnation. The curve of decline, as Marguerite Yourcenar wrote, is complicated.

What is happening to France, as sociologist Jerôme Fourquet observed, is best understood as “the Great Metamorphosis”. Nobody has done more than Fourquet to peel away the misapprehensions that surround French society, and reveal what it is now, or what it will look like in the future. He is the sociologist of France as it is, not what it once was, or how The Economist or Financial Times wishes it to be.

“The Great Metamorphosis” began, Fourquet argues in La France sous nos yeux (2021), in the Eighties. That was the decade France’s cultural core began to collapse in on itself, and the features of French society in its present form began to surface.

In 1983 strikes and violent protests by auto-workers, mostly immigrants from the Maghreb, made the Muslim minority visible to France for the first time. Images of the riots propelled the Front National to its first significant successes in the European elections of 1984. France’s agonies over migration had begun.

Then, in 2005, French voters rejected the European Constitution in a referendum — despite its backing by most of the French media and political class. Here, Fourquet believes, a new divide could be seen for the first time, one that would determine political conflict going forward: between those who benefited from globalisation, and those who did not.

Against this backdrop of intensifying political discontent, French culture was changing. Older mores were disappearing, especially Christian ones, and Catholic ones in particular. Fourquet strikingly demonstrates the disappearance of the Church’s influence on French sensibilities. In 1961, 38% of French Catholics declared that they went to Mass every Sunday. By 2012, only 7% did. This sharp decline in the number of practising Catholics was matched by a shrinking number of vocations. At the outbreak of the Revolution, the number of priests, 170,000, was almost equal to their number in 1950. By 2015, it had fallen to 51,500. If the current trend continues there won’t be a single Catholic priest left in France in 30 years.

Released from this crumbling framework, French attitudes towards marriage, homosexuality, and children born to unmarried parents changed dramatically. In the Sixties, marriage was still the dominant social norm, but today it has ceased to be so. In 1980, 11.4% of children were born out of wedlock; by 1990 it was 30% and by 2005, more than half the children were born outside of marriage. If a teacher had started his career in 1980, he would have taught a class in which almost all the children had married parents. By the time of his retirement, however, that ratio would have inverted.

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The last stand of French Catholicism came when Francois Hollande legalised gay marriage in 2013. To an extent unseen in the United Kingdom, or Germany, or Spain, French Catholics mobilised against Hollande’s decision. La Manif pour tous marches drew tens of thousands of participants who disagreed with the new law, but to no avail. Catholics finally realised they were a minority, one of the islands in the “French archipelago”, as the title of one of Fourquet’s books goes. Dechristianisation, he believed, had entered its “terminal stage”.

Nature famously abhors a vacuum. As Christianity receded other forces began to influence French society. Emancipation from tradition led to individualism. Fourquet measures this in birth names: In the early Sixties, the number of newborns with rare names — those that had been given to no more than three people so far — was less than 6,000. By 1990, it had jumped to nearly 18,000. But the real explosion came in 2016, when as many as 55,000 newborns bore rare names. And the cultural component of Catholicism was replaced by American pop culture.

Americanisation, Fourquet writes, has profoundly transformed France. Although 27% of French people have visited the US at least once, every second person among the wealthy has done so. The upper classes are fluent in English — Macron voters were the most proficient in this language, while Le Pen voters were the least — and consume mostly American media.

The less fortunate have their own cultural markers of Americanisation. Again, Fourquet analyses names. The Maries of French tradition were replaced by Kevins (after Home Alone) and Dylans (after Beverly Hills 90210). The map of these American names coincides with the places where Marine Le Pen can count on her firmest support. Many National Rally activists bear names such as Jordan Bardella, today the number two in the party, or Davy Rodriguez, who headed its youth organisation. More phenomena of this kitschy low-status Americanisation include the immense popularity of country music clubs, vintage US cars, and pole dancing across France, as well the spread of the Buffalo Grill restaurant chain in hundreds of locations.

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Both the elites and the working classes began to dream American dreams. Fourquet calls one of them the “Plaza majority” lifestyle, after the name of the celebrity real estate agent Stéphane Plaza. In his TV shows, he advertises an ideal shared across French society: a house with a garden, a desire that mimics the American suburban lifestyle. Depending on the class, this ideal assumes different forms, but it often includes a swimming pool. This vision of affluence from America captured the imagination of the French, who have built 1.3 million pools in their country. Elsewhere, Fourquet says the last common experience of the “French archipelago” is a visit, or “pilgrimage” to Disneyland — 75% of those under 35 have visited the theme park.

Americanisation was the only component of globalisation that did not bitterly divide the French. According to Fourquet the split between those for whom globalisation meant achievement and those for whom it meant dispossession, would, from 2017, become central to understanding France. As in the United States and Britain, globalisation swept the French economy. As in the United States and Britain, its impact could have perverse consequences.

At the turn of the century, the French telecommunications manufacturer Alcatel had 120 different types of plants scattered around the country. One of them was located in Lannion. This is where Minitel was created and where the first French portable phone, Bi-bop, was invented. In 2001 Alcatel’s CEO declared that in the new economy factories were not necessary. Thousands of Lannion residents lost their jobs. Between 1999 and 2004 the city lost 10% of its population — then between 2004 and 2017 it fell by another 20%.

What happened to Lannion residents? They dropped out of the middle class, which was everywhere being reshaped by “the Great Metamorphosis”. It led to a phenomenon that Fourquet calls “bipolarisation”; society begins to resemble an hourglass. The middle class disintegrates, its lower strata falling into the lower classes and its upper strata ascending into the upper classes.

This process can be seen in leisure activities. The Trente Glorieuses were a time of upward social mobility, which translated into democratisation of ski slopes. While it used to be that entire middle class families went skiing, today skiing has become an activity that only the well-off can afford. The appearance of hard discount stores represents another sign of the erosion of the middle class. Its less affluent members cannot afford to maintain their consumption habits. This also, as Fourquet points out, explains the ominous success of Dacia cars. This Romanian brand, bought out by Renault, was originally intended as a way to expand into Eastern European markets. However, Dacia has enjoyed great popularity in France, allowing those who otherwise would have to turn to a used car to buy a new one.

Dacia drivers in the new France were more likely to work in warehouses, schools, and nursing homes than factories. It was these workers who became the backbone of the Gilets Jaunes movement. The protestors were the people who Fourquet had studied for decades; “the proletariat working in logistics and services”, and those who juggled several jobs to make ends meet. Jacline Mouraud, a Gilets Jaunes in the protest delegation which met with the French government, simultaneously worked as a hypnotherapist, an accordionist, and a security guard. Fourquet sees the Gilets Jaunes as an example of the “subaltern class” once described by Gramsci. Similar to the farmers of the Italian Mezzogiorno, constantly agitated, but unable to articulate their grievances successfully.

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In Fourquet’s work we can see the patterns that have come to define modern France. The detachment of the elites from their country; the splintering of the middle-class; the collapse of centuries old traditions. His analyses clarify French politics. A Fourquet reader might have predicted Eric Zemmour’s failure to pick up the Rassemblement National vote over the weekend. The electorate of Kevins who sing country music and enjoy Buffalo Grill belongs to a different universe than the de Maistre-quoting essayist from Paris who recorded his best results in Saint-Tropez.

Without Fourquet’s writings, it can be difficult to grasp that the run-off between Macron and Le Pen is more than a political battle. It is a clash between two worlds within France, between the two halves of Fourquet’s hourglass. A confrontation, as Disraeli once wrote of a divided England, of “two nations, between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets.”

What will France be after France? Fourquet warned that the islands of the French archipelago will continue to drift apart. Stark differences in consumption, lifestyles, mobility, and wealth would only sharpen. He believed there were two ways to end this fragmentation. A new electoral system, based on proportional representation. And a final abandonment of France’s old Left-Right divide, and the acceptance of a new politics, contested on one side by the winners of globalisation, with the losers on the other side.

Proportional representation seems a distant prospect. But on Sunday, France, where politics had been structured for over half a century around two parties, changed dramatically. The socialists were irrelevant by 2017. Now Les Républicains cannot even obtain 5% of the vote. In the run-off, for the second time in a row, we will witness a showdown between the candidate of France for whom the future and globalisation mean the same thing and the candidate of France for whom globalisation means decline. French politics has finally come to represent the society described by Fourquet.