“Our false friend America”, or nostalgia for Gaullism

This article was inspired by Mark Rousset’s work (Notre faux ami l’Amérique. Pour l’Alliance avec la Russie. Préface de Piotr Tolstoi. Edition Librinova, 2023) devoted to the opposition of American interests to the national interests of Europeans and the need for an alliance with Russia to preserve the sovereignty of European nations in the face of American hegemony. At the moment of the highest rallying of the EU and NATO around the United States to counter Russia, such an essay seems heretical. It is diametrically opposed to the direction of French policy in Europe and the policy of the European Union as a whole, as well as the information background of the leading media, but if we consider the author’s ideas in historical retrospect and in a modern social context, it would be a mistake to consider his book as the speech of an angry lone patriot. Fifteen years ago, M. Rousset published a book in defense of the idea of a sovereign Europe, which could become an independent center of power in the emerging world hierarchy. In fact, this is an idea that France was hatching after the end of the Cold War. F. Mitterrand and J. Chirac, following in line with the Gaullist tradition of French geopolitics and echoes of which were heard in the statements of the current president of France until February 2022. Its mainstay could be the EU under the leadership of a Franco-German pair, which together with Russia would form a European trio of conductors of continental interests in order to avoid subordination to US interests and not be hostages of the US-China rivalry. However, the format of the “European troika” (France – Germany – Russia) had no place in the new Western European architecture, based on a pair consisting of NATO and the EU, atlanticized after a large expansion. Thus, the development of the international situation in Europe went according to the worst of the scenarios predicted by the author. Meanwhile, despite the defeat in big politics, the ideas of the defenders of sovereignty have remained relevant both for business, which is painfully sensitive to American pressure, and for a wide but diverse range of voters who cast their votes to opposition political movements of the extreme right and extreme left, and not only in France. Their interests are focused on internal problems, and they see the main threat not as Russia, but in the loss of identity and sovereignty, and therefore yearn for the ”European” Europe of nation-states, which de Gaulle defended. For them, Russia is an abstract geopolitical entity, but not a hostile Other, but a positive example of countering the Anglo-Saxon global project aimed at vassalizing Europe.