From the \u00c9vian G7 to the summit at the Quirinale on the C\u00f4te d’Azur, something is shifting in how Europe’s ruling class thinks. Less inherited twentieth-century ideological loyalty, more pragmatism in mobile formation. A reading of recent summits and the fractures emerging along Ukraine’s battle lines.<\/p>\n
Intense weeks lie ahead. The real turning point will come from NATO’s summit in Ankara. For now, one must look back at what has unfolded, which, setting aside reactions and the fallout from Donald Trump’s call for “restrictive measures” against Giorgia Meloni, an incumbent prime minister, makes for a peculiar arithmetic of power. A fortnight ago, at the furthest point of the Cap d’Antibes peninsula, where Villa Eilenroc thrusts nineteenth-century terraces into the Mediterranean blue and the late-June heat grows so dense it acquires the consistency of oil, Giorgia Meloni emerged from her car beneath Emmanuel Macron’s gaze. He waited for her before the Picasso Museum with the faintly theatrical courtesy of someone who knows he is staging a useful scene. The two of them, representing on paper the opposite poles of European politics; one leads a coalition built on Brussels rejection, the other a centrist convinced of deeper Union; found themselves smiling, brushing hands, signing a joint roadmap on defence, civil nuclear energy and space. It was the first bilateral summit between France and Italy since the 2021 Quirinale Treaty promised Rome and Paris a connection comparable to the one between Paris and Berlin.<\/p>\n
Sergio Fabbrini, who teaches political science at Luiss, put it with scholarly clarity: Meloni had deployed her tie to Trump in order to weaken the Union, and now, increasingly without Trump at her side, she finds herself forced back towards Brussels, starting with defence. In that phrase “forced back” lies the thread of a larger, slower mutation; it concerns not programmes but the grammar in which Europe’s decision making class organises its thought. For forty years, that grammar was built from fixed references: Atlanticism as faith rather than calculation; the Franco-German axis as an immovable pivot; the single market as destiny; enlargement as civilising mission. Stable geometries, fixed ones, inherited from the second half of the postwar era and for long reassuring.<\/p>\n
What the recent summits bring to the surface, from Antibes to \u00c9vian, is instead a new willingness to think in variable geometries; coalitions of purpose, temporal convergences, loyalties measured against interest rather than position. Interest that observers within the Berlaymont and Justus Lipsius, the palaces of the Commission and Council, have framed with a candour Europeans rarely permit themselves: what holds such arrangements together is interest, a shared advantage, not shared ideology.<\/p>\n
Just before, from 15 to 17 June, on the French shore of Lake Geneva, Macron closed his final G7 as president with the relief of one who pocketed more than expected. On Ukraine he secured on paper that Russia shows no serious willingness to make peace, promised more air defence for Kyiv and fresh restrictions on Moscow’s energy revenues. The week’s scene came courtesy of Trump, who on arrival threw across the table, in French, a “I am THE chief”, before Macron gifted him a Versailles dinner amid gilt and fireworks, whilst negotiations were being wrapped up with Iran on reopening the Strait of Hormuz; the same strait where two months earlier Europe had discovered its strategic nakedness.<\/p>\n
The question circulating and now cemented in Brussels is no longer whether the Atlantic alliance should be preserved, but how to distinguish the military apparatus of the alliance from the personal politics of its current occupant. Now the argument is recited without reserve at every level. It is certainly a subtle distinction but a risky one; treating the United States as a geopolitical constant and its president as a variable to be managed, coaxed, outmanoeuvred when necessary. Chatham House cautioned that the G7 format works only if members share fundamental values and trust one another, and that Trump’s presence renders every outcome reversible. The unpredictability of the American president can hollow out commitments the day after they are made. Learning to build on such sand is itself already a form of pragmatism in variable geometries. The mere expansion of the table signals intent: at \u00c9vian, beside the Seven sat Japan’s premier Sanae Takaichi for the first time, and five invited countries orbited around them; India, Brazil, Egypt, Kenya and South Korea, at liberty to choose which declaration to sign and which to decline. Nine final documents, each with its own coalition of signatories: no longer a creed to be accepted wholesale, but a menu to compose.<\/p>\n
Yet beneath this language of state flow the grey waters of a reality that escapes the communiqu\u00e9s. On Wednesday 29 June, at the entrance to a building in the Principality of Monaco, steps from the French border, a bomb concealed in a rucksack detonates. Three gravely wounded, among them Vadym Yermolaiev, oligarch developer of Dnipro. French investigators suspect Ukraine’s security service, the SBU. A woman with residence in Germany would be detained. Clarity remains absent. Yermolaiev had renounced Ukrainian citizenship in 2017, held commercial interests in occupied Crimea, and had been sanctioned by Kyiv in December 2023. The papers would report he was part of what Ukrainska Pravda had christened the “Monaco Battalion”: pro-Russia oligarchs who fled Kyiv alongside pro-Russian politicians, settled in the Principality for comfort, tax shelter and a semblance of safety. The Corriere della Sera headlined: “Bombs Against the Tycoon on Zelensky’s Blacklist”. It was a sign of a reality that war’s official account conceals; in Ukraine there operated sectors of the establishment who settled scores through violence, who sustained hidden ties with the Russian world, who from the shadows managed conflicts without space in official statements.<\/p>\n
In the background, that same night between 1 and 2 July, Moscow answered weeks of Ukrainian strikes on Russian infrastructure by unleashing a massive bombardment on Kyiv. Eleven hours of sirens, residential buildings struck, collapses, rescue work in rubble. Mayor Klitschko counted thirteen confirmed dead, more than eighty five injured, medics caught in an ambulance. Zelensky had warned beforehand on his X account that Putin was preparing “a massive attack”. It was the test of civilian resilience precisely when domestic Ukrainian politics fractures and European doubts thicken.<\/p>\n
Because that same night saw the true political crisis break open in Kyiv. Zelensky recalls Valerii Zaluzhnyi to the capital, former commander in chief of the army, now ambassador to the United Kingdom. He describes a “window of opportunity” to him, owing to a stabilising front and a society that holds firm, for staging presidential elections in autumn. He begs him not to run, for a public contest between them would fracture the country at a critical moment. Zaluzhnyi answered with two words: “I will”. In polling Zaluzhnyi stands at 73 per cent trust; Zelensky has crashed to 20 per cent following November’s corruption scandals. Were elections held, the general would beat the president in a run-off with 64 per cent. Zelensky, who two years prior had removed Zaluzhnyi from command precisely from fear of his rising popularity, discovers that popularity remains intact and rooted. The “sub-underground state” of Ukrainian politics, the quiet manoeuvring between factions who awaited their moment, resurfaces precisely when Ukraine should appear most united before Europe. In Poland Rzeczpospolita writes on how Ukrainian grain and refugees have transformed European backing for Kyiv into domestic controversy. In Germany the press asks whether Berlin truly wants a sovereign Europe or prefers to remain America’s workshop. The Frankfurter Allgemeine notes that whilst Friedrich Merz speaks of strategy towards Ukraine and a new inverted Ostpolitik, the von der Leyen Commission bleeds support vote by vote and Europe’s centre of gravity empties out.<\/p>\n
This is the moment when variable geometry meets its ultimate test: can European pragmatism hold when the object of that pragmatism itself, Ukraine, fractures politically and is struck by bombardment in the same night? Or endure the escalating conflict that sees Ukrainian strikes growing ever more precise and targeted towards Russia, conceived as a sequence of personal trips against Putin? The answer is not written. For the first time in years, Brussels holds no reassuring certainties about how the Union can move forward. Mario Draghi, in his competitiveness report, reminded us that without investments on the scale of 750 to 800 billion annually, Europe faces slow agony. Yet between the rhetoric of state and the reality of American tensions, Ukrainian fractures and Chinese threats, the gap widens. And the figures climb, forcing a hasty exit from numerous comfort zones consolidated until now.<\/p>\n
I return to Antibes, to the villa by the sea and the two leaders who held hands knowing they did not love each other. Marc Lazar, italicist at Sciences Po, remarked that Meloni and Macron attempted to build upon a rapprochement still fragile despite their disagreements; she strong at home and weak in Europe, he strong in Europe and weak at home, each useful to the other precisely through their asymmetry. Little enough, the sceptic will say. Yet it is the exact symptom of the mutation; two opposites at the same table because circumstances offer no better choice, extracting from that necessity perhaps a virtue. Optimism carries no obligation and does not come free. Still, for the first time in years I glimpse, along the horizon of this Europe that quietly calls into question its twentieth-century loyalties, something that resembles a bus. It will pass, surely. It falls to us not to let it slip away.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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