From Foreign Policy, November 21:
Argument
An expert's point of view on a current event.
The Franco-German Motor Is on Fire
One day during the 1990s, former European Commission official Riccardo Perissich, an Italian citizen, bumped into then-European Commissioner Manuel Marín in a corridor of their office building in Brussels. Clearly upset by something, the commissioner, a Spaniard, said to him: “Riccardo, do you know what you are? You are a question.” When Perissich looked puzzled, Marín went on: “Only the French and Germans are allowed to have problems in this place. The British are allowed to have difficulties from time to time. The rest of us are only allowed to have questions.”
Perissich, now retired, recently brought up this anecdote when describing the importance of a well-functioning Franco-German relationship for the European Union. As he indicated, there is a lot of friction between France and Germany at the moment. Germany stands accused of behaving in an un-European manner with its large national energy subsidy packages for citizens and industry, its continued unilateral deal-making with China, and its insufficient financial and material support for Ukraine. It’s so bad that a joint parliamentary meeting was canceled in October. Perissich points out, however, that in the EU there are almost always problems between France and Germany. And solving them often has priority over solving other countries’ problems.
A large part of the current Franco-German friction is therefore unsurprising. But there is a deeper malaise, too, between the two countries—more worrying because it may be more difficult to solve.
Franco-German frictions have indeed been normal in postwar Europe, and for a simple reason. Before European unification started in the 1950s, Germany and France, rivaling for power on the continent, fought three major wars—from 1870 to 1871, from 1914 to 1918, and from 1939 to 1945—in which millions of people lost their lives and much of Europe was destroyed. This is why European unification focused on managing conflicts between those two powerful countries and not on, say, those involving Luxembourg or Denmark. Part of the European Union’s mission to this day is to ensure that France and Germany keep solving their problems peacefully. For 70 years, the two countries—with their different political and economic cultures, rarely agreeing on anything—have not fired a single shot at each other. In today’s Europe, they shoot with words, not ammunition.
For seven decades, it has worked—even though, as Perissich writes, those who come from other EU countries often look at the frequent Franco-German squabbles “with a mixture of hope, irritation, and also frustration at not actually being able to participate in them.”....
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