IN 2017 EMMANUEL MACRON took to the stage under the domed amphitheatre of the Sorbonne in Paris to call for a more “sovereign”, autonomous Europe. Filled with as many abstract nouns as policy ideas, the speech came to mark the French president’s ambition for the European Union to toughen up, and stand on its own two feet. Seven years later, on April 25th, Mr Macron returned to the university with an altogether graver message: “Our Europe is mortal; it can die”. The underlying thread in Mr Macron’s long speech was one of Europe’s fragility in a darker world. He referred at times to the European project, narrowly defined as the 27 members of the European Union.

Its residents have over the decades come to assume that the EU is a fixed feature of the landscape; Mr Macron stressed that it is instead a construct that could, through the resurgence of nationalism, be undone. But he also spoke of Europe as a broader shared liberal-democratic space, “from Lisbon to Odessa”, a firm nod to the inclusion of war-battered Ukraine.