Part I - The findings
3 - Sovereignty is indivisible
Sovereignty cannot be shared. It is total or it does not exist: a partially sovereign state is not half sovereign, it is vulnerable on all fronts. To cede an essential lever is to accept that decisions made on that lever by others condition all the others. Currency conditions industry. Industry conditions employment. Employment conditions the social fabric. The social fabric conditions national cohesion. National cohesion conditions the capacity to defend the other levers. Pulling on one thread unravels all the rest, which is why partial or supranational sovereignty is a contradiction in terms.
French history over the last fifty years is its involuntary demonstration. Every time a government has attempted to pursue a sovereign policy on one lever while accepting external constraints on the others, it has failed. Mitterrand in 1983 wanted a sovereign industrial policy but without calling into question the European monetary commitments: the markets got the better of him in eighteen months. Chirac wanted an independent foreign policy but without leaving the integrated structures of NATO: diplomatic independence remained largely rhetorical, with one exception. In 2003, France refused to participate in the invasion of Iraq and cast its veto at the UN Security Council. This was a real sovereign impulse, saluted the world over as an act of resistance to American pressure. But it remained isolated, an act of diplomatic sovereignty within a globally vassalized framework, which did not prevent France from remaining integrated into Atlanticist military structures nor from continuing to bear European constraints on all other levers. An impulse is not a doctrine. Sovereignty does not manifest itself in isolated bursts: it is exercised permanently across all essential levers. Every attempt at partial sovereignty has produced the same result: a broken promise, a reasserted constraint, one more disappointment for the civic body.
The conclusion is simple and uncomfortable: there is no middle ground between full sovereignty and the absence of sovereignty. Arrangements, negotiations over margins, exceptions wrested at great effort from supranational frameworks - all of this is the management of dependence, not the exercise of sovereignty. If France wants to become sovereign again, it must be so completely on currency, on borders, on trade, on law, on defense. This is the object of the refoundation proposed in the following parts.