ALEPH NEWS. Read Emmanuel Macron’s full interview with The Economist magazine. “The European model of prosperity can die if solutions are not taken now”

The Economist: In your speech at the Sorbonne, you said that “Europe can die”. What does this actually mean? What’s the stake?

President Macron: I was referring to the words of Paul Valery after the First World War, about the fact that we now know that a civilization can die. First of all, because we have military and geopolitical risks, security risks. Europe is not the safest area in the world, although the continent has a model armed forces that is now solid, complete and effective, like the French army. However, even when we look at Europe as a whole, we see that it has invested much less in defense and security than the US and China, and that it finds itself in a global context where proliferation is about to return: Russia, but and Iran and other powers. And not only is the high-intensity war returning on European soil, but it is being waged by a power with nuclear weapons and belligerent rhetoric. This means that Europe must, legitimately, raise the issue of military protection. And, of course, they must prepare to no longer enjoy the same protection from the US, as I said in 2019, also at the Economist. We must be prepared to protect ourselves.

Secondly, the challenge for Europe is economic and technological. There can be no great power without economic prosperity, nor without energy or technological sovereignty. We saw this at the beginning of this war of aggression, when the European production model was heavily dependent on Russian gas – less so than France or others. So we must build our sovereignty, strategic autonomy, independence from the point of view of energy, materials and rare resources, but also from the point of view of fundamental skills and technologies. And I started this “awakening”. We’ve contributed a lot to it over the past few years, but currently we’re not fully involved. We need to be even stronger, and more radical. In addition, there is the fact that Europe does not produce enough wealth/capita compared to other major powers, and with our strong ambition, at a time when we see the factors of production being reallocated, whether in green technology or artificial intelligence, we must to be an attractive continent for these major investments. Our ambition is to ensure that these disruptive technologies do not develop in other regions first, either because they are very well subsidized and encouraged, as we see in the US, due to major investments in AI, or because the factors of production are much cheaper there, as in the USA or China.

Read the full interview on Aleph News.