Macron, Trump, and the Question of the Nation

From the beginning of Donald Trump’s campaign for the presidency and throughout his administration, the most consistent point of orientation in his politics has been the priority of the nation. It informed the slogan “Make America Great Again,” which initially shocked political sensibilities, since it implied the accusation that previous bipartisan political leadership had stood by during a decline or even facilitated a loss of greatness. The priority of the nation similarly underpinned the formula of “America First,” as the designation of a foreign policy that would give greater attention to national interest and therefore break with established patterns of multilateralism. Trump himself has embraced the term “nationalist,” and this marks his difference from both the free trade internationalism that used to define the neoliberal Republicans as well as from the multiculturalism that dominates the identity-political Democrats.

Between those two alternatives, globalism and fragmentation, Trump has opted for the nation. With that choice, he put his finger on the forgotten category—class—in an era of growing inequality. “Nation” serves as the organizing principle for programs purporting to achieve vertical integration, the “whole nation,” i.e., a promise—whether fulfilled or not—of an inclusive nationalism. Trump’s nationalism therefore is better described as a national populism. This aspiration for inclusion outweighs a simultaneous function of exclusionary nationalism, the differentiation from other nations, although that aspect clearly plays a role as well, especially in immigration policies.

There is no need to document the hostile response that Trump’s emphasis on nation and national interest has faced. “America First” was misread as a dog whistle to bitter-ender fans of Charles Lindbergh, as if there were sufficient historical knowledge for many to imagine any intentional connection. Trump’s focus on sovereignty and unilateralism has led to strained comparisons with Erdoğan and Putin. (That his administration’s policies toward Russia have been notably tougher than those of the Obama administration typically goes unmentioned.) None of that helps us understand the phenomenon of Trump’s nation-thinking. Is Trump’s nationalism cut from the same cloth as the nationalist ideologies that led other countries, notably in Europe, into the wars of the last century? But Trump has been so far the most anti-war president in a generation, with a predisposition to wind down wars, not ramp them up. What kind of nationalist can he be?

Rather than looking for an answer by comparing him to dictators, it is more useful to point to the head of state of another liberal democracy, Emmanuel Macron, the president of America’s oldest ally, and ask how he addresses nationhood. He too, like Trump, has evinced an explicit elevation of nationhood and the indispensable significance of loyalty to a national tradition. No doubt, Macron and Trump work in different rhetorical registers, just as the national histories involve some incommensurable differences. Furthermore, the policies and politics of the two presidents differ enormously, due not least to the contrast between the centralism of France and American federalism, visible especially in the alternative responses to COVID.

Yet just as Trump invoked the validity of American history and values of the founders in his July 4 speech at Mount Rushmore—widely denounced by his critics as divisive and racist—so too did Macron unabashedly embrace French nationhood and the values of the French Republic in an important speech delivered on September 4 in Paris at the Panthéon. Comparing some points in the two documents allows us to take the pulse of national self-understanding in these two different settings. In the following, translations of key passages from Macron’s address are presented as important evidence in the debate over nationhood.

Of course there is another agenda in comparing the two speeches. In the context of the American political discussion, Trump remains a figure of controversy and a target of bitter criticism, certainly in academic circles. In contrast, Macron—like Angela Merkel—often functions as a measure of the good leader: if only our American president could be more like the European politicians—so goes the litany, part of a long liberal history of wishing that the United States could be more old-world. No doubt there are many differences between Trump and Macron, despite their brief, early “bromance.” Nonetheless we are going to discover uncanny similarities between the two, particularly a positive embrace of national identity. Yet if we find that Trump and Macron are in some points on the same page, then what? Either the liberal positive evaluation of Macron is wrong or the blanket condemnation of Trump needs revision—or, more importantly, we need to think about nation and nationalism in ways that are not a priori pejorative.

The two addresses were delivered in contexts laden with national symbolism, not only the sites, the Mount Rushmore and the Panthéon, but also the dates: American Independence Day and the 150th anniversary of the declaration of the French Third Republic in 1870 in the midst of the Franco-Prussian War. The Paris event was specifically staged as the naturalization ceremony for a group of new citizens, allowing Macron to highlight the importance of immigration in French history, but precisely therefore also leading to emphases on the virtues and values that bind the nation together, for all its diversity. Yes, France is a nation of immigrants, but France is also and emphatically a nation.

Becoming French and entering the Republic means, for Macron, a love of France, the land itself as well as its history and culture as a whole. In a remarkable passage that clearly indicates awareness of the concurrent wave of statue-toppling in the United States, Macron underscores the importance of a French patriotism grounded in the full legacy of the past, without censorship, without a cherry-picking of only the glorious moments: “To love our landscapes, our history, our culture as a whole, always. Both the Coronation of Kings at Reims and the Festival of the Federation in the Revolution—that is why the Republic does not take down statues and does not simply choose one part of its history, because one never only chooses a part of France: one chooses France. The Republic begins, as you understand, long before the Republic itself because its values are rooted in our history. And becoming French means embracing it all and embracing its language that does not end at its frontiers—as you well know—but it is one of the cements of our nation.”^[1] He conveys an appreciation of the long history of France, and so it is no mistake that he invokes the historian Marc Bloch, the founder of the Annales school. Macron appeals to the new citizens not simply to acquire a new passport but to internalize the full inheritance of the French past, endorsing the notion that identification with the French Republic also involves an internalization of the pre-Republican history. Hence his admonition against iconoclasm or the attacks on statues and memorials: as a citizen, one owns the whole history of the nation and does not have the option to curate it to one’s idiosyncratic taste.

It is no surprise that Macron fills the love of country with the familiar values of the Revolution—liberty, equality, fraternity—which however he interprets in view of the contemporary threat they face. The danger to republican values lies, at least in this speech, not in far-right heirs to Vichy but in the “separatism” of radical Islamists. Thus he invokes the principle of liberty with reference to the just opened trial of the terrorists who attacked Charlie Hebdo offices in 2015, five years after the crime. He similarly interprets equality as meaning equality before the law of the state, not Sharia law. Therefore fraternity requires an explicit condemnation of radical attacks on police and other representatives of the state: this is the opposite of the anti-police rhetoric associated with Black Lives Matter and Antifa. Macron’s blunt statement deserves quoting: “Our unique [social support network] system is only held together by always fragile ties among citizens, ties of respect and civility that can be broken at any moment by violence and hatred. For that reason, in the Republic, police officers and constables, magistrates, mayors, elected representatives, and, more generally, all those who fight against violence, against racism, and anti-Semitism play a decisive role. Therefore anyone who attacks the forces of order or elected representatives must face severe punishment: according to the law, never arbitrarily. Anyone who attacks the forces of order or elected representatives will not succeed.” France has already seen its measure of fatal attacks on police and soldiers, and only a month after this speech it would witness the gruesome beheading of a high school teacher, Samuel Paty, victim of an Islamist assassin because he had taught about freedom of expression, that is, a core Republican value. Yet Macron was certainly also well aware of the wave of anti-police sentiment that swept through the United States in the summer. Macron’s message: it is not true that “All Cops Are Bastards,” as the widespread graffiti during the American summer of 2020 proclaimed. On the contrary, he is objectively endorsing the “Blue Lives Matter” response: attacks on police are wrong. There is an unmistakable trans-Atlantic undercurrent that informs his speech.

Beyond country, history, and values, Macron also points to language. The cultivation of the French language, as a vehicle of communication but also as a gateway to the literary heritage, is a vital component of national identity. The scope of the claim deserves attention. The president of France argues that fluency in French and an appreciation of the cultural heritage are vital for the immigrant on a path toward citizenship. While the notion of a national language remains controversial in the United States, Macron is comfortable insisting on a shared language as congruent with a shared culture, close to what in Germany is called a Leitkultur, but with much greater prominence ascribed to the legacies of great writers: “‘My homeland is the French language,’ wrote Camus. Of course mastering French allows one to communicate, to converse with compatriots, to understand our law, and that is why language is a prerequisite to acquiring national citizenship. But mastering French is also a passport toward a culture, an incomparable history as large as five continents. It means access to the imaginaries of Hugo, Dumas, Zola, Malraux, Césaire—all of them honored here in the Panthéon. . . . Mastering our language is even more a matter of reaching the soul of nation, the eternal form of France. . . . Our language is the cradle of the Republic, even before it was proclaimed in 1792, because the Republic already took shape in the texts of Bodin in the Renaissance. . . . Our language is what holds us together, our people, our history. It is why Charles Peguy could exclaim: ‘the Republic, our French Kingdom.’ In France, for certain, everything begins with the words.”

This is a breathtaking description of the entwinement of language, literature, and nation, difficult to imagine any American politician proposing. Macron’s cultural nationalism mixes a few distinct components. Most prominently is the insistence—speaking to a group of new citizens from varied linguistic backgrounds—the importance of gaining French language skills. Nothing mitigates against knowing other languages, including their respective heritage languages, but Macron has no hesitation in treating French as the language of France. Furthermore Macron unapologetically privileges linguistic expression in works of high culture, especially literature; he posits a special relationship between literary creativity and its contributions to the language, which then in turn enriches the nation. It is not only the ideas of great authors that matter; it is the words they use and disseminate. Nor does he hesitate in asserting quality judgments as objective. In his view, some authors and some works are more important and, ultimately, better than others: it is not for nothing that he is speaking in the Panthéon. Given this hierarchy, he furthermore assumes as objective the canonic legacy and therefore the importance of a knowledge of the literary and cultural past, not as facile amusement nor as the target of a frowny hermeneutics of suspicion but as a matter of national substance and pride.

Defending the values of the Republic as well as the love of the nation remains, for Macron, a constant, indeed existential task. Because it is never fully achieved, every citizen is called upon to contribute to the shared project. For Macron, this has always been true throughout French history, but it is particularly urgent today, as the Republic faces a genuine threat: “The Republic is a transmission. The Republic is a will, never completed, always to be reconquered. And if it has survived since the Revolution, it is because across the centuries, a vision for the ages has linked all the women and men who dreamed it, who made it real, who defended it sometimes in the most tragic hours of our history, and who renewed it in the European project. And today, on this anniversary, it is not joy that predominates but a form of lucid gravity, as we face the menaces that weigh on the Republic.” The Republic is endangered, and he has already identified the threat: the hostility to liberty on the part of Islamist radicals, the subversion of equality by the separatism of Sharia law, and the breach of fraternity inherent in attacks on the police and other representatives of the state. Therefore Macron calls on the new citizens in front of him and by implication all citizens as well to participate in this indispensible transmission: the fulfillment of the Republican values inherent in the teleology of French national history.

Macron has not minced his words in defense of France, the nation and the Republic. French citizenship, he proclaims, involves an obligation to inherit a culture in order to contribute to a mission. The appeal is reminiscent of John F. Kennedy’s inaugural challenge to ask what one can do for one’s country. But what about Macron’s patriotism as a metric to evaluate Trump’s nationalism? The Mount Rushmore speech—delivered two months prior to Macron’s—bears remarkable similarities. It too celebrates the origins of a republic, the values of the revolution, and, as in Macron’s text, especially liberty. Thus Trump: “Our Founders launched not only a revolution in government, but a revolution in the pursuit of justice, equality, liberty, and prosperity. No nation has done more to advance the human condition than the United States of America. And no people have done more to promote human progress than the citizens of our great nation. . . . [The founders] enshrined a divine truth that changed the world forever when they said: ‘. . . all men are created equal.’ These immortal words set in motion the unstoppable march of freedom. Our Founders boldly declared that we are all endowed with the same divine rights—given [to] us by our Creator in Heaven. And that which God has given us, we will allow no one, ever, to take away—ever.”^[2]

Like Macron, Trump conveys an unbroken and unapologetic identification with the national founding in terms of liberty. For both, the foundation of the nation remains an obligation in the present that operates through tradition and teleology. Yet traditions can differ. While it may be a matter of liberty on both sides of the Atlantic, the gap between the political theology of American civic religion and French laicité with its anti-clerical background is self-evident. Macron underscores the right not to believe, while Trump emphasizes the durability of religion, a constant difference between political cultures in France and the United States that dates from the late eighteenth century. In addition, the two claims differ in their spatial scopes. Macron addresses how the value of liberty defines the French Republic and the French nation, as he welcomes new citizens into the national community. In contrast, for Trump the American articulation of liberty and equality has an external world-transformative status: human rights therefore apply everywhere. This is an ambitious assertion that conforms with the prominence of rights discourse in current American foreign policy, in contrast to the marginalization of human rights during the Obama administration. However one may judge Trump’s expansive claim—the notion that universal human rights are really to be understood as universal—it is difficult to see how this program for universal emancipation might be described as conservative, as Trump’s critics stereotypically claim.

Both presidents underscore the internal diversity of their respective nations: their nationalisms are distinctly inclusive. Thus Trump: “We are the country of Andrew Jackson, Ulysses S. Grant, and Frederick Douglass. We are the land of Wild Bill Hickok and Buffalo Bill Cody. We are the nation that gave rise to the Wright brothers, the Tuskegee Airmen—Harriet Tubman, Clara Barton, Jesse Owens, George Patton—General George Patton—the great Louie Armstrong, Alan Shepard, Elvis Presley, and Mohammad Ali.” The list deserves some scrutiny. Trump begins with two presidents. Not only has Trump’s foreign policy sometimes been described as “Jacksonian,” but the statue of Jackson in Lafayette Park across from the White House had recently been attacked by demonstrators; Grant statues have also come under attack, in San Francisco for example, even though he led the armies that defeated the confederacy and ended slavery. After the presidents, Trump lists representatives of different sectors: activism, athletics, invention, music, nursing, the armed forces, and space travel. Of the fifteen, six are African American. This diversity, both ethnic and social, stages the understanding of “nation” as inclusive.

One can only wonder if Macron or his speechwriters had read the Mount Rushmore speech as a model for the phrasing delivered in the Panthéon, which similarly lists heroic contributors to France, immigrants or of immigrant background: “It was September 4, 1870. The Empire had just been defeated at Sedan, when [Léon Gambetta] a young deputy of 32 years proclaimed the Republic from the balcony of the Hotel de Ville. [He . . .] was the son of immigrants, recently naturalized. . . . Marie Curie, born and raised in Poland, received two Nobel Prizes, decided to serve France in the trenches as a simple nurse. . . . Josephine Baker, born an American, chose France so her talent and energy could shine. She loved her adopted country so much as to risk her life for it by joining the Resistance. . . . Félix Eboué, the descendant of slaves, answered General de Gaulle’s call and was the first to plant the flag of Free France in Chad. . . . Gisele Halimi [from Tunisia . . .] advocated for the emancipation of peoples and took giant steps in the cause of women.”

Perhaps the Macron text borrowed from Trump’s model, or perhaps the rhetorical similarity merely reflects objectively comparable challenges in the contemporary definition of nationhood. Narrowly ethnic understandings of national membership, associated with parts of the fringe alt-right in the United States or with the old guard of the National Front in France, are inadequate to describe national communities, certainly in today’s America or France, but probably in the past as well. Yet cultural and genealogical diversity does not preclude shared loyalty and heritage. Both Trump and Macron project an inclusive definition of national community, inviting all, regardless of background, into a culture of shared patriotism.

The two speeches converge but also differ with regard to the question of a present danger. We have seen Macron call out the threat that Islamism poses to the Republic and its values, and he would recur on October 2 in a speech dedicated to this topic of separatism. It is likely that the celebratory character of the event in the Panthéon mitigated against any extensive discussion of threat, but it is nonetheless there, an ominous danger as well as an exhortation to the new citizens—as representatives of the nation in general—to be vigilant. In contrast, at Mount Rushmore, in the midst of the summer of the riots, the attacks on national symbols, and the explosion of cancel culture, Trump addressed the issue directly: “Angry mobs are trying to tear down statues of our Founders, deface our most sacred memorials, and unleash a wave of violent crime in our cities. . . . One of their political weapons is ‘Cancel Culture’—driving people from their jobs, shaming dissenters, and demanding total submission from anyone who disagrees. This is the very definition of totalitarianism, and it is completely alien to our culture and our values. . . . In toppling the heroes of 1776, they seek to dissolve the bonds of love and loyalty that we feel for our country, and that we feel for each other. Their goal is not a better America; their goal is the end of America. . . . In its place, they want power for themselves. But just as patriots did in centuries past, the American people will stand in their way—and we will win, and win quickly and with great dignity.” Trump conveys a characteristic self-confidence; in the Panthéon, Macron was more circumspect with his reference to “lucid gravity.” Nonetheless both identify opponents as fundamentally hostile to the respective national missions, and both appeal to the citizenry to come to the defense of the national communities and their values.

To be sure the personal styles of the two presidents could not be more different, as are the rhetorical textures of the speeches: French high culture versus Fourth of July oratory. Nonetheless they both affirm the validity of national identity: not only its presence but the appropriateness, indeed urgency, of a positive internalization on the part of the citizen—pride in one’s nation, love of country, patriotism. As mentioned earlier, Macron inserts a passage from historian Marcel Bloch. It is moving: “France is the homeland from which I would not know how to uproot my heart. I have drunk at the springs of its culture. I have made its past my own. I only breathe well beneath its sky, and I have taken my turn defending it to the best of my ability.” That is the benchmark of an affective loyalty to one’s nation, and the sentiment underpins Trump’s discourse as well as Macron’s, no matter how different the idiom.

What then to make of this juxtaposition of two accounts of nationality that display such remarkable resonance with each other? Why do these two different presidents appeal to nation in ultimately similar, if not identical, manners? We can contextualize this convergence and attribute it certainly to the historical moment, whether understood as multipolar or, alternatively, as one of post-globalization. In either case, the reassertion of national sovereignty emerges as a strategy as well as a challenge to vestigial assumptions regarding any inevitable international governance. Brexit as a challenge to the European Union is part of this mixture too (no matter that Macron is a strong supporter of the EU and a vocal critic of Brexit). Against this backdrop, “nationalism,” to use Trump’s term, or national populism becomes relevant. In the highly polarized and overheated American debate during the lead-up to the election, critics have zeroed in on Trump and the Mount Rushmore speech in particular. Yet the Mount Rushmore ideas are congruent with Macron’s at the Panthéon: the positive identification with national history, the opposition to attacks on historical statues, and the concern with the attacks on national cohesion.

Trump’s economic agenda is without a doubt more populist than Macron’s. Yet one can claim that Macron is, in terms of nationalist insistence, even firmer than Trump, with the celebration of a single national language and endorsement of a national cultural canon—a canon of great works—as vital to citizenship. Some of this difference might be attributed to the much greater centralization in the organization of French culture and education, but it is surely not only that. The fragmentation of American culture and society may be greater—how to measure that quantitatively?—and the animosity toward particular American legacies much more embedded in the sensibilities of the internationalist cultural elite than in France. Whether the elite, the educational establishment, and the culture industry have been successful in extirpating those legacies and traditions from the population at large in the United States, the nation as a whole, whether national self-confidence is still allowed—this is the cultural political question of the moment.

Notes

1. “Discours du Président de la République à l’occasion de la célébration du 150ème anniversaire de la proclamation de la République, au Panthéon,” September 4, 2020.

2. “Remarks by President Trump at South Dakota’s 2020 Mount Rushmore Fireworks Celebration,” July 4, 2020.