THE ELECTION VICTORY of Spain’s antiwar Socialists in the wake of al Qaeda bombings has left American commentators worried. The war on terrorism, it seems, is endangered by what Italy’s Corriere della Sera calls “the spirit of Munich . . . blowing across Europe.” And that spirit appeared to be blowing at gale force on Thursday morning, when Poland’s president Aleksander Kwasniewski told a radio station that his country’s troops might pull out of Iraq ahead of schedule, in early 2005. That afternoon, he complained about American intelligence failures in Iraq to a group of French journalists. “We were misled with the information on weapons of mass destruction,” he said, later adding, “This is the problem of the United States, of Britain, and also of many other nations.”
When the story was trumpeted in the international press as evidence that America’s antiterrorist coalition was crumbling, Kwasniewski backtracked, professing himself “very disappointed” that incoming Spanish prime minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero would bring Spanish forces back from Iraq. And Kwasniewski’s staff sought to defuse the controversy by telling the Warsaw daily Rzeczpospolita the next day that Agence France-Presse was to blame. The Polish word that was translated as “misled” or “led into error,” staffers insisted, would have been better rendered by “tantalized” or “deceived.” Whether or not this is a distinction with a difference, the official Polish Press Agency (PAP) had translated the word exactly as AFP had: “misled.” The same story had apparently been fed to National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, who said she thought the Poles had been “a bit misinterpreted.” A State Department spokesman added, “This isn’t something that worries us.”
It should be. The problem is not simply that Poles oppose their country’s mission in Iraq by 53 percent to 42 percent, according to a mid-March survey taken by the Polish company CBOS. It is not simply that the Spanish troops Zapatero has promised to withdraw serve in the Polish sector, and their departure will cause real logistical difficulties. It is not simply that senators from both parties in the ruling coalition–the Union of Labor and prime minister Leszek Miller’s Democratic Left Alliance–held a press conference on Thursday to urge withdrawal, complaining that Poland’s leaders, “in the face of firm opposition by France and Germany, sped us into a war for which there is neither social approval nor money.”
The big problem is that, in terms of European Union politics, Poland’s interests and Spain’s are more tightly linked than the interests of any other pair of member countries. These two are the E.U.’s Siamese twins. As one goes, the other very well may follow.
Poland’s and Spain’s fates were joined by accident at the E.U.’s Nice summit in December 2000, when German chancellor Gerhard Schröder sought to increase his country’s representation on the E.U. Council of Ministers. Until Nice, the “big four” countries (France, Germany, Britain, Italy) had all had the same weight in votes, since they had virtually identical populations–60 million, give or take. With the addition of the East German lands, however, Germany was now a third larger than the others.
France could not countenance being consigned to the second tier in the council of ministers, and Jacques Chirac fought Schröder with all his negotiating might. But that might was limited, because, once France rejected population-based weighting for a bigger country, it could not impose it consistently on the smaller ones. Keeping the balance between France and Germany was achieved by a Faustian bargain. Poland and Spain were enlisted on the side of the status quo with a promise of voting rights just a smidgen less powerful than those of the Big Four. So Europe now had a Big Six.
The big loser from Nice was France, which saw its desire for a strong European central authority hamstrung. The big winner from Nice was Britain, for exactly the same reason. It got the kind of Europe it had always desired–an alliance of disaggregated nation-states, a trading bloc–without having to dirty its hands to fight for it. The Europe that existed on September 11, 2001, had recently become a different kind of Europe than had ever existed before, a British Europe. This was “New Europe”–which was never just an idea but a political regime.
And, because of the Hispano-Polish mistake, it looked like it would go on forever. Europe could not coalesce as an alternative pole to the United States unless it could speak with one voice. But any majority-voting arrangement that would make that possible would be opposed by the “semi-bigs”–Poland and Spain–whose votes (and finances) were imperiled by European unity and self-assertiveness.
The E.U.’s Brussels summit last December, meant to debate former French president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing’s draft constitution, failed so spectacularly that many European observers thought the E.U. had reached terminal gridlock. Unifying Europe meant getting rid of the weighted-voting system and replacing it with Giscard’s majority-voting one. And Poland and Spain would not let that happen. Ever.
“The Poles have saved us,” was the line in one British paper. But it could just as easily have read “Saved by Spain.” The British order in Europe looked unlikely to end because Poland’s and Spain’s interests looked unlikely to change. And about the most stable element in this mix was the Spanish government. Sixty-one percent of Spaniards told pollsters this winter that unemployment was the most important issue on which they voted. They certainly weren’t going to kick out José María Aznar’s Popular party, which had entered office in 1996 with unemployment at 22 percent and had cut it in half.
So, just as significant for the antiterror alliance as Zapatero’s reaffirmation of his promise to withdraw Spain’s troops was his announcement that Spain would drop its obstruction of the European constitution. Zapatero has decided to trade his country’s weight in the council of ministers for a personal position at the ideological prow of European diplomacy. Poland is now all alone in blocking the constitution, and will be exposed to the full political wrath of France and Germany, which it cannot withstand.
It is wrong to assume that European Commission president Romano Prodi was having some kind of nervous breakdown when he took the opportunity, just hours after the Spanish elections, to express his hopes for the European constitution. He saw to the heart of the matter. The Madrid bombings are the E.U.’s Boston Massacre or Alamo–an outright disaster and a bloodbath that is also a founding event. Last Tuesday, Chirac and Schröder met in Paris to discuss fighting the “roots of terrorism.” French foreign minister Dominique de Villepin helpfully identified the “two crisis points that nurture terrorism: the Middle East and Iraq.” Schröder gave a nod toward transatlantic cooperation. Chirac did not. French and German officials looked forward–“the sooner the better,” as Chirac put it–to relaunching work on the European Constitution. And interring, not just as a concept but as a political fact, “New Europe.”
Christopher Caldwell is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.
