No French politician ever lost votes by bashing the Americans. And let’s be honest, no American politician ever lost votes by bashing the French.
Au contraire, as we might say. Even the ability to speak French is regarded as slightly suspect, as candidates from Thomas Jefferson to John Kerry and Mitt Romney can attest. So, on one level, the spat between President Trump and French President Emmanuel Macron is nothing new. Both men might reasonably expect to profit domestically by insulting each other — Macron with a certain sneaky elegance, Trump with his trademark bluster.
In 1966, when Charles de Gaulle ordered American troops to withdraw from French soil, a furious Lyndon Johnson asked whether that included the American soldiers buried in French cemeteries. Both presidents became more popular as a result.
Twenty years later, when former President Ronald Reagan ordered airstrikes against dictator Moammar Gadhafi in retaliation for Libyan-sponsored terrorism, Britain gladly offered the use of its bases, but former French President Francois Mitterand closed French airspace to the jets, adding hundreds of miles to their route. Again, it played with both home crowds.
In 2003, when the “cheese-eating surrender monkeys” led opposition to the Iraq War, French fries were briefly renamed “freedom fries” at a U.S. congressman’s urging. Yet again, both electorates backed their leaders.
This time, though, there is more than national rivalry at stake. Presidents Trump and Macron embody two clashing ideologies — sovereignty and supranationalism. Both men were elected as champions of their respective causes against opponents who stood for the opposite: Hillary Clinton and Marine Le Pen. The current row began when, in an implicit criticism of Trump, Macron declared that patriotism and nationalism were opposites. In itself, that statement is almost meaningless. Macron was — consciously or otherwise — quoting Charles de Gaulle, who was about as far from him on the nationalism/supranationalism spectrum as one can be.
Still, everyone understood what the former banker was getting at. The nation-state, as he sees it, is passe, a 19th-century hangover with no place in the digital age. Money, people, and ideas are so mobile that state sovereignty no longer has much meaning. The future, he believes, is with associations that can set the rules at planetary level.
This was, of course, precisely the ideology that Trump ran against in 2016. He believes, though he expresses it in rather coarser terms, in the Westphalian model, whereby each state is responsible for what happens on its own territory and international relations rest on voluntary cooperation, not global technocracy.
I am, as regular readers know, no great admirer of the 45th president, but on this issue, he is dead right. The nation-state, with all its imperfections, is the most secure vessel for freedom. Various supranational ideologies have arisen down the years, claiming a higher authority than state sovereignty and refusing to recognize territorial jurisdiction: fascism, communism, Islamic fundamentalism. All end up being illiberal and undemocratic. Only the nation, rooted as it is in organic and genuine loyalties, has endured as a unit within which an open society can flourish.
You might think it silly to liken Macron’s centrist, Europhile, bureaucratic form of supranationalism to communism or jihadism. But the essential presumption is the same. When a well-intentioned UN official demands the extradition of, say, an alleged war-criminal who might evade justice at home, he is using precisely the same logic as an Iranian mullah who pronounces a fatwa on a foreign national who might otherwise escape being tried for blasphemy. In both cases, the ruling ideology is held to be more powerful than the authority that comes from sovereign statehood.
Ideologues, by definition, see their doctrine as an end that justifies the means. This does not cease to be true simply because the doctrine is centrist and internationalist. Look at the misery that supporters of European integration were prepared to impose on the peoples of the Mediterranean states, especially Greece — the years of unnecessary poverty, joblessness, and emigration — all for the sake of keeping the euro in place as an instrument of deeper union. Look at their readiness to swat aside referendum results when they don’t like the outcome.
In the end, it comes down to legitimacy. To make democracy work, people have to feel enough in common to accept government from each other’s hands. They have to be prepared to accept election results when they lose, to pay taxes even when they resent them, to obey laws they regard as wrong. People have that sense as American or French citizens, but not as global citizens. Which is why, in the last analysis, Trump’s approval ratings are so much higher than Macron’s.
