The Misunderstood Macron

By Michael Brendan Dougherty

Friday, December 04, 2020

 

The American press cannot comprehend Emmanuel Macron. At first he was hailed by the prestige press as the savior of the liberal world order, the one that Trump and Brexit threatened. Now, he is seen as an authoritarian who has moved to the far right in a vicious campaign that threatens the human rights of Muslims living in France.

 

Both images were wrong. But maybe there is a reason for the translation errors.

 

Macron, who left the Socialist Party to form his own — En Marche! — was seen as a neo-liberal reformer. He is a product of France’s peculiarly rigid educational meritocracy. He is urbane, and childless. Unlike almost every one of his predecessors, Macron has no special relationship to the provincial regions of France, no terroir to return to for restoration. He’s a Paris politician with an enthusiastic base of support among French financiers who work in London.

 

So of course his defeat of the right-wing Marine Le Pen was over-interpreted as the triumph of sensible Blairism and Merkelism in one of the most important capitals in Europe.

 

But, in fact, Macron was always a little more illiberal than assumed. He was always going to accept limits on his economic reform agenda. And he did eventually give in to some of the Yellow Vest demands. France may have an unruly political culture of street protest, but one of the reasons for its unruliness is the fact that France has a weaker civil-rights tradition than many of its European peers. The line between protest and riot is pretty well-established in Anglophone countries. But the boundary between a demonstration and a revolt is a little blurrier in France. Macron supported making permanent many extraordinary policing measures that had been part of a state of emergency in 2015, a year when France experienced a wave of terrorist attacks. Macron has been tough on immigration, even berating migrants themselves in public. He has refused to take in migrants from Italy when possible.

 

Now he is misunderstood again. The Washington Post writes stories essentially blaming French racism for the Islamist attacks visited upon it. The New York Times has referred, in news stories, to his “tilt” to the right, and called it alarming.

 

In a weird way, the New York Times and the Washington Post are echoing the most illiberal and authoritarian critics of Emmanuel Macron. It is Turkish president Recep Erdogan who has said that Macron “needed mental treatment” for his supposed fear of Islam. Mahathir Mohamad, the former prime minister of Malaysia, amplified the argument that the French have brought this on themselves. After outlining the crimes of Franks going back to the Middle Ages, he asserted that Muslims have the right to kill millions of Frenchmen and women.

 

In fact, Macron’s view reflects a longstanding and growing worry among the French center-Left and Left that the state has allowed the growth of a “counter-society” within the republic, one that threatens French modernism, secularism, and women’s rights. Macron is not above calling out the responsibility of French statesmen for allowing this to happen, saying that immigrants were abandoned to the “ghettoization of our republic.” The French far Right’s typical objection saw all immigrants as a threat and sought to reassert France’s Catholic identity. Only in the past half decade has Marine Le Pen moved her party to defend France’s secular modernism, summed up in what she called “the beaches of [Brigitte] Bardot.” French secularism that was meant to contain a Church of the majority may not be well-adapted to confronting a minority Islamic community, but Macron’s attempt is aimed at shoring up a progressive society, not retreating from it.

 

Also, Macron may be misunderstood by America precisely because so many Americans see Europe in American terms. Sometimes this is the ignorant but admiring attitude expressed toward European welfare states, which are sometimes less generous than we imagine. Sometimes it is the warm, but condescending, view of Europe as an American adjunct, the junior sidekick in NATO.

 

But Macron is at least as vociferous about NATO and other global institutions as Donald Trump. In one of his recent, prolix interviews, Macron castigated those who just want to recommit to Europe’s standing as a cat’s paw of the United States. He said urgent ideological and political work needed to be done in “conceiving the terms of European sovereignty and strategic autonomy, so that we can have our own say and not become the vassal of this or that power and no longer have a say.”

 

He chafed at the power of America to sanction French companies that work with Iran, the power of the American dollar over international relations, and the contending technological dominance of America and China, with Europe not as a player but as a supplicant. In this Macron is articulating a desire of his predecessors — such as Charles de Gaulle — who rejected the overweening influence of the Yank.

 

Partly, our misunderstanding of Macron is due to our superpower status. Every great global hegemon has a megaphone that resounds around the world and is tempted to mistake the mere echo of its own political conflicts for the shouting on the ground elsewhere.

 

And that in turn tempts leaders such as Macron and German chancellor Angela Merkel to make some unsavory and perhaps unsafe attempts at balancing their relationship to America with relations to rivals such as Russia or China. This may be foolish, but it’s real evidence that the European soul has grown a little tired of American condescension and misunderstanding. Maybe it’s time to extend a little more understanding, and let the restraints in our relationship go a little more. Otherwise they may be cut off in a fit of anger.