Rishi Sunak’s meeting with Emmanuel Macron could signal a new period for cross-channel relations
The first Franco-British summit was held in 1976 in Rambouillet under Valéry Giscard d’Estaing and James Callaghan. Since then, these confabs have become almost yearly events. In the 1980s and 1990s François Mitterrand held 12; Jacques Chirac, his successor as president, 11. But Brexit, and its damaging fall-out, has meant that not a single bilateral summit between the two countries has taken place since 2018, when Mr Macron’s government sat down with Theresa May’s at Sandhurst.
A defining feature of the Paris event is that it is taking place at all. Brexit has emptied diaries of the regular meetings that used to bring ministers together. During the Boris Johnson years, cross-channel trust simply collapsed. After a period marked by the trading of insults and threats, the get-together is a positive sign that the two governments are ready to sit down and talk seriously.
The summit could help forge closer co-operation on some bilateral matters, such as nuclear energy, university research or student mobility. There may be an effort to curb the dangerous crossings in, as Britain wants—although France rejects outright the British idea of systematically returning to French soil migrants who make it across the channel.
The meeting may also set the stage for future talks on other crucial areas of co-operation, notably defence and security. Mr Macron has long argued that France and theshould work more closely with post-Brexit Britain in these areas. In that spirit, the heads of all five of the two countries’ intelligence services were invited to join the Sandhurst summit five years ago.
It has not escaped French attention that just days after the summit Britain, America and Australia are due to head to Washington,. This trilateral defence pact signed in 2021 sank a French contract to supply Australia with submarines, upset France’s Indo-Pacific security strategy and enraged the French government. “still casts a shadow on the relationship that London doesn’t seem to fully grasp,” says Georgina Wright, of the Institut Montaigne, a think-tank in Paris.
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