The writer is president of France
In a few days, more than 200 international CEOs will arrive in Versailles to participate in an event entitled “Choose France”. Many of them will unveil investments in strategic areas. Since the first of these events in 2018, thousands of jobs and hundreds of factories have been created, with more than 200 new plants established in France in the last two years alone.
We are committed to rebuilding French industry and promoting our economic power. This will allow us to strengthen our public services and invest in our future. We are acting with unwavering determination at the national level, with the result that in 2022, according to an EY survey, we were for the fourth consecutive year the most attractive country in Europe for foreign investment.
However, this battle for reindustrialisation must of course also be fought on a European scale.
Since I became president of France in 2017, I have consistently supported the idea of European sovereignty. At first this was seen as wishful thinking, and sometimes perceived as too French. However, the EU has had to face two crucial crises in recent years. And, due to the Covid-19 pandemic and the war Russia has decided to inflict on Ukraine, we have recognized our strategic dependencies and have decided to take action to reduce them.
We Europeans have reached this crucial consensus a a summit in March 2022, also in Versailles. We agreed on the importance of keeping control of our destiny and paved the way for a more sovereign Europe, with concrete decisions on defence, energy and economic security.
We are no longer naive. Without compromising our openness, we act to protect our interests, our independence and our values and to assert our European economy and social model.
What we need now is a comprehensive framework to implement this European consensus on sovereignty. I propose a doctrine based on five pillars.
The first pillar is the most obvious: a commitment to competitiveness, greater integration and deepening of the EU single market, which is the first condition for creating European champions in the fields of clean technology and artificial intelligence.
By contrast, industrial policy, the second pillar, has long been taboo. But in recent months we have revamped this old concept and turned it into a powerful lever to meet the challenges of the ecological and digital transitions, as well as to meet the ambitions of our partners and rivals.
The European Chips Act will promote European research and development and manufacturing of semiconductors. The Net Zero Industry Act will simplify existing rules and bring more investment and expertise towards green and clean technologies.
In March, the European Commission announced changes to state aid rules to better support Europe’s strategic industries. This has been accompanied by decisive progress in the reform of the electricity market.
The third pillar is the protection of vital European interests and strategic assets. The EU has, for the first time, created a tool to block foreign takeovers of strategic European companies. And we must be bold when it comes to the issue of technological decoupling and tightening export controls.
Then there is reciprocity, the fourth pillar. It means our trade agenda should be ambitious and coherent with our broader political goals. It must therefore be sustainable, fair and balanced and pursue clear strategic European interests.
The last pillar of the framework is multilateral solidarity. Sovereignty does not mean self-sufficiency and the EU can only thrive in the context of global development. I invited the countries of the southern hemisphere to come to Paris in June to lay the foundations for a new international financial framework.
We must implement this doctrine without delay. We need to regain control of our supply chains, energy and innovation. We need more factories and fewer dependencies. “Made in Europe” should be our motto. We have no choice, as sovereignty is intertwined with the strength of our democracies.
For decades, the backbone of Europe’s economy has been a middle class in well-paying industrial jobs, confident that the next generation would be more prosperous than the last. At Versailles next week, and in the coming months, we Europeans will be able to demonstrate that our continent, the cradle of the Industrial Revolution, can once again be the home of thriving industry and shared progress.
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