Merz, Macron, and Europe’s Imperial Rebirth
From Atlanticism to sovereignty
Constantin von Hoffmeister explains why Germany and France’s growing military partnership might be the first step towards a truly sovereign European empire.
The recent German-French Ministerial Council in Brühl, Germany, marks a notable advance in military collaboration between the two leading continental powers, even as the joint fighter jet initiative met obstacles. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and French President Emmanuel Macron stood together in the historic halls of Augustusburg Palace, the very site where Charles de Gaulle, the towering French wartime leader and founder of the Fifth Republic, once extended the hand of friendship to Konrad Adenauer, the first Chancellor of the postwar Federal Republic of Germany and architect of its democratic reconstruction, laying the groundwork for what became the Élysée Treaty, the landmark 1963 agreement that formalized close bilateral consultation and cooperation between the two nations on matters of politics, economics, and defense. The Ministerial Council produced concrete steps towards deeper integration in defense matters, particularly nuclear deterrence, with the Bundeswehr (German armed forces) set to participate in French nuclear exercises later this year and French Rafale jets deploying operationally to Nörvenich in North Rhine-Westphalia in Germany. Such developments, though framed within existing Atlanticist structures, carry the seed of something far greater: the awakening of a true European strategic consciousness that transcends the bureaucratic liberal European Union and its endless submission to external masters.
The American thinker Francis Parker Yockey (1917-1960), in his monumental work Imperium (1948), diagnosed the crisis of the West with unmatched clarity and called for the rebirth of Europe as a single, organic Culture-State-People. He rejected the petty nationalism that had torn the continent apart in the twentieth century and instead demanded a grand synthesis where the great nations of Europe would merge their destinies under a common imperial idea. Yockey understood that Europe’s High Culture faced mortal danger from materialism, liberalism, and above all the cultural and political domination exercised by the United States. The current moves by Merz and Macron towards expanded military cooperation—including work on the Combat Cloud system for networking weapons and continued collaboration in critical technologies such as artificial intelligence, space, nuclear fusion, and quantum research—represent modest yet real progress along the path Yockey charted. Europe is beginning, even haltingly, to think in terms of its own power and survival rather than perpetual dependence.
Is a new continental order emerging beneath the surface of European politics?
