Nuclear cloud hanging over the Europe of energy
The strategic agreement sealed a few days ago between Siemens (Germany) and Rosatom (Russia) is very bad news for the ‘Europe of energy’.
It is even worse considering that Siemens divorced the French nuclear power plant builder Areva before contracting its new marriage, which aims to create one of the world’s three or four leading companies capable of controlling the entire construction and supply chain for civilian nuclear power plants. Siemens, a minority shareholder in Areva in the days when Germany opted to phase out nuclear power generation, decided to become a major player in the sector when the energy crisis sparked a burgeoning of nuclear projects all over the globe: in China, India, the United States, the United Kingdom, Brazil and a number of Arab states interested in preparing for the post-oil age… Even in Europe, Italy, which had decided by referendum to pull out of nuclear energy, is now trying to make up for lost time. Against this backdrop, there is no question of Siemens being content with the scraps of such a gold mine! After failing to renegotiate a satisfactory new partnership with Areva, the management of the German group did not think twice about teaming up with the Russian public enterprise Rosatom, which has know-how comparable to that of the French firm.
This decision comes on top of other blows in the last few years to the principle of European energy solidarity, which is nevertheless reiterated at every summit in Brussels. The Germany of Gerhard Schröder had already set a poor example by signing a bilateral agreement with Russia for the construction of a gas pipeline under the Baltic Sea (North Stream), to cut out the middleman between the supplier country and its customer. Poland and the Baltic states reacted bitterly at the time to this German go-it-alone move. In the south-eastern part of the continent, another Russian gas pipeline project, South Stream, has seen several EU Member States (Bulgaria, Hungary and even Italy) or applicants (Serbia) double-dealing at the expense of the competing project Nabucco, designed to ensure Europe’s energy independence. The fate of Nabucco is still not clear in March 2009.
It is often said that the Franco-German tandem is the key driving force behind European integration. Its foremost function is forgotten: without agreement between Paris and Berlin, there is no union in Europe. If one or more other countries have misgivings on a major issue, Europe can be slowed, but its unity is not called into question. However, if Germany and France are on opposite sides, there is no longer one Europe but two!
In July 1993, violent global monetary turmoil assailed the French franc after having swept away, one after another, all the European currencies apart from the mighty German mark. Most experts recommended at the time to let either the franc or the mark float freely, exempted from the rules of the European Monetary System, the precursor of the euro. Political leaders were opposed because doing so would have caused the monetary and thus the economic interests – and in the longer term the political interests – of the two countries to diverge. There would have been two Europes. The Governor of the Bank of France at the time, Jacques de Larosière, came up with a solution by easing the rules of a system in which both currencies were able to continue to participate. The markets were impressed by this political will and cooled down: the road to the single currency was clear.
In 2009, the wrong combination of energy transport infrastructure and industrial alliances could have consequences as serious as those avoided in 1993: a Berlin-Moscow axis moving away from and little by little diverging from a London-Paris-Rome axis, to the great satisfaction of all those, in Europe and beyond, who want nothing more than our collective failure.
Last December, under the French EU Presidency, the 27 had the courage to agree on a common policy on energy and climate change. Nuclear energy and gas pipelines were not included. They urgently need to be put on the agenda. The survival of the European political project hangs in the balance.
Alain Lamassoure, 9 March 2009