Let the Future Govern the Future

Gabriel Attal has apparently committed the unforgivable sin of saying out loud that Europe may need to become the “United States of Europe.” He presented it as the project of a generation, and the reaction was immediate: indignation, sarcasm, lectures from the guardians of old sovereignty, and the usual chorus of men who have spent decades explaining why nothing serious can be done.

Good.

Not because Attal is automatically right in every institutional detail. Not because the phrase “United States of Europe” solves anything by itself. Slogans do not build armies, budgets, borders, industries or democratic legitimacy. But because the scandal reveals something useful: the old French political class still believes it owns the future.

It does not.

France’s older political generations have had their turn. They inherited a country with a permanent seat at the UN Security Council, nuclear weapons, a serious industrial base, strategic autonomy as a doctrine, a deep administrative state, world-class infrastructure, and one of the most powerful cultural positions in the world. They had half a century to prepare France for the return of history.

What did they leave?

A country that talks endlessly about sovereignty but struggles to finance its army, secure its energy choices, control its borders, educate its children, sustain its industry, or influence events at continental scale. A country that invokes grandeur while discovering, war after war, crisis after crisis, that most of the instruments of power have migrated elsewhere: to Washington, to Beijing, to markets, to technology platforms, to demographic reality, and sometimes simply to those who still know what they want.

This is not only a French failure. It is European. But France has made a particular art of confusing vocabulary with power. We say “sovereignty” as if the word itself were a fuel reserve, a semiconductor factory, an ammunition stockpile, a demographic policy, a defense budget or a diplomatic coalition.

The old sovereignists should be asked a very simple question: sovereign with what?

With which army? Which industry? Which energy system? Which population pyramid? Which currency power? Which technological ecosystem? Which continental strategy?

For decades, France has preserved the liturgy of sovereignty while allowing the substance of sovereignty to erode. The flag remained. The instruments weakened. And now the same people who presided over that erosion, or applauded it from the sidelines, are outraged that younger leaders are asking whether the national frame is still sufficient.

That outrage is not an argument. It is a reflex of ownership.

The real question is not whether “United States of Europe” is a perfect formula. It probably is not. The United States of America was born from a particular history, geography and political culture. Europe will not become that by copying the name. A European federation, if it ever exists, will have to be something stranger, older, more multilingual, more legally layered, and probably less emotionally simple than the American model.

But this is precisely why the debate matters. Attal’s phrase is useful because it forces the question out of administrative fog. It asks, brutally: should Europe remain a coordination machine between declining medium powers, or should it become a political power?

That is the question many older politicians refuse to face.

They prefer the comfortable fiction that the French nation-state, standing alone, can recover the full strategic capacity it had in the age of de Gaulle. But de Gaulle’s France no longer exists. The world in which a medium European state could perform independence by balancing between blocs has disappeared. Russia wages imperial war on the continent. The United States is no longer a guaranteed adult in the room. China is a civilizational-scale industrial and technological competitor. The digital public square is not French. Supply chains are geopolitical weapons. Energy is strategy. Demography is strategy. Ammunition is strategy.

In that world, “sovereignty” cannot mean nostalgia for the old container. It must mean the ability to act.

If the national container no longer produces that ability, then defending it as an absolute becomes anti-sovereign. It becomes the worship of a shell emptied of its power.

This is where the generational dimension matters.

The old political class will not live with the full consequences of its caution. The young will. They will live with the Russian threat, the American uncertainty, the ecological transition, the debt, the demographic imbalance, the industrial hollowing-out, the artificial intelligence shock, and the collapse of the comfortable postwar assumption that someone else will always guarantee Europe’s security.

So yes: let Attal speak. Let Macron’s generation, and the one after it, test the limits of European federalism. Let them argue, fail, correct, design, negotiate, and invent. They may get it wrong. They will certainly get parts of it wrong. But they have more right to experiment with the future than those who already spent it.

This does not mean abandoning France. It means taking France seriously enough to ask where her power can actually survive. A France dissolved into a bureaucratic Europe would be a defeat. But a France trapped in theatrical solitude would also be a defeat. The choice is not between pure nation and pure empire. The choice is between forms of political scale capable of acting and forms incapable of acting.

A European power worthy of the name would need democratic legitimacy, defense capacity, industrial policy, border control, energy strategy, fiscal seriousness and geopolitical will. None of this will appear by chanting “Europe” any more than it appeared by chanting “France.” Federalism is not magic. But neither is sovereignty.

The honest case for a more federal Europe begins with humility: we failed to preserve enough power nationally, and we have not yet built enough power continentally. That is the gap. That is the work.

The fury against Attal is therefore revealing. It is not only about Europe. It is about succession. The old guard hears “United States of Europe” and understands, perhaps correctly, that the younger generation is no longer asking permission to inherit the ruins politely.

Good.

France does not need another fifty years of ceremonial sovereignty and practical impotence. It needs a serious argument about power. If the young leaders of France are willing to ask whether that power must now be built at European scale, they should not be silenced by those who made the question unavoidable.

The old farts, among whom I increasingly count myself by age if not by resignation, have had their chance. We have argued, postponed, moralized, triangulated, nationalized, Europeanized, denounced and explained. The result is before us.

The future belongs to those who will have to live in it.

Let them try.