The Chinese leadership was delighted to welcome France’s Emmanuel Macron on his three-day visit last week, its enthusiasm fuelled by his robust message that France and the EU are not to be seen as automatically at one with the United States.
Macron’s departing message, in an interview with Politico and Les Echos, was a familiar Gaullist trumpeting of ambitions for France’s and the EU’s “strategic autonomy”. There was, uncomfortably for some EU partners, a deliberate ambiguity about who he was speaking for; he kept at arm’s length Commission president Ursula von der Leyen, also in Beijing at the same time.
Macron emphasised the need for the EU to develop independent capabilities that would allow it to become the world’s “third superpower”. The “greatest risk” Europe faces, he said, is that it “gets caught up in crises that are not ours, which prevent it from building strategic autonomy.” His message to President Xi Jinping, as the latter conducted threatening naval and air exercises around Taiwan, was “not my business”, and it provoked angry responses in the US, where it was suggested he was telling China to go ahead and invade if it wanted to.
France insists it has not changed its opposition to any attempt to unify China by force. Yet in reality Macron’s visit was less about Taiwan than about ensuring that American “decoupling” from the Chinese economy does not also become European. Von der Leyen was also talking about maintaining and expanding trade links but with more of an emphasis on “derisking” , a willingness to restrict trade in highly sensitive technologies where military use cannot be excluded or where there are human rights implications. Macron and Xi agreed joint commitments to a Franco-Chinese “global strategic partnership”, the development of civilian nuclear power stations, the transition to carbon-neutral economies, sales of Europe’s Airbus aircraft, and the promotion of pork exports. Europe is better served by carefully-managed engagement with China rather than gunboat diplomacy.