By Jörg Kronauer
Is the debate about nuclear armament in the EU moving into the next round? There are some indications that this is the case. Last week, Poland’s President Andrzej Duda declared that his country was prepared to station US nuclear weapons on its territory. On Friday evening, his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron said that France was offering to take over the EU’s nuclear deterrence with the Force de frappé. Duda implicitly called for an expansion of military cooperation with the USA. Macron meanwhile placed his proposal in the context of the demand made in his speech at the Sorbonne on Thursday that a “credible defense of the European continent” should be pushed forward – one that operates separately and is independent of the United States. Macron claimed that this would also require a nuclear component, because Russia is, after all, a nuclear power.
Macron’s push has several levels, and these all have to do with the old core European rivalry between Germany and France in one form or another. One of them: Berlin has managed to completely outcompete Paris in building a Europe-wide air defense system. German, Israeli and US defense companies benefit from the costly European Sky Shield Initiative (ESSI), which Chancellor Olaf Scholz initiated in August 2022, but French ones do not. Paris, which has not yet been politically involved in ESSI, has been trying for some time to retrospectively carve out a place for itself in it. Macron said on Friday that truly comprehensive air defense must also include defense against Russian nuclear missiles. But part of the defensive program must be nuclear deterrence, the French President added, concluding that, as the sole nuclear power in the EU, only France could realize this. If Macron gets his way, Paris will have a strong presence in today’s German-dominated European air defense system.
In addition, Berlin has long been extremely dissatisfied with the fact that it does not have nuclear weapons. In a nuclear world, we hear and read again and again that only a state that possesses nuclear bombs is truly sovereign in terms of power politics. As long as we do not have any, we must make do with transatlantic nuclear participation and are, as Donald Trump suggests, dependent on the whims of the USA. Germany has repeatedly tried to get France to let Berlin have a say in the force de frappé or at least to co-finance it; we all know that whoever pays decides.
Paris has always strictly rejected the step that would at least indirectly make Berlin a nuclear power. If France were to succeed in establishing itself as the EU’s sole nuclear guarantor, Berlin would no longer be subordinate to Washington in the nuclear field, but also to Paris. The demand for a German bomb has been heard repeatedly for years. It could soon be heard again.
This article was previously published in the German daily newspaper Junge Welt here. Translation to English by UWI.