Brussels, We Love You. Now Please Get Out of the Way.
France has a nuclear fleet, a Cartesian education system, and opinions about everything. Brussels has committees. This, in miniature, is the entire drama of European industrial strategy.
The facts are these: while Germany was switching off its reactors — a decision history will study with the fascination of a pathologist — France kept the atom, and the atom kept the lights on. Our electricity is among the cleanest and cheapest in Europe, which in Brussels counts as a suspicious achievement. The taxonomy wars — is nuclear green? — consumed years of summits that could have built actual power plants. Cartesian logic suggests: if it emits no carbon and powers the factories, it is green. Brussels logic suggests: another working group. We love Brussels. We do. But the working groups do not generate megawatts.
Meanwhile the industrial strategy unfolds in its usual two-step: Paris proposes, Berlin disposes, and the compromise pleases no one at the speed of a TGV. The Americans subsidize with the Inflation Reduction Act — vulgar, effective — and European industry quietly relocates across the Atlantic. The Chinese subsidize everything, elegantly and at scale. Europe responds with a regulation. It is not nothing, our regulation. It is simply not a factory.
And then there is francophone Africa — the relationship Paris conducts with the awkwardness of a family reunion where everyone remembers the past differently. The old arrangements are ending; the new ones must be partnerships or they will be nothing. The Sahel wants investment without tutelage; Dakar and Abidjan want French capital that behaves like capital, not like history. France knows this continent better than any Western power — the languages, the networks, the unspoken rules. Knowledge is only useful if it comes without condescension. The theatricality is French. The stakes, this time, are African. We would do well to listen more than we declaim.