While the world focuses on the many ways in which the Israel-Hamas war is reshaping the geopolitics of the Middle East, western powers are also contending with its impact on their societies and domestic politics. The worry is not only about an immediate regional spill-over, but about repercussions in Paris, Berlin, London and beyond.
Given the tortuous histories of France and Germany, rising antisemitism in both countries is of particular concern in the wake of the 7 October Hamas massacre in Israel and the Israeli government’s retaliatory war. In France, which has the largest Jewish and Muslim communities in Europe, events could potentially pit two minorities – both of which have reason to feel systemically and historically victimised and persecuted – against one another. In Germany, the weight of the second world war needs no explanation.
Leaders in both nations have addressed the unacceptable rise in antisemitic acts. Germany’s vice-chancellor, Robert Habeck, recorded an unflinching, direct 10-minute video statement. He posited that Israel’s security was a part of Germany’s Staatsräson, emphasising a responsibility that was both collective and deeply individual to each person in Germany. Habeck reminded Germans – three times – that the Holocaust occurred within living memory. This was a caution that these events must not be allowed to slide into the haziness of historical time – but remain real and present.
In France, Emmanuel Macron issued a similar warning, but chose to do it at France’s most prestigious masonic lodge, Le Grand Orient de France, known for its anticlericalism and devotion to reason and Enlightenment values. This is a place of pure intellectualism, ideas and rhetoric, disconnected from embodied forms of belonging. When the word “Jew” was finally mentioned, it was to stress that “persecuting a Jew is always a form of persecution against the republic”. This was the reverse of Habeck’s attempt to bring listeners closer to the human experience: Macron spoke of persecution as an abstraction.
The shared shame that is prompting these different warnings reveals the blindspots and diminishing returns of such appeals today. Perhaps above all, it reveals the identity crises at the heart of the EU’s most powerful countries.
Germany has over the past two years seen its confidence in mercantilism as a tool for democracy exposed as immoral, its reliance on comfort as a hallmark of success challenged, its industrial prowess tested by dependence on China and its pacifist character recast by the necessities of war. A resurgence in antisemitism may feel like a challenge to its last fundamental truth. And so Habeck’s stark reassertions of these truths were necessary, but also desperate.
Macron’s words revealed the shortcomings of a universalism that, because it asserts timeless republican values, cannot allow a revisiting of the past as a real place, with real suffering. Hence the difficulty in coming to terms with both antisemitism and colonialism, which are reduced to offences against the ideals of the French republic rather than crimes against people. That fetishisation of words over truth is partly what allows a party such as Marine Le Pen’s National Rally to shamelessly march against antisemitism.
When the republic becomes an abstraction, it becomes an empty space on to which anyone can project the vilest of fantasies; when the victims of persecution are no longer flesh and blood, they can be embraced or rejected, as can the persecutors. Le Pen and her crew (in common with many other hard-right parties) redefine what constitutes a crime and what constitutes a victim. The Jews (who the National Rally and its predecessor, the National Front, have persecuted from their inception) are granted victim status by the National Rally when it can find more convenient scapegoats – in this case, Muslims.
There is a paradox in all this. Habeck’s choice of the plainest and most direct words conveyed authority and honesty. But it also served to highlight that these words can no longer do the work on their own without a new national story in which Germany recasts itself as a different kind of success – removed from both the nightmare of the Holocaust and the mercantilist peace that sustained the country through the cold war and reunification, but now feels threadbare.
Macron’s narrative, meanwhile, shows the limits of storytelling when it is unwilling to address hard truths. Where Habeck lacks a story, Macron lacks truth. And neither country can move forward: Germany because it is trapped by the truths of the past, and France because it refuses to acknowledge them by sticking to an increasingly hollow story.
In this context it is difficult for convincing new narratives to emerge – narratives that incorporate the past but also allow for the crafting of new national identities. With a war raging in Europe itself and far-right parties resurgent within the continent’s democracies, such “identity failures” threaten the EU’s cohesion and capacity.
Now the war in the Middle East makes this threat even more pressing. The leaderships of both France and Germany are allowing their shortcomings to be weaponised by those who stand to gain from this vacuum. Much has been written about the failure of the EU to play a role in the Middle East – but leadership cannot emerge from Brussels while its founding democracies shy away from their own reconstruction.
Catherine Fieschi is a political analyst. She is is a fellow at the Robert Schuman Centre of the European University Institute in Florence and author of Populocracy
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