This weekend, French President Emmanuel Macron ended a four-day state visit to China for talks with President Xi Jinping. Even as working-class opposition exploded in strikes and protests across France after enforcing deep pension cuts despite overwhelming popular opposition, Macron called for new, massive increases in military spending to build a European “war economy”.
French President Emmanuel Macron (right) and Chinese President Xi Jinping attend a meeting of the Franco-China Economic Council in Beijing on Thursday, April 6, 2023. [` Photo/Ludovic Marin/Pool via `]
Macron’s visit to China came in the shadow of NATO’s war with Russia in Ukraine and escalating US military threats against China over Taiwan. On the first day of the hearing, he asked Xi for help to “bring Russia back to sane politics” in Ukraine. Xi responded, the Chinese People’s Daily reported, by pledging to “work with France to urge the international community to use common sense and restraint to avoid measures that will further aggravate the Ukraine crisis.”
Macron’s visit centered on talks to deepen French economic ties with China and strengthen French and European forces amid rising tensions with Washington. Macron’s visit was accompanied by a massive delegation of CEOs from energy monopoly Electricité de France, aerospace companies Airbus and Safran, train maker Alstom, luxury groups LVMH and L’Oréal, and tourism companies. Electronic music composer Jean-Michel Jarre and his wife, Chinese film star Gong Li, were also part of the French delegation.
Macron has criticized the US policy of forging closer ties with Taiwan, thereby creating conditions for Washington to potentially end the “one China” policy and provoke a war between Beijing and Taiwan. According to a Chinese communiqué, Macron called Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen’s visit to the United States “regrettable” and officially declared his support for the “One China” policy. Macron returned to this yesterday in an extensive interview with the financial daily Les Echos on his flight back to Paris.
Macron said: “The question for us Europeans is: do we have an interest in things speeding up over Taiwan? No. The worst thing would be to think that we Europeans have to blindly follow along on this issue and adapt to the US rhythm and Chinese overreactions. Why should we follow a rhythm that others have chosen for us? At a certain point we have to ask ourselves the question of our own interests. … It would be paradoxical, since we are building elements of genuine European strategic autonomy, if we suddenly started following US policy in a kind of panic reaction.”
Macron called for France and the EU’s major imperialist powers to respond to growing tensions with Washington with a massive military build-up financed by attacks on the working class. He said: “For too long, Europe has not built that strategic autonomy that I am fighting for. Today the ideological battle has been won, the structure is in place. It inevitably comes at a price. … We’ve made cuts, they’re tough, we’re starting to see results, but at the same time we’re paying for what we haven’t done in the last 20 years.”
“As history accelerates, we must parallel it accelerate the European war economy. We don’t produce [arms] fast enough,” he said, adding, “The key to becoming less dependent on the Americans is to strengthen our defense industries and agree on common standards” for arms manufacturing in Europe.
Macron fears that if Washington prematurely provokes a full-scale war with China before the EU’s military buildup is complete, EU states could be left behind as “vassals”. He said: “If there is an acceleration of the explosion of the [US-China] Duopoly, we will have neither the time nor the means to fund our strategic autonomy and will become vassals, although we could be the third pole if we had a few years to build it up.”
Macron also hinted at his lack of confidence in the US dollar, which is facing increasing question marks after the Silicon Valley bank bailout and the US Treasury’s use of the dollar to impose sanctions on Iran and European companies operating there. As Russia, Brazil and other countries move to conduct their trade with China in other currencies, Macron said, “I would like to take this opportunity to insist on one point: we should not rely on the extraterritoriality of the US dollar.”
Chinese commentators signaled the Beijing regime’s support for the recent turn in French politics by publishing articles in the French press hailing Macron’s “independence”. China’s state-run Global Times published an editorial titled “Macron’s visit to China embodies the value of strategic autonomy,” praising Macron for potentially opening a path to a Sino-European alliance that balances Washington.
It said: “The Chinese people have always valued the strategic autonomy and independent diplomatic spirit that France has shown in the changing international landscape. At the time, former French President Charles de Gaulle maintained an independent foreign policy to safeguard France’s national sovereignty and interests. … It is clear to everyone that being a strategic vassal of Washington is a dead end. Making China-France relations a bridge for China-Europe cooperation is mutually beneficial to the world.”
While Washington is taking the lead in fomenting wars with Russia and China to preserve its global hegemony, Paris and Beijing’s proposals for a “multipolar” capitalist order to better defend their national interests are also relentlessly reactionary. Not only the politics of the imperialist leading power, but the entire capitalist nation-state system is completely bankrupt, as it was in the run-up to the world wars of the 20th century.
This is most evident in Macron’s policies in France. He governs against the people and, despite overwhelming popular opposition, imposes deep cuts in pensions without a parliamentary vote in order to finance an enormous military build-up. Indeed, in China, Macron publicly mocked the majority of French people opposed to his cuts, insisted his regime was “democratic” and then scoffed: “If people wanted the retirement age at 60, they wouldn’t have voted for me.” should. ”
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The “national autonomy” touted by Paris and Beijing is not the liberty and social and democratic rights of working people, but the freedom of the capitalist classes to wage war in pursuit of their profit interests.
This is particularly evident in the case of France. De Gaulle withdrew from NATO in 1965 amid rising conflicts between Washington and Paris over the US dollar and French suspicions that the CIA had aided rival factions on the French right trying to antagonize de Gaulle during the French War of Independence to assassinate Algeria. As these conflicts increased, France became the first NATO country to recognize the People’s Republic of China in 1964.
Tensions between the US and France have escalated since the Stalinist dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 deprived NATO powers of a common enemy. The material source of these tensions remained the struggle over the distribution of profits from the world economy. Barring a period of US-French tensions when Washington launched its illegal invasion of oil-rich Iraq in 2003, French imperialism has engaged in all major US-led wars of the post-Soviet era, sending troops to Iraq, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and beyond.
It is French imperialism’s rivalry with Washington that underlies Macron’s reactionary calls for a “war economy” funded at the expense of workers to build Europe as a “third pole” that rivals both Beijing and Washington.
Macron’s trip amid an explosive domestic crisis had both national and global dimensions. He hopes to use the services of union bureaucracies and pseudo-left groups to exhaust the strikers and get workers to accept that the cuts will eventually be over. Macron no doubt hopes that the rhetoric about French national autonomy, appealing to the chauvinist among union bureaucrats who look up to de Gaulle and his alliance with the Stalinist French Communist Party, would strengthen his support in the bureaucracies.
Significantly, Macron’s trip to China came after Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of the pseudo-left Unsubmissive France party, repeatedly criticized US-Taiwan policy and backed the One China policy last fall.
It would be politically suicidal for workers to entrust the fight against war to Macron and the Chinese Stalinist regime in Beijing. Macron is leading an increasingly dictatorial regime in France, which must be overthrown by a general strike by the working class. His trip to Beijing underscores that pursuing such a struggle also requires building an international anti-war movement of the working class, uniting workers in America, Europe, China and beyond against imperialist war and capitalism.
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