A single thread connects, per the Institut Thomas More report, the ten decisions in this installment: sovereignty given up and never replaced. The report examines the milk-quota system (1984), the ratification of the Single European Act (1986), the Maastricht Treaty (1992), the strengthening of SAFER - France’s land-management and pre-emption agencies (1999), the introduction of the euro (2002), the constitutionalization of the precautionary principle (2005), the signing of the Lisbon Treaty (2007), the sale of Alstom’s energy division (2014), the closure of Fessenheim (2020), and the Climate and Resilience law (2021). This is the densest installment of the series: rather than lining the ten up one by one, it groups them into three terrains - European integration, agriculture, and industry and energy.
European integration: four transfers of powers
The law n°86-1275 of 16 December 1986 authorized ratification of the Single European Act, which amended the community treaties to « créer un marché intérieur unique » (“create a single internal market”) through « l’harmonisation des règles nationales » (“the harmonization of national rules”) and the completion of the « quatre libertés » (“four freedoms”): goods, services, people, capital. The report sees a break with the Treaty of Rome: a first block of powers transferred to the Community, the abandonment of unanimity in favor of qualified-majority voting, and competition among member economies elevated to a core principle. Its verdict is harsh: GDP per capita rose by nearly 60% in the United States between 1993 and 2022, against just 30% in Europe. The report of the High-Level Group on the Future of Cohesion Policy (2022) - cited once, then, via an « Ibid. » footnote, cited again for the energy-dependency figures (91.7% for oil, 83.4% for gas) - estimates that « environ 135 millions de personnes » (“about 135 million people”) live in regions that « ont pris du retard » (“have fallen behind”). The report also faults France for not having demanded, in 1986, that taxation and social policy be included in the bloc of powers voted by qualified majority.
Signed on 7 February 1992, approved by referendum on 20 September 1992 (51.04% “yes”), the Maastricht Treaty had its ratification authorized by law n°92-1017 of 24 September 1992 and entered into force on 1 November 1993. The report credits it with three goals - peace through integration, economic power through budgetary discipline, and, ultimately, institutional integration - and concludes it was a « double échec » (“double failure”). A caveat on the report’s own chronology: it dates this assessment “thirty-five years after” the signing, then, further on, “thirty years after” for the same « vice originel » (“original flaw”) - yet from 1992 to the report’s 2026 publication, only thirty-four years have passed. It also notes the Stability Pact, violated « dès 2003 » (“as early as 2003”) by Germany and France itself: the same « vice originel » as in the Single Act, according to the report - sovereignty delegated with no higher sovereignty put in its place.
Decided by Maastricht but put into circulation on 1 January 2002, the single currency was, per the report, poorly prepared as early as 1986: France cut aid to companies while Germany kept its own, and kept interest rates high to peg the franc to the mark. Through the 1990s, the French corporate failure rate was double that of former West Germany, and between 400,000 and 450,000 mid-sized and large firms disappeared, according to Insee data. « La France a très mal préparé puis très mal utilisé l’euro » (“France prepared, then used, the euro very badly”), the report sums up, « s’en servant principalement pour masquer son laxisme budgétaire » (“using it mainly to mask its budgetary laxity”): public debt rose from €25 billion in 1981 to €3.4 trillion in 2026 - the report’s own sentence establishing this is internally inconsistent, giving €1,000 billion for 2022 and €2,200 billion for 2019.
The third European referendum, after those of 1972 and 1992, the treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe (TECE) - drafted by the Convention on the Future of Europe, chaired by Valéry Giscard d’Estaing - was rejected by 54.68% of French voters on 29 May 2005. The precise chronology that follows: Nicolas Sarkozy, elected 6 May 2007, announced at the European Council of 21-22 June 2007 a « traité simplifié » (“simplified treaty”) to be submitted to Parliament rather than referendum; the Lisbon Treaty was signed on 13 December 2007, then ratified by Parliament sitting in Congress on 4 February 2008. This is the very title the report gives the decision: « la rupture démocratique deux ans après le “non” au référendum de 2005 » (“the democratic rupture two years after the ‘no’ in the 2005 referendum”). It quotes Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, for whom « dans le traité de Lisbonne, rédigé exclusivement à partir du projet de traité constitutionnel, les outils sont exactement les mêmes […] la boîte, elle-même, a été redécorée » (“in the Lisbon Treaty, drafted entirely from the constitutional-treaty project, the tools are exactly the same […] the box itself has been redecorated”). The report writes that « depuis plus de vingt ans, cet épisode a agi comme un poison qui se diffuse lentement dans le corps politique » (“for more than twenty years, this episode has acted like a poison slowly spreading through the body politic”), and notes that no referendum has been held in France since.
Agriculture: two France-only regulations while its neighbors liberalized
Decided at European level in 1984 to cap a milk-production system in overcapacity (+60% since the creation of the Common Agricultural Policy in 1962, according to the European Commission), the quota system left member states wide latitude over internal allocation. France, per the report, turned it into « un instrument de stabilisation de son tissu agricole » (“an instrument for stabilizing its farming base”) rather than a lever for economic adaptation: decree n°84-481 of 21 June 1984 tied quotas to individual farms, while Germany and the Netherlands favored consolidation of their most productive operations - one caveat: the report dates the decision itself to 7 December 1984, a date that does not match the decree it cites as the founding text. The exit from quotas took effect in 2015: between 2015 and 2022, French production stayed nearly flat (+2%, according to Eurostat), against 15% to 20% growth in Germany and the Netherlands.
Created in 1960 and given a pre-emption right in 1962, SAFER (the land-management and pre-emption agencies) accompanied the structuring of French agriculture. In the late 1990s, as the CAP’s Agenda 2000 pushed Germany, the Netherlands, Spain and Poland to consolidate their farms, the Jospin government made the opposite choice: driven by Agriculture Minister Jean Glavany, the law n°99-574 of 9 July 1999 extended SAFER’s pre-emption right to the sale of shares in companies holding farmland. « Là où nos partenaires européens favorisent la croissance et la consolidation des exploitations, la France introduit un niveau supplémentaire de régulation qui complexifie les transmissions, freine l’entrée d’investisseurs et limite les dynamiques d’agrandissement » (“Where our European partners favor growth and farm consolidation, France adds a further layer of regulation that complicates transfers, discourages investors and limits expansion”), the report states, seeing in it a structural handicap still visible more than 25 years on.
Industry and energy: precaution turned into a rule, nuclear power in decline
Introduced by Maastricht after the 1992 Rio summit, originally limited to environmental matters, the principe de précaution (precautionary principle) was raised to constitutional status by the constitutional law n°2005-205 of 1 March 2005: France is, per the report, the only country to have written it into its fundamental law. The report attributes several setbacks to it: the 2018 ban on neonicotinoid insecticides drove the sugar-beet harvest down from nearly 40 million tonnes to 26 million in 2020, according to FranceAgriMer; the ban on GMO corn since 2008 coincides with French production falling from 16 million tonnes in 1990 to 13 million in 2025, while US production rose from 250 to 432 million; and the law of 13 July 2011 banned, « au nom du principe de précaution » (“in the name of the precautionary principle”), the exploitation of hydrocarbons through hydraulic fracturing - fifteen years later, France has, per the report, « jamais extrait le moindre cm3 de gaz de schiste » (“never extracted a single cm3 of shale gas”).
On 5 November 2014, American firm General Electric finalized its purchase of Alstom’s steam turbines for nuclear power and its electrical-grid business - a deal overseen at the time by Economy Minister Emmanuel Macron. « Symbole de l’abdication industrielle » (“A symbol of industrial abdication”), per the title the report gives the decision: industry’s share of French GDP, 24% in 1975, fell to 17% in 2000 and below 10% by 2025, according to Insee and Redécode research; manufacturing specifically now accounts for only 9.6% of GDP, against 18% in Germany, according to a Thomas More report from May 2026. More than forty large industrial groups - Technip, Alcatel, Arcelor, Pechiney, Essilor, Lafarge, PSA - passed under foreign control in 25 years. The report links the sale to the “loi Florange,” passed the same year, meant to protect « rentables » (“profitable”) sites: Florange’s blast furnaces, halted in 2012, never restarted despite the law.
Four months after a first reactor was shut down on 22 February 2020, Fessenheim’s second reactor stopped on 30 June, under decree n°2020-129 of 18 February 2020 - a decision stemming from the 17 August 2015 law on “energy transition for green growth,” which capped nuclear’s share of electricity at 50% by 2025. In the year that law passed, the share stood at 76.3%; the target, postponed to 2035, was then repealed by the law of 22 June 2023. The report calls it the « point d’orgue » (“culmination”) of an anti-nuclear policy dating back to the Jospin government, and links Fessenheim’s closure to the quiet abandonment, on 30 August 2019, of the Astrid fast-neutron reactor project (€738 million and forty years of research, according to a Senate report from July 2021). France’s energy-independence rate, which reached 50% in 1990, has stagnated there since; the French now pay around €0.19 per kWh, against €0.11 in 2009.
Law n°2021-1104 of 22 August 2021, the loi Climat et résilience (Climate and Resilience law), concentrates, per the report, « tout un catalogue de dispositions » (“a whole catalogue of provisions”): a requirement for schools to make students understand « les enjeux environnementaux, sanitaires, sociaux et économiques de la transition écologique et du développement durable » (“the environmental, health, social and economic stakes of the ecological transition and of sustainable development,” article 5); the extension of low-emission zones to every urban area of more than 150,000 residents (article 119); a ban on domestic flights where the train takes less than 2h30 (articles 144-145) - three routes actually cut, without stopping civil-aviation emissions from rising 4% in 2024, according to the DGAC (the civil-aviation authority). It also sets « l’objectif national d’absence de toute artificialisation nette des sols en 2050 » (“the national goal of zero net soil sealing by 2050,” article 191), in a country where the agricultural workforce has fallen from 1.5 million to about 400,000 people over forty years, and bars the sale of category-G thermal sieves - the worst-rated homes for energy efficiency (article 148).
What this installment finds
The thread running through these ten decisions is constant: sovereignty given up - to Brussels with the Single Act, Maastricht and Lisbon, to the euro without real budgetary discipline, to the precautionary principle against energy and agriculture, to SAFER and milk quotas against farm competitiveness - with no equivalent decision-making capacity put, per the report, in its place. Three internal wobbles compound the record: the date the report gives for the milk-quota decision (7 December 1984) does not match the decree it cites as the founding text (21 June 1984); its verdict on Maastricht is dated “thirty-five years on,” then, a few pages later, “thirty years on,” for a treaty signed in 1992; and a single sentence puts public debt at €1,000 billion in 2022 and then at €2,200 billion in 2019. The figures cited can be checked independently of the phrasing around them, that of an avowedly partisan think tank. One question this installment leaves open: who, or what, should have filled the place left vacant?
This eight-part series offers an outside reading of the report - it is not a publication of the Institut Thomas More. Read the full report (PDF, 112 pages, in French) - 1975-2025 : les 50 décisions qui ont coulé la France, coordinated by Jean de Belot, Tarick Dali and Jean-Thomas Lesueur, Institut Thomas More, June 2026.
