Test the Grand Continent. The ideas and analyses you won’t find anywhere else. But you’ll see them everywhere soon. In your inbox starting at eight euros per month
What does the French social contract inspire in you, in the moment we are going through?
Whichever way one defines this social contract, it is clear that it is no longer at work. What is striking in the recent period is how every part of the political body, so to speak, every organ, every muscle, every bone, is gradually separating from one another. There is no longer a synthetic principle capable of unifying us.
The French social contract rested on the general principle of modern politics, the regime of representation: there is a civic people, the rights of its members are protected by a rule of law, and within this framework political representation allows the leadership of the country to be entrusted to the political force, to the orientation, to the actors who enjoy the support of the majority. It was therefore the majority contract, normed by the rule of law and backed by the political people defined by national belonging. Today, all parts of what you call the French social contract are paralyzed, or at least have separated.
There is no longer a majority principle, because there is no longer a real, nor even potential, majority. This is a major factor in the situation: what supplied the energy, the axis, and the ballast of our regime is missing. The rule of law, which served to regulate excesses, drifts, or imprudences of the majority regime, now claims to decide, at least negatively, the very content of policies. It holds the government and the legislature on a leash. And of course, the civic people, instead of being regarded as the primary source of political legitimacy and the natural framework of political life, has undergone a systematic process of delegitimization. The idea that the national people could have the right to govern itself has been branded unworthy by the enlightened opinion that guides and directs us. Thus, the three major components of our political apparatus are no longer operational: the first is absent, the second is hypertrophied, the third is suspect and denounced.
What would you say about Macronism ?” How do you assess this political formula, not clearly right or left, which, in reality, quickly became something else?
It is difficult to render a judgment to the extent that, for a large part, Emmanuel Macron’s mandates merely extended a trend. That trend was the end of majority alternation, or rather the shift from a meaningful alternation between right and left to an alternation that was in essence decorative. Regardless of which side was in power, the policy was largely the same, justified and normed by the construction and, more still, the rhetoric of Europe. With this insight, which must be acknowledged, Macron seized the opportune moment and seized the game: he was elected on a project to do two policies at once, since they were heading in the same direction. It was plausible and tempting, even if there was some audacity in presenting as a “revolution” a move that attempted to push to its logical extreme a trend that had already long been evident.
So, what did he do? What I would reproach him for is never having questioned the situation, the real state of the country he was governing. He used the governance conveniences bequeathed by the Fifth Republic, the symbolic resources of our old and great country, but for what purpose? Carried along by his own momentum, he only skimmed over the country. He does not align with any political or spiritual family of France, which is not shameful in itself, but it deprived him of shared orientation elements that even the most talented people need. He perceived the exhaustion of the historical parties quicker than others, without being able, or willing, to found a new one. He displayed a sometimes supernatural talent for adapting to situations and extricating himself from jams, but his ascent along the crests led him to that fatal dissolution that has made our already wavering Republic suffer a harm he still does not measure.
Yet he is the representative of the high administration; this is a French tradition.
I don’t know, but so be it! One could mention his Saint-Simonianism. It seems to me, however, that he hardly drew on the capabilities of this high administration, that he weakened its great bodies, that he at least showed a preference for consulting firms… Whatever part of our collective organization was concerned, he wanted to “move it,” without much prior reflection, and convinced that his virtuosity would suffice. Hence the almost immediate hostility he provoked. This hostility was sometimes blind and overexcited, but his disdain, or his brazenness, toward his interlocutors, even the most modest, fed this rejection. In the end, he is now supported only by that part of the educated, credentialed bourgeoisie for whom he still embodies the “government of the best.” His talents are beyond question, but he did not make the effort to grasp the enduring features of our national history nor to seriously analyze the state and functioning of our regime.
We’ll say, and this is not false, that these failings are those of the French political class for forty years: the left forgetting the working people, the right forgetting the nation, throwing themselves into an European construction as ambitious as it is indeterminate, without realizing that the country did not follow them, or did so only very weakly, in this project, whose leadership class did not even know what it precisely consisted of.
There is today a presidential campaign, with, let’s say, three options. Does the expression “extreme center,” for what is now called the central bloc, seem to you to be well founded?
I have boasted of being one of the inventors of this expression… What is striking is that this sector of public opinion cannot conceive that others do not share its obviousness. By making European integration a test of intellectual and moral competence for citizens, by enshrining enthusiastic support for that enterprise, it excludes from the legitimate public sphere countless citizens who had objections, reservations, or doubts, more or less pertinent but who did not deserve the crushing contempt of the “good party.”
The political life of our country has gradually become immobilized and sterile due to the inability to accept disagreement and to welcome objection. See how easily, with what certainty and with rights, the political class decided to disregard the 2005 referendum. For many French people, that was a decisive rupture with their leaders. To refuse to take into account the clear vote of 55% of the French, nor that of the Dutch, two countries so politically different from one another, who at the same moment told their political class the same thing and were ignored, how can one not see that as one of the major sources of the divisions that immobilize us?
For more than twenty years, the political class governed as best it could despite the secession of the people, or a good part of it. Today it proves utterly unable to govern, while popular resentment is all the more virulent as the condition of the many deteriorates in a striking way. The parties that claim to be expressions of the people’s anger have made no effort to instruct and guide it, contenting themselves with fueling and exploiting it. Their electoral victory, which polls seem to predict, will be the revenge of the despised, but it offers no refounding of our political contract, since the new prospective rulers who did not think to prepare for it will be unable to meet the demands, sometimes contradictory, of a civic body that is impatient, painful, exasperated, and more divided than ever.
The functioning of a representative regime rests on a delicate articulation of the relationship between those who govern and those who are governed. It requires a certain trust of the people in its representatives and a certain sense of responsibility on the part of the governors toward the people who elected them. This exchange has not happened for a long time. Once the governors consider themselves responsible primarily before the European project and the “values” they declare inseparable from it, they exonerate themselves from the obligations embedded in the very definition of our regime. The representative operation has become obscure and distorted.
When you speak of the criticisms one can address to the European Union, what do you have in mind?
The European Union has not ceased to say that it was doing what it did not do and did not want to do. For decades, EU supporters held all the power and exercised it without obstacle. I have noted it before: they systematically delegitimized any reasonably rigorous critique of how Europe was being built. All the powers for what purpose? Officially to build this Europe that alone would have the strength to defend European nations now too weak to be the center of the world. Yet, what do we see? An Europe unable to defend itself by its own means.
When one claims to build a new political body, one first worries about being capable of defending what one builds. Yet the political class acted as if this did not concern it. It had values to spread, rights to implement, the alignment of interests to organize, but it had nothing to defend.
The comparison with the founding of the United States is instructive. The American states, when they decided to unite more closely, established institutions of the Union: a Presidency, a Senate, a House of Representatives. Where is the European executive? It does not exist. Where are the elected representatives of the European people? They do not exist since there is no European people. It is thus the institution most devoid of its own legitimacy, most dependent on opaque negotiations between the various European states, namely the Commission, that is charged with Europe’s general interest. How can one imagine that such a poorly formed institutional setup could ever produce a political community?
I do not at all reject the argument that, given the state of the world, our nations are now too weak and must therefore unite their forces. Simply, I argue that if one wants to build a political union, one must take political reality into account and rely on it. And the political reality of Europe remains the nations. Evidence of this is that everything significant in the life of the European Union, as it exists, still depends mainly on the member nations. Do we really think they will eventually merge into a Union in which they will necessarily be the main actors? The possible and desirable Europe will be the joint work of our nations or it will not exist at all.
What is singular, precisely, is to see the divergence between the United States and the European States. How do you judge Donald Trump’s power and the way democracy in America operates?
The first great peculiarity of American democracy lies in geography: the United States is an almost unlimited continental empire, while Europeans have, and know they have, neighbors beside them whom they must take into account.
What has been called Europe results from the reciprocal actions of nations that built themselves with one another, some early like England and France, others later to unity like Germany or Italy, through fighting, negotiating, carefully determining their borders, despising each other, admiring each other, imitating each other, etc. Europeans have always had to take the neighbor into account. What shaped European life for centuries was the rivalry and emulation between powers that, even if unequal, tended to recognize one another. They did not contest the existence of their neighbors, even though this unwritten law of European politics had exceptions, especially in the case of Poland. I leave aside here the Hitlerian venture, which lies entirely outside the frame.
The United States never met an equal, even approximate, in their surroundings. They developed with a continental perspective from the outset, expanding west to the Pacific, south to seize half of Mexico, and to subjugate the Central American countries to direct or indirect political or economic control. The United States proclaimed themselves early on protectors and suzerains of the two Americas. The imperial impulse operated irregularly but remained always powerful. One must of course mention the Spanish–American War of 1898, which saw the United States seize the remnants of the Spanish Empire, with the Philippines.
It was in 1917 that the United States became the axis of the international order when they intervened decisively in the Great War. From 1945 a long period opens of an American empire that takes its responsibilities as an empire seriously and, if I may say so, regularizes its situation. Today one speaks, with a somewhat complacent nostalgia, of a “rules-based empire.” In any case, if this empire remained anchored in American power—military, economic, and financial—and attentive to its interests, the American ruling class showed enough political intelligence to exhibit a certain impartiality in administering the rules, and even a certain generosity to help the devastated Europe rebuild.
If I had to characterize Trump’s actions in one word, I would say they express the revolt of a significant part of the American nation against the American empire, against this empire of rules, values, and military strength that the American nation feels it can no longer bear. The portion of public opinion that Trump represents believes that Americans have squandered their energy and their money, blood and treasure, on causes that do not concern them, and that it is time for America to go home and mind its own business. But going home and minding one’s own business means reviving certain ancient but still available reflexes, especially the dominator impulse in the two Americas, toward the North (Canada) and toward the South (Cuba, Venezuela). This re-centering on the continental empire implies a chaotic retreat of the most exposed zones of the world empire (the Middle East, Europe). There is therefore a certain rationality and even coherence in Trump’s international approach. This coherence is more than half obscured by the accompanying discourse, which is odious except in the ridiculous, but it is real. It has harmful consequences for Europe and disastrous for Ukraine, but what is rational in it is more to be feared than what is odious, because the reorientation Trump has given to American policy may endure.
Among the latest Trumpian gambits, there is one I wanted your view on, because I recalled the pages you dedicated to it in La Raison des nations: the desire to publicize capital executions after an execution has, again, gone very badly in the United States.
The suggestion by the American Secretary of War, dismissed by Trump himself, does not seem to me to be of particular interest. In an already unrestrained political atmosphere, he seeks to stand out with sensationalism and outrage. Whatever judgment one makes of the death penalty, treating a capital execution as a spectacle to be broadcast live and to which the public is invited betrays a morally degraded sensitivity.
To insist on showing that one truly respects nothing is a strange move from someone who boasts of wanting to restore traditional morality. I have not checked, but I do not think this domestic-security-like demand by the Secretary of War earned much sympathy, even among American conservative opinion.
What you wrote in La Raison des nations is that the death penalty in the United States was inseparable from a reading of the Hobbesian pact that is very different from ours, and from a completely other conception of legitimate defense. Could you develop this point, especially since France is traumatized by an episode that raises precisely the question of protecting property…
I have encountered many Europeans who suddenly see a widening gap with the American interlocutor who had seemed so close until the gun-rights question arises, and they discover that for the American friend the right to bear arms, or at least to have arms available at home for self-defense, tends to be taken for granted.
We should not be surprised, because the possibility of disagreement is, in fact, embedded in the matrix of modern politics. You mentioned the name of Thomas Hobbes: it is indeed in his Leviathan that the rationality and legitimacy of the modern state are laid out as clearly and strikingly as possible. If there is no power capable of ordering the commons, everyone is the judge of the best way to defend himself against the neighbor who is always threatening. Then there is the “war of all against all,” more precisely each against each, because everyone has the right to do what he deems necessary to defend himself from the risk of violent death at the hands of others. He can always plead legitimate defense: he was about to be attacked! How to escape this war of everyone against everyone? It is necessary and enough that everyone renounce the exercise of his right to defend himself and entrust the exercise to a single authority, which will be empowered to defend the equal right of all citizens not to risk their lives at every moment – to live in peace. The entire legitimacy and raison d’être of the State lies in the mission that each person entrusts to it to defend their life, so that all are defended equally.
One sees the difficulty: in order to defend my right to life, but also the freedom of movement inseparable from life, I give an exorbitant power to the State. It is rational though, because instead of fearing everyone all the time, I now have only one object of fear, the sovereign State. It has all the powers, but it has no plausible motive to attack those who gave it the authority to enact the law. As a famous Hobbes commentator wrote, the “homeopathic fear” of the State replaced the panic fear of everyone and of everything. The “monopoly of the legitimate violence” allows citizens to live, not without fear, but with a fear that is incomparably more “livable” than it would be in the absence of the State.
What if the State does not defend me, or defends me poorly? Or worse, if it asks me to risk my life to defend it? Hobbes answers this difficulty: if the State asks me to risk my life to defend it, it breaks, in a sense, the contract that binds us. I therefore have the right to defend my own life, in practice by deserting to escape the risks of the battlefield. It is not honorable, he says, but one cannot say it is unjust, because all the justice of the State consists in the protection it owes me.
This Hobbesian detour helps us grasp more clearly the root of the disagreement between Europeans and Americans. Europeans assume that once the State has received the monopoly on legitimate violence, we no longer have a legitimate opportunity to take our defense into our own hands. We have entrusted it all completely to the State. As for what is called “legitimate defense,” Europeans view it with suspicion. Justice, particularly in France, is reluctant to consider it a valid excuse.
These days, even in our country, we fear that robbed merchants will seek justice themselves. We see there a challenge to State authority that is more serious than the one committed by criminals. In the United States, it is the same thing, but it is different. Certainly the public institution is supposed to defend me; that is indeed the mission I entrusted to it, but if it is not there, if it is not available, I always retain, in the last instance, the right to defend myself, and thus to possess the necessary weapons. It is indeed the same legal and moral apparatus, but interpreted differently.
American citizens feel more than we do that the right and power of the State are rooted in the right and power of each individual to defend himself. We feel more than they do that by keeping for ourselves, as a kind of reserve, a right more or less constitutional to defend ourselves, we would imperil the morality and dignity of the State; we would fall back into a pre-moral state, the state of nature.
This also resonates differently today, since Europe regards itself as threatened by Russia. The question of the right to defend oneself, that is, to arm, and more precisely to risk the life, not of the population at large, but of a portion of our children, as a French military man has said, arises. What does this make you think?
The question arises, and it arises, so to speak, terribly. I find it hard to answer. I belong to a generation that has entirely escaped war, that has entirely ignored it. Boomers in France are the first generation that has never known war in any form. Yet the possibility of war, the risk or threat of war, has returned to Europeans’ consciousness. It is quite possible that they will soon have to defend themselves, including by military force, against an expansionist project conducted by Russia. No—the possible is already real; we must defend ourselves against such an enterprise, it is already engaged.
This upsets Europe’s moral metabolism. I am not teaching you anything new: Europe has built itself—to the extent that it has been built—on the idea that it was the citizens’ guarantee of peace—of a peace that no one imagined could be broken. This peace found its guarantee and pledge in the reconciliation between European nations, particularly between Germany and France. One did not take into account what lay outside the Union’s member states. As for major dangers, responsibility was left to the United States. For minor dangers, the European states, in practice France or the United Kingdom, could take care of them. Thus Europe as such left defense matters either to the United States or to its member states. In Europe’s self-understanding, defense against an external enemy held no place.
To acknowledge today that it faces a serious risk of war is for Europe to admit, if not the emptiness, at least the obsolescence of its most captivating promise—the promise that most shaped European citizens’ consciences. It would, however, be a fatal error to suddenly want to turn Europe—the guarantor of peace—into Europe—ready for war. That would provoke resentment and the refusal of a broad majority of European citizens. Since the prospect of war, for individuals and groups, is necessarily an occasion for soul-searching, Russia’s assault must become such an occasion. If war threatens, even more so if it is already underway, it demands an urgent inventory of our material and moral resources. If we are about to ask young European citizens to be ready to risk their lives, we must—excuse the solemnity of the remark—seriously examine the motives of the human soul.
In what sense?
Let us return. Europeans are confronted with a threat that could become lethal. Europe must therefore muster sufficient forces and determination to face this threat. This cannot be done in the name of “Europe and its values,” recycling for war the rhetoric that promised perpetual peace. What will give Europe the strength to defend itself is to give voice back to the nations, as necessity is now driving us to do. Poles, Balts, Norwegians, Swedes—these peoples are indeed preparing for war; they have already taken costly and courageous decisions, they are ready or nearly ready for the ordeal.
We help them, as we help Ukraine, within the limits of our modest means and the resolve that remains to be confirmed. I believe, or I want to believe, that in the various threatened European countries the sense of patriotism is still alive, or at least capable of being awakened by a direct and sincere political message, in service of a coordinated political and military action to defend the homeland, and thereby Europe, within a framework of a alliance of European nations. The moral resource by which we can ask citizens to risk their lives is still and always patriotism. There is no other.
This demands a great deal of discernment, and even delicacy, from those who govern us. Dividing citizens, whether in the name of Europe or of France, labeling some as “traitors,” is the last thing to do. The goal is to secure as much support as possible for defense against Russian aggression. Let us avoid morally discrediting those who disagree with us from the outset. We must explain why and to what extent Russia is a threat, and a threat such that only a serious military preparation, i.e., one that makes us capable of waging war if things come to that, can respond. Our rulers must make a sustained effort to persuade the civic body of these necessities, without seizing the occasion to score easy points against political opponents.
I think that many Europeans, even if they sincerely condemn Russia’s aggression, do not realize to what extent Ukraine’s crushing would be a catastrophe for all of Europe. One sometimes hears foolish sneers: “So we will soon see Russian tanks on the Champs-Élysées!” What is at stake now is Ukraine’s survival. Putin is destroying Ukraine; that is what he wants to do and he is doing it.
The destruction of Ukraine means endangering the whole of Europe along the entire front line. It is therefore urgent that Europe muster enough forces to help the Ukrainians thwart his enterprise, as well as the moral resources necessary to sustain a durable and large-scale military effort. These resources must primarily be drawn from the patriotic spirit of the various European nations, nations allied in a civilizational whole that seeks to defend itself by mobilizing its constituent parts, its “living stones.”
You are a great reader of Tocqueville. In the opening pages of Democracy in America, there is a kind of providential trust in the leveling of conditions and in the sense of sameness. Can that sentiment still be shared today?
Tocqueville’s optimism was nevertheless a prudent optimism, because for him the natural movement of democracy tended toward a kind of “soft despotism,” as he called it. To avoid it, one must cultivate an art of democracy. And the art of democracy is the art of making the most of representative government, carefully calibrating the institutional setup, encouraging associations, preserving equality of rights without stifling virtue and talents, and cultivating a language capable of saying what is, rather than drowning it in abstractions… We are talking about a forgotten art.
I would like to mention an important point in this regard. We constantly experience and validate a terrible simplification, or calcification, of language. We no longer know how to speak about collective problems except in the language of rights. There are subjects for which the language of rights is perfectly relevant, but many questions where it must be complemented by another language, another approach to things. One cannot simply say: there are unlimited human rights, and the task of politics is merely to guarantee the equality of these unlimited human rights. What becomes of the citizen’s rights then? Can one simply dissolve citizen rights into human rights? You know as well as I that asking this question is considered a crime, or nearly so, in the current public opinion.
As a reaction to this hypertrophy of human rights, identitarian claims emerge, identities whose very meaning lies in this assertion itself. And this is done in the name of another human right, the right to have an identity… That adds one more right, as if we lacked any! It is mostly a means of oversimplifying the task. This “identity” we so vehemently proclaim is usually a “common good” that would benefit from being analyzed in precise political and moral terms. It is true that the common good cannot simply be the framework of rights; it has political and moral substance, it includes “life contents,” but this must be carefully derived and articulated instead of being asserted as a block to be taken or left.
Tocqueville feared the taste of democratic societies for abstractions. Look at how education is wrapped in bundles of abstractions among us: “the right to quality education,” “equality of opportunity,” “education to correct inequalities”… All these formulas circle the subject they barely touch. They tell us nothing of the desirable content of education. For example: what place should be given to learning language? How should it be taught? The French language is abandoned, humiliated, and mutilated in many places. What art of democracy if the art of writing and speaking is lost? On the radio you hear a few phrases from Georges Pompidou or François Mitterrand, and you think: how well he spoke, how he found the right word, how well he placed it! This linguistic nuance of discourse was not only the talent or virtue of a person, but the expression of a country that had mastered the political art of democracy. Have we lost it? I am alarmed by the verbosity and hurriedness of most politicians I hear on the radio in the morning. Do they address someone? It seems they have a stock of nouns to utter, like signals, without worrying that they be used to support a discourse that would require verbs.
Only the art of democracy, with the good use of our language it presupposes, can allow us to “sew together” once again the constituents of our regime that have parted ways: a political people within the national framework, which does not exclude a closer union among European nations; a rule of law that does not replace the legislature or the government; finally a political representation that reestablishes a fair exchange between the trust of the governed and the sense of responsibility of the governors. Is there still time to repair this device, which is the grand masterpiece in peril of modern politics?