London, England
THE OLD JOKE said that in an ideal Europe the British would run the police, the French the restaurants, the Germans the trains, the Swiss the bureaucracy, and the Italians the opera. In a nightmare Europe, the restaurants would be British and the police German, while the railroads would be controlled by the Italians, the French would do the bureaucracy, and the Swiss would take over the opera. But nobody ever imagined that there would be a European army, and until recently the very phrase would have had a ludicrous ring, an oxymoron on the lines of “Canadian aggression” or “the Cuban tradition of liberty.”
Suddenly, though, Europe has an army. It is not a very impressive force, and it exists mainly on paper — 90,000 lightly armed troops, 350 combat aircraft, and 80 warships supposedly available for missions within 60 days, a not-very-rapid reaction force whose purpose is hard to see. Britain’s contribution is large — 24,000 soldiers, 72 airplanes, and 18 warships. This might seem reasonable, since Britain’s are the most serious forces in Europe, which is not saying much. Currently, most of our submarines are in dock, the army’s rifles don’t fire, and its radios are hopelessly insecure, while the Royal Air Force’s bombs don’t go off and a general shortage of ammunition means that naval gunners must shout “bang” during firing training, to save shells.
We in Britain are not supposed to call the new Euroforce an army, since to do so will embarrass the government and alert a bored and complacent electorate to the gathering speed of European integration. Our continental partners laugh behind their hands at this fiction, but do not mind very much so long as we take part. The president of the European Commission, Romano Prodi, has helpfully suggested that we call it “Margaret” or “Mary Jane” if we wish, though it will still be an army even so. If this jest was meant to be a tribute to Margaret Thatcher, it misfired. For the creation of the Euroforce has brought the former prime minister out of retirement and into her first full-scale conflict with Prime Minister Tony Blair, who has until now had her qualified approval and at least pretended to respect her legacy. They are now out of love for good. She attacked Blair’s support for the force as “monumental folly” and huskily declared “I prefer NATO and I prefer the great alliance between Britain, Europe, and America. It is that which was of great benefit to the world. We lost a lot of people on the continent defending the liberty of our country and the countries of others and we must never forget NATO is the key to European security.”
Continental Europeans would prefer to forget. They resent Britain’s long manipulation of the balance of power in the European continent. Since the 16th century, London’s scheming has managed to defeat several projects for a united Europe of one kind or another, leaving Britain to get on undisturbed with developing liberty, the rule of law, and free trade. Perhaps the cleverest achievement of British diplomacy in the 20th century has been to draw the United States into the game — on the perfectly reasonable basis that a European superpower will turn out to be at best cool towards America and at worst actively hostile. French hostility towards NATO when it mattered, along with skeptical continental attitudes to the Reagan bombing of Libya and the Gulf War, tend to confirm this fear.
In the years since the end of the Cold War, Britain has attached her armed forces to American operations in the Gulf and the Balkans, to keep alive the idea of a “special relationship” that few Americans have even heard of. But the State Department and the Clinton White House have responded by supporting the idea of European integration, seeing it — quite wrongly — as a flattering imitation of U.S. federalism and a democratic project, when it is in fact statist, bureaucratic, centralized, and far more like a constipated version of the Soviet Union than it is like the vision of the American Founding Fathers.
This week at a conference in the French Mediterranean resort of Nice, the European state will move swiftly towards nationhood. It already has a flag, an anthem, a supreme court, a currency, a toy parliament, and the makings of a rather illiberal constitution. Now it seeks — among other things — its own federal police force and prosecutor, a common airspace and its own military command. Like most European Union bodies, this new army, or “Margaret” if you prefer, will grow to its full power by slow degrees. Year by year it will become more important and obtain more control over the armed forces of all Union members. Again, like many EU projects, it will be more significant for what it prevents than for what it permits. And the main thing that it will prevent is the maintenance of the transatlantic alliance between the world’s two foremost rule-of-law democracies. A new world order really is in the making, but it is not necessarily one that will please Americans or increase the liberty and prosperity of mankind.
Peter Hitchens is the author of The Abolition of Britain (Encounter Books).
