RUTHFULLY YOURS

But Mr. Macron’s posturing aside, the French are nationalist to the core. Ask the European parliamentarians and their staffers who must make the expensive, time-consuming, carbon-emitting trip from Brussels to Strasbourg once a month to maintain the absurd fiction that French Strasbourg is the home of the European Parliament. Ask any European negotiator who has tried to prune back the Common Agricultural Policy, a giant boondoggle under which France is the largest recipient of funds. Ask any Italian diplomat about French policies in Libya. Ask any American negotiator about France’s approach to trade. Ask any German diplomat who has had a few drinks.

French diplomacy under President Macron is as nationalist as ever. His core objective is to shift EU economic policy in France’s favor. Mr. Macron hoped introducing market-based reforms in France would persuade Germany to loosen the EU purse strings and give Paris more fiscal running room. Then, perhaps, the resulting boost to the French economy would reconcile public opinion to Mr. Macron’s reforms. But he has not made much progress, in part because the German government is too weak to take large political risks. Now he is facing voters’ wrath.

It is ironic that it was a “green” fuel tax that sparked the rioting across France. From the standpoint of the elites who manage France’s international portfolio, France’s climate policy has been a great success. As they see it, shrewd French diplomacy brought the world to Paris in 2015 to resolve a global problem and draft a climate accord that lays the blueprint for humanity’s green future. For Mr. Macron and his associates, this is all about Making France Great Again while saving the planet. It is a glorious achievement; the French should be thrilled.

They are not. Like peasants complaining that the splendors of Versailles did nothing to feed their children, French van drivers, commuters and farmers thronged the streets across the country. They don’t want grandeur and they don’t want international summits. They want bread—or lower fuel prices, which is much the same thing.

Mr. Macron’s ambitions are being thwarted not by French nationalism but by German nationalism. In their own tortured way, the Germans are as nationalistic as the French, even if no one in Germany’s professional elite can acknowledge it.

How can we tell that Germans are nationalistic? By what they do and don’t do. After World War II, Germany took in between 12 million and 14 million German refugees expelled from Poland, Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union. There was grumbling, but by and large the newcomers found places to live and settled down. The transition for the one million non-German refugees who came to the country in 2015, however, has been much less smooth. The political reaction continues to wound Angela Merkel’s government and the political establishment.

Similarly, Germans have paid roughly €2 trillion to lift East Germany in the years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, but they fight any suggestion that they should show that kind of solidarity to Italy or Greece. The Federal Republic of Germany is a “transfer union” in which rich areas subsidize poor ones on a very large scale. Germans do not want the EU to work that way. This difference in attitude exemplifies how nationalism works: You do things for “your own” people that you would never do for others.

One reason German public opinion is so suspicious of a transfer union is that many ordinary Germans still do not trust France. This perhaps is what Mr. Scholz was getting at. As long as France clings to its permanent seat on the Security Council, how truly European-minded can it be?

Mr. Macron may have made a mistake by enacting unpopular economic reforms before getting firm German commitments on changes in the Eurozone. He is paying a high political price for the reforms but can’t point to stronger growth or German concessions to defend the reforms to voters. At the same time, his pursuit of grandiose diplomatic pageants, including the One Planet Summit and the recently concluded Paris Peace Forum, reminds Germans of all they dislike and distrust about France—while sending a message to ordinary French voters that he is more interested in strutting the global stage than in solving problems at home.