The scale and speed of this geopolitical shift was captured by the incoming German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, when, responding to his party’s victory at the weekend, declared that his priority would be to “achieve independence from the US”. Once the archetype of a solid West German realist, Merz declared that Trump’s behavior had left Europe with little choice. Two days previously, the CDU leader had even argued that Germany needed to begin discussions with Britain and France about “nuclear sharing” because the US could no longer be relied upon.

Nor is Britain quite as allergic as it once was to such talk. Following the emergency summit called by Emmanuel Macron last week to discuss the Trump administration’s opening of peace talks with Russia, Keir Starmer declared that Europe could no longer “cling to the comforts of the past”; it needed to take responsibility for its own security.

In Paris, were it not for France’s own political crisis, there might have been a sense of delayed gratification. For as early as 1962, de Gaulle had been clear about the purpose of what was then the Common Market. “What is the point of Europe?” the general asked. “The point is that one is not dominated by either the Russians or the Americans.” And so it seems today.

Suggested reading

Germany is stuck in a centrist trap

By Wolfgang Munchau

For most of the French presidents who followed de Gaulle, this central vision remained the unrealized — but axiomatic — purpose of what became the EU. In one of his first major interventions after being elected in 2017, Macron called for the continent to rapidly carve out its own autonomy from the US. “We cannot blindly entrust what Europe represents [to] the other side of the Atlantic,” he declared, only to be mocked for his apparent naivety. Macron claimed that the central reality Europe needed to face up to was the “gradual and inevitable disengagement by the United States” from the continent, which, in turn, demanded Europe develop its own “autonomous operating capabilities”.

If anything, Macron’s speech has proved too timid. Back in 2017, he was calling for an autonomous European force capable of “complementing” NATO. Today, Germany’s Merz is questioning whether the trans-Atlantic alliance even exists in practical terms any longer.

The appeal of the Gaullist argument always lay in its apparent moral clarity and dignity. As Thomas Paine might have put it: There is something absurd in supposing a continent be perpetually governed by an Empire on the other side of the ocean. Perhaps, but the problem has never really been one of morality — rather the reality of national ambition lurking underneath. As de Gaulle said, Europe was not so much the means to make Europe great again, but France. It was, he said, the means for France to “become again what she has ceased to be since Waterloo: First in the world”.

Macron’s 2017 speech is a reminder that just beneath the European surface of French foreign policy lurks that old Gaullist national interest. As well as calling for European autonomy to protect the continent’s interests from an American withdrawal, Macron also called for the EU to develop a foreign policy focused above all on the Mediterranean and Africa, and for the euro to be placed at “the heart of Europe’s economic power in the world”. Neither of these priorities speaks in any way to the one country France would need to support a policy of European autonomy from the United States: Poland. In fact, the focus on the Mediterranean and Africa is a transparent attempt to use the power of the EU to pursue what are, in effect, French strategic concerns.

A regular complaint from American officials over the years has been that, despite repeated demands for European autonomy, there was never much interest shown in the practical realities of turning this into genuine continent-wide integration supporting any war for survival against Russia. It is notable, for instance, that Macron’s speech from 2017 focuses on threats from terrorism and instability in Africa but not Russia, despite the fact that it had already invaded and annexed land from Ukraine.

Even today, many of the old instincts remain. Starmer’s hopes for a new defense and security pact, for example, are currently being held up by discussions over fishing rights. Those close to Starmer remain deeply skeptical that there will be any significant change in the EU’s willingness to compromise its single-market “red lines” in order to forge a closer relationship with Britain’s defense industry — something which could be a key asset in developing European military-industrial capacity. “The French see no benefit opening up the market to British competition,” one British official put it. The simple fact remains that whatever the rhetoric coming out of Berlin, Paris or Brussels about nuclear deals and “resets”, the old red-lines of the Brexit negotiations remain: if Britain wants more than it has today, it will have to accept the EU’s rules.

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Can Starmer exploit Europe's crisis?

By Tom McTague

Amid Trump’s disregard for Europe’s interests — and sensitivities — it is understandable why the allure of de Gaulle has returned to the continent’s politics. As Julian Jackson put it in his biography of the general, although much of what he stood for was built on the myth of French victory in the Second World War — ”throwing dust in the Allies’ eyes so that they might be blinded into thinking that France was great” as he put it — de Gaulle really did save the honor of France, while posing many the questions which continue to dominate Europe’s discussions today, including, most pertinently: How to create ‘Europe’ itself?

Yet, de Gaulle was also a deeply flawed prophet, casting his country “into a role which was beyond her power”, as Britain’s ambassador at the time, Gladwyn Jebb, remarked. This remains a core challenge for Europe today. While there are questions of indignity and morality, there are also questions of means and will. France, Germany and Britain remain bound by fiscal and political constraints — many of their own making — which make any serious push towards strategic autonomy hard to take seriously.

Right now, Germany is in the fifth year of an unprecedented post-war economic stagnation, having seen each of the core planks of its geopolitical strategy ripped apart following the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Having bet the house on its export-led industrial economy, it was ultimately dependent on Russian gas, Chinese trade and American defense. Today the German economic model faces the existential challenge of losing all three of these core pillars in one go. Having also removed all nuclear energy in a gamble on renewables, and tied itself to the most extreme form of fiscal conservatism imaginable by shoehorning a “debt brake” into the German constitution, the incoming government’s room for maneuver is extraordinarily limited.

The initial results of the election suggest that Merz will not have the required two-thirds majority in the Bundestag necessary to remove the debt brake, making any significant uplift in defense spending extremely difficult. In July last year, the previous coalition government agreed to cut military aid to Ukraine by almost half to €4 billion in its draft budget for 2025, despite Olaf Scholz’s Zeitenwende — or turning point — speech declaring a whole new attitude to defense following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

In France, meanwhile, Macron has no majority in the National Assembly to pass any budget, and lost three prime ministers last year trying to do so. Faced with a blocking majority of the hard-Left and hard-Right, much of which is skeptical of the war in Ukraine and opposed to significant cuts to pensions or welfare, it is similarly difficult to see a path to significant defense spending increases in the foreseeable future — unless new elections later this year can break the impasse.

Even in Britain, which has the most parliamentary powerful government of the three major European powers, there are severe fiscal constraints against any rapid increase in defense spending of the sort required to achieve independence from the US. According to senior British officials, even increasing the budget to 3% of GDP would only strengthen the conventional forces we already have, allowing London to fulfill the role demanded of it by Nato. To fill the hole left by the United States — including, as Merz suggested, an independent European nuclear deterrent against Russia — would require an uplift of the order Trump has demanded: to 4-5% of GDP.

For any British government, such a choice is not only politically unfeasible, but far from obviously militarily desirable. As one senior official put it, in some of the core aspects of modern defense — from space, to drones and AI — European states dreaming of autonomy from the US could quickly look markedly unattractive to the UK, which may choose to partner with fast-moving, well-funded American programs, rather than speculative, expensive and unproven European alternatives. These also come with the added risk that Britain could be “blocked at the last minute because Breton langoustine fishermen are unhappy”.

But as the spectre of de Gaulle looms over a Europe bickering over seafood, the continent should find inspiration in another figure: not the great man of France, but the founding father of modern Europe, Jean Monnet.

In his biography of the great statesman, François Duchêne sets out how Monnet used moments of crisis to pursue new ideas, rather than simply leaning on those old maxims of foreign policy: “He suspected history of being a crutch,” Duchêne wrote, “for those who hoped relying on it would be easier than thinking for themselves.”

Indeed, one of the interesting things about Jean Monnet is that he is not simply revered by Europe’s federalists as the founding father of modern Europe, the first to be given named an honorary “citizen of Europe”, but that he is also held up as icon among eurosceptic revolutionaries such as Dominic Cummings who see him as one of the geniuses of modern politics, able to give institutional life to his ideals. Monnet led a remarkable life: French official and European hero, but also a man of the Western order who was knighted by the British, worked for Churchill, proposed the union of Britain and France and was seen by de Gaulle as being too much of an anglo to be trusted.

The highest praise Monnet had for any statesman was that they were “generous”, the opposite of which he called the “spirit of domination” whereby these men seek only to further their immediate interests within their narrow positions of power. Looking out across Europe today, it is hard to see much generosity among its statesmen — or indeed any of Monnet’s genius for taking an idea such as “strategic autonomy” and making it real For Monnet, in fact, one of the central purposes of the “Europe” he created was to keep together the Atlantic world and what he originally saw as its three component parts: the continent; the British Commonwealth; and the might of the United States.

There were, for Monnet, very few politicians who combined the skill of high office with the “generosity” to achieve results that went beyond immediate national interest. Without that generosity, Monnet argued, men turned too often to what he called “little solutions to big problems”. If there is a description of modern Europe’s predicament, it is this: a continent stuck in its old ways of thinking, still focused on its old red lines and petty nationalisms — and still lacking the generosity required to break free from the indignity of Trump’s domination.

In the summer of 1945, with Europe lying in ruins, Charles de Gaulle and Jean Monnet were the two dominant Frenchmen of the day. Having returned from a visit to Washington, the general and the “inspirer” as de Gaulle dismissively referred to Monnet, held a long discussion about the state of the continent. “You speak of greatness,” Monnet told de Gaulle, “but today the French are small. There will only be greatness when the French are of a stature to warrant it… For this purpose they need to modernize.” De Gaulle had returned from American stunned by the prosperity — and power — of the new hegemon. “You are certainly right,” he replied. “Do you want to try?”

The rest is history. But some things remain unchanged. Europe today is small and it will only achieve greatness when it assumes the stature to warrant it. Instead, no doubt, Berlin, London and Paris will argue about fish and plead for America to stay just a bit longer.

Napoleon’s Grand Armée marching down Whitehall was an eventuality that was planned for. “When an enemy lands, all the difficulties of civil government and the restraint of forms cease; every thing must give way to supplying and strengthening the army, repelling the enemy…” wrote Sir David Dundas in a government memo of October 1796. “The great object must be constantly to harass, alarm, and fire on an enemy, and to impede his progress.”

During the war with revolutionary France, the threat of invasion was a reality for the British — not simply a counterfactual dreamed up by an historian having a bath. What if Napoleon had invaded? What then might have been the consequences, both in the short and in the longer terms?

Napoleon’s conquests of other countries provide a clue — notably so if there was strong resistance — most obviously Spain after it was seized in 1808. Such resistance was certainly planned in Britain. Documents from figures such as Thomas, Lord Pelham, Home Secretary from 1801 to 1803, as well as Dundas’s 1796 memo, indicate plans to contest bitterly any French advance from the landing sites, including using scorched earth policies. (Major-General Sir David Dundas would serve as Commander-in-Chief from 1809 to 1811.)

To this end, and in the face of repeated invasion fears, there was a large-scale mobilisation of males into militia and volunteer units, and these were extensively trained. Numerous barracks and Martello towers were built along the south coast. So Britain would have fought, and would have fought hard.

French troops landed in Wales in 1797 and, on a greater scale, in Ireland in 1798. These incursions were swiftly suppressed by locally-available forces, which suggests that far more French troops would have been required for any invasion to succeed. That, indeed, had been the invasion plan in 1759 and 1779, during earlier conflicts. Any French advance from the South Coast would have been contested in the Weald and then again at the Thames. There was also a reserve centre of government in Northamptonshire, to carry on the fight if London fell.

The French advance would not have had the support of air power, airborne troops or mechanised forces, as was the prospect Britain faced in 1940.

If the country had still been conquered, then the hypotheticals open up further. Napoleon’s hostile attitude to Britain, which he regarded as crucial to the opposition throughout Europe, would scarcely have eased as opposition grew there. There were three options used by Napoleon for the lands he conquered, and none was attractive for those defeated. Incorporation in France was one option. This might seem implausible in the case of Britain, but given that Napoleon adopted this method very widely, including for example for the Hanseatic Towns, Dalmatia and, eventually, the Netherlands, it could well have been adopted here. It would have meant military government.

Secondly, there was the option of installing a member of his family, or a close ally, as ruler, as with Naples, Spain, Westphalia, Sweden (with the Frenchman Bernadotte as Regent) and, for a while, the Netherlands. There was no-one available, however, who would have been acceptable in Britain, and no member of the British Royal Family who could have been brought forward.

Thirdly, as with Austria in 1805 and 1809, and Prussia in 1806, they could leave the existing ruler in power but drastically curtail their position, notably by greatly annexing territory, but also by other constraints. This would scarcely have been easy and in Prussia provoked the anger that encouraged an anti-French reaction in 1812-13. It is difficult to see either George III or the Prince Regent as being willing to accept this role. Moreover, unlike in Spain, where the rift in the royal family had provided the French with options, in Britain the divide between George III and the Prince of Wales had greatly eased by this time.

Further reading

France can't cancel Napoleon

By John Lichfield

Napoleon would have needed a quiescent Britain if he was to turn against Continental rivals, but, as in Spain from 1808, a significant occupation army in Britain would have compromised that outcome. Yet Napoleon was not a ruler able to secure quiescence, in large part because, despite the rhetoric of Enlightenment, his rule was oppressive and extortionate. The choice, whether annexed or “allied”, was a poor one. As with Hitler, the inevitable consequences of rule by France was manpower being conscripted and resources seized.

This avarice encouraged opposition which, in turn, was treated harshly. In Lombardy in 1796, Napoleon used summary executions and the burning of villages. Such insurgencies were not new, but they became more important from 1792-1815, in part because the French Revolutionaries and Napoleon transformed, destroyed or took over existing power structures, and also because they accelerated processes of change that much of the population already found inimical.

In particular, French attacks on the Church and Christian practices, let alone full-scale atheistical de-Christianisation, were far from popular, challenging both established beliefs, interests and senses of order, continuity, identity and legality. This helped to contextualise the pressure of meeting onerous French demands for supplies and conscripts for their army, and their seizures of goods and money.

The net effect was a widespread opposition and lawlessness, with, in addition, insurgencies of various types seen across larger areas of Europe as French forces advanced, for example in Calabria in 1806. The French responded with troops, which were referred to as flying columns, by the use of the gendarmerie (mobile armed police), and by recruiting local allies. In 1798, despite what Napoleon saw as the introduction of Enlightenment policies into Malta after he seized it, the island rapidly rebelled in large part due to an insensitive treatment of the Church, which was always a poor strategy, as well as higher taxation. Because of its history of opposition to France, Britain would probably have been far worse-treated.

Further reading

Europe is waiting for its Napoleon

By Peter Franklin

In the British Isles it is very likely that, had Napoleon invaded, he would have found local allies, with more in Ireland than anywhere else. They would not have relied on these rebels to fight for them in England — that was a job for the Grand Armée — but once established, the French would very much have sought assistance in order to get government to work. Moreover, they would have sought to withdraw most of the invading army in order to operate elsewhere.

What French control would have meant would have varied greatly depending on the particular French government in question, and this would have affected the likely supporters in Britain. The radicals of the London Corresponding Society and other such bodies would have worked with the republican regimes of the 1790s but have found an imperial Napoleon far less conducive.

Nevertheless, convenience, self-interest and ideology would have won him some support, as was also the case with the Kingdom of Italy established in 1805. The longer the new order was entrenched, the more likely that there would have been collaborators, although it would have varied. Some of the poets and painters would doubtless have helped decorate the new regime, but they would have been of scant consequence, as anyone with a suitably neo-classical palette would have qualified. Christian Tories, such as Jane Austen, would probably have remained unpublished.

In the ideological sphere, Napoleon’s support for the reintroduction of slavery and the suppression of Haiti would have caused problems for some of the fellow-travellers, but their consciences would doubtless have been flexible, prefiguring those of the historians who have praised Napoleon. Charles James Fox might have justified co-operation on a needs-must basis, and would have certainly been a convenient figurehead for a ministry. The latter would have probably contained “men of business” but the subordination of mercantile Britain to French interests would have exposed their political weakness as quislings able only to implement dictates determined in Paris.

Ultimately, most of the Whigs would probably have found the reality of Napoleonic rule highly unwelcome. The position of his British supporters would have been greatly weakened by the burdens arising from his expectations of support for his imperialism elsewhere.

Further reading

Imagine a world without the USA...

By James Kirkup

The net effect would have been to make British politics far more divisive, both then and subsequently. Conservatism and nationalism would have been closely linked, and the radical tradition associated with harsh foreign rule. In Europe in 1816-48, and to a degree thereafter, there was a divisive political tension that owed much to the legacy of Napoleonic rule. Britain was spared that legacy, and there was only a comparable dissension in Ireland. However much it owed to the silver sea and the Royal Navy, and the security these offered, this difference contributed to British political exceptionalism.

The divisions between liberalism and conservatism that were so bitter in much of Continental Europe in the 19th century — literally then a matter of life and death — played a role in their 20th-century counterparts of Left and Right, as did the legacy of past practices of co-operation or resistance with conquerors. In Britain, things turned out differently, with the centre holding firm for a patriotic affirmation of national sovereignty against extremism of Left and Right. And this owed much to the fact that Britain was able to avoid the rule of Napoleon Bonaparte.