As Trump and Putin menace Europe, I say this: vive le Churchillo-Gaullisme!

The Guardian

15-03-2025

Should we all be Gaullists now? In the language of France's most important European partner, the answer is 'Jein!' (a German word combining ja for yes and nein for no). Yes, Emmanuel Macron has been right to warn us ever since he became France's president in 2017 that, discerning a long-term trend of US disengagement, Europe should be ready to defend itself. Now, confronted with Donald Trump, a rogue US president putting in question an 80-year-old American commitment to the defence of Europe against Russia, lifelong Euro-Atlanticists like me must acknowledge that we need not just a Europe with more hard power – something for which I have always argued – but also the real possibility of European 'strategic autonomy'. Oui, Monsieur le Président, you were right.
Yet en mȇme temps (at the same time), to deploy Macron's signature trope, we should answer 'Non'. For De Gaulle, a great man of his time, believed that defence should be the exclusive province of the nation state; that the emerging European Community should be a Europe of states (a disunited version of the European Union to which today's hard-right populist nationalist parties dream of returning); that Britain should be excluded from the European project (hence his famous 'Non!' to British membership in that emerging community); and that Europe should be constructed as a counterweight to the US, having close relations with Russia and China.
Above all, though, any realistic plan for defending ourselves against Vladimir Putin's Russia must start with the only serious military organisation in Europe today, which is Nato. This is where you find the assigned, trained and interoperable forces from all European Nato countries, the command and control, the complex coordinated air operations, the detailed plans for an allied reaction force to rush to the defence of the eastern frontier and a credible ladder of (mainly American) nuclear deterrence. The EU has nothing remotely comparable. History might have been different if the original idea to build a more integrated Europe around defence had not been killed by the votes of Gaullists (and communists) in the French national assembly in 1954. For as De Gaulle's biographer Julian Jackson reminds us, he 'attacked no supranational organisation more ferociously than the abortive European Defence Community'.
So whatever your original ideological preference, Gaullist or Atlanticist, if you're serious about the defence of Europe, you start from Nato – and then see how we can Europeanise it as fast as possible. But equally, faced with the radical unreliability of Trump, we do need to think afresh about extending the reach of French and British nuclear deterrence. The EU is now becoming a significant player in the field of defence, especially in supporting Ukraine and for defence procurement. And because the EU and Nato both contain Putin-friendly blockers such as Hungary's Viktor Orbán, some of the cutting-edge defence commitments will require 'coalitions of the willing' like that for Ukraine on which the British prime minister, Keir Starmer, has been working closely with the French president.
A former French minister for Europe, Clément Beaune, tweeted a photo of the improvised meeting of European, Turkish and Canadian leaders that Starmer convened in London with the three words 'Les États unis' (the united states). But there's all the difference in the world between being 'united states' and being the United States, les États-Unis – a single state capable of deploying huge lethal power on a single executive decision. So the challenge for Europe is to make a rapid, coherent, credible transition from the security we have enjoyed for almost 80 years, in a US-dominated alliance, to a Europe without a single hegemon that is nonetheless capable of defending itself against the most aggressive great power. That's a tall order. To be a non-hegemonic great power in product regulation or trade policy is one thing; doing it in the hardest area of hard power, the one that calls on young men and women to sacrifice their lives, is quite another.
There are three major obstacles to achieving this ambitious but now existential goal. The first is the hugely disparate historical self-understandings of European countries when it comes to national security. In an international crisis, every British prime minister thinks they should be Winston Churchill and every French president, De Gaulle. The national role models of other European leaders are less clear cut – the postwar chancellor Konrad Adenauer for Germany? The inter-war Marshal Józef Piłsudski for Poland? The 1990s 'hour of Europe' foreign minister Jacques Poos for Luxembourg? – but their strategic instincts and cultures are equally diverse.
The approach Europe needs is therefore Churchillo-Gaullism, combining the best of our continent's two most influential traditions when it comes to a world at war. That's a formula to which not just Macron and Starmer but perhaps even a majority of European leaders may subscribe.
Second, the policies we need are European but our democratic politics are still national. Behind last week's headline figure of the EU devoting €800bn to defence is actually just €150bn of complicated European funding. The bulk of the headline figure is merely a licence for individual member states to spend another €650bn in aggregate. Every national leader announcing increased defence spending explains how this will create jobs in their own country. Yet, besides more arms production, Europe desperately needs its rationalisation and consolidation. Europe has about 170 major weapon systems compared with about 30 for the US. Consolidation would mean agreeing that this kind of fighter plane should be produced in, say, Italy and Sweden, closing a factory in France, while that sort of air defence system should be produced in France and Britain, closing a factory in Germany. Imagine how easy that will be.
All this when most European countries are heavily indebted and their ageing populations are crying out for increased expenditure on health, social care, pensions and so on. This brings us to the last obstacle, which is perfectly captured in something Churchill said to De Gaulle when the latter awarded him the Croix de la Libération (Liberation Cross) in 1958. Contrasting the complicated challenges of the 1950s with the single clear objective of their wartime partnership, Churchill observed, 'It is harder to summon, even among friends and allies, the vital unity of purpose amidst the perplexities of a world situation which is neither peace nor war.' That's exactly where we are now, somewhere between peace and war.
As we have seen in recent days, at the first sign of the possibility of a ceasefire in Ukraine our publics are desperate to believe that we can quickly revert to our old post-1989 peacetime ways. It is now the duty of European leaders not just to rekindle the fighting spirit of Churchill and De Gaulle but also to explain honestly to voters that we face another long struggle – and if we really want peace we must prepare for war. So I say: Vive l'Europe! Vive le Churchillo-Gaullisme!
Timothy Garton Ash is a historian, political writer and Guardian columnist