We were always a gooseberry in the EU

The Franco-german alliance will remain strong because the Union has brought peace and stability

Istill remember the first editorial I read in The Economist. It was 1987, and the article was all about how the Franco-german engine that had powered the EU from the beginning was about to stall. I have been reading variants of that article in the British press ever since; and yet, despite an occasional cough, the engine purrs on.

It is the job of reporters to listen out for the coughs, of course. During Emmanuel Macron’s visit with Angela Merkel on Monday, there was much media discussion of their differences. Macron wants the EU to pool some of its members’ debts; Merkel has had enough of carrying others’ liabilities. He wants to relax the rules on public spending; she wants to see him make domestic reforms first.

But the coughs are audible because the engine is running so quietly. Macron and Merkel agree on the fundamentals. They see the success of the euro as the key aim of economic policy. They want further political integration in Europe, especially in the military sphere. Much the same could have been said of Chirac and Schröder, or Mitterrand and Kohl.

To see why the Franco-german alliance is so important to both partners, try a thought experiment. Imagine yourself in Hamburg, say, in 1945, your country wrecked by bombardment and racked by hunger, partitioned, occupied and dishonoured. Suppose some aspirant politician had clambered on to a pile of rubble and promised that, within 20 years, yours wouldn’t just be the wealthiest country in Europe, but would be at peace with its erstwhile foes. You’d have wanted to throw things at the idiot.

For an entire generation of Germans, Europe is the magic wand that effected that miracle, even facilitating the reunification of the country in 1990 without any backlash from neighbours. No wonder they see the EU as being beyond argument.

It was the French, ultimately, who waved the magic wand. After 1945, they opposed Anglo-american attempts to reintegrate West Germany into the comity of nations. But when it became clear that the British and American governments were determined to bring West Germany into Nato, they performed a 180-degree turn. If Germany could not be held under the boot, she must be clasped to the breast.

In 1950, the French foreign minister, Robert Schuman, proposed that West Germany and France place key components of their economies under supranational authority. The German leader, Konrad Adenauer, immediately spotted the opportunity. “This is our breakthrough,” he told MPS.

It is hard, from a British perspective, to see quite how much this matters to the two countries, which had been sporadically at war since they emerged as separate entities in the ninth century. I am writing these words in Strasbourg, which has passed back and forth four times between the neighbours since 1870. Not far from where I am sitting is a memorial to some Resistance fighters, shot and thrown into the Rhine the day before Strasbourg was liberated. I once met a local man who had been conscripted into the Wehrmacht because, unlike the rest of France, Alsace-lorraine was treated as integral German territory. You can understand why, with such a history, the two nations were prepared to try anything that looked like a way out.

For what it’s worth, I think European peace since 1945 owes more to the defeat of fascism, the spread of democracy and Nato than to Francogerman institutional amalgamation. The EU is a consequence, not a cause, of that peace. But what I think is neither here nor there: for the French and the Germans, the EU is emotional rather than political.

Our mistake, as a country, has been repeatedly to try to thrust our way into the duopoly. It was never realistic. We should instead have contented ourselves with being good neighbours.

Right from the beginning, Winston Churchill imagined a “United States of Europe” which the UK would support from the outside like a flying buttress. “France and Germany must take the lead together,” he said in 1946, while Britain and America “must be the friends and sponsors of the new Europe”. It has taken us 70 years but, at long last we may finally be about to realise Churchill’s vision.

Daniel Hannan is a Conservative MEP and author of ‘What Next: How to Get the Best from Brexit’