Our European Problem

As EU elites would have it, the EU national is a citizen of a federal state currently under construction. That’s why Western European leaders have been transferring unprecedented amounts of sovereignty over the last decade from their liberal democratic nation-states (at times against the wishes of their own peoples) to supranational institutions. What’s the primary motive behind the single currency or, for example, the EU’s nascent Common Foreign and Security Policy? The intention is to consolidate power. There’s no better way to enable “Europe,” most Western European leaders believe, to compete in the post Cold War world. Okay. Notwithstanding questions about democracy, sovereignty, and accountability, that is.

But what does all this mean for the transatlantic relationship? “We Europeans want to assert ourselves as Europeans,” says a French defense ministry official. Our lack of unity in the past meant “the Americans always had free rein,” wrote the senior economist of one of Germany’s leading banks in the German weekly Der Spiegel recently. Not surprisingly, then, Americans see Europe’s new Security and Defense Policy, for example — the Western European ambition to beef up their military capability — as “burden-sharing”; Western Europeans see it mostly as an important step to “power-sharing.” Okay, too. The Americans have said for years that they want the allies to become more self-reliant. Why get squeamish when they make noises in this very direction? Well, truth is there’s an edge to this new Europe, and this time it’s not just French.

When Italian towns adopt American death row prisoners to lobby for, it’s hard to accept that the misplaced gesture arises merely from a sincere opposition to capital punishment. Everywhere in Europe you bump into the thesis that America is the “rogue superpower.” When the dispute erupted this spring over Europe’s (read: Germany’s) candidate to lead the International Monetary Fund, the Suddeutsche Zeitung labeled the U.S. approach as once more “America First through America’s Fist.” When Horst Koehler finally got the job, “Robin Hood returned home victorious,” wrote the weekly Die Zeit, with “an important victory for Germany, indeed for Europe.” Now, the other Europeans, including the French and the Italians, may not have been fond of the German candidate. But they quickly closed ranks to forge a common front against the Americans.

There are seemingly small but important self-deceptions that Republicans have come to engage in concerning foreign policy the last couple of years. One is that Europe matters less to the United States after the Cold War. They shouldn’t forget that 95 percent of U.S. air lift during operation Desert Storm came through bases in Europe — for which there remains no viable alternative. The other delusion? That “strong” Republican leadership in the White House by itself will be enough to reverse the depletion of American credibility in the Alliance that Bill Clinton’s feckless foreign policy has helped promote. It will help. But no matter who sits in the Oval Office, there’s no escaping the fact that today, a less dependent Western Europe is redefining itself and renegotiating the transatlantic relationship.

The scales need to fall from American eyes. Once upon a time Europeans pursued integration as a means of overcoming the malign nationalism that ruined the continent in the first half of this century. “Now,” concedes an adviser to the prime minister of one of the smaller, slightly Euro-skeptical states, “the old destructive nationalism of the European nation-state may be slowly being replaced by a new Euro-nationalism.” How better to define this nationalism than in opposition to the United States?

Not so, say the Eurocrats, of course. The EU just wants to pursue legitimate European Union interests in the world. But how should Americans understand the EU agenda of heterogeneous Europe? We know what French or British interests are, but what exactly is, say, the EU interest in the Middle East? Is there any reason to believe that Finland and Greece have more in common in their interests toward Iraq than do, let’s say, Britain and the United States?

And what about Britain in all of this? Tony Blair wants to have his cake and eat it too. That means fully joining the new Europe and maintaining the UK’s special relationship with the United States. The UK remains a special ally of the United States. We share intelligence with the Brits, for example, that we would never pass on to some of our other dear European friends.

Remember a year and a half ago when a French official working at NATO was caught passing NATO targeting plans for Kosovo to a Serb diplomat in Brussels? What happens when the Brits move closer to Europe and the French (and the Germans) exact a price for their influence on the continent? Crude questions? Samuel Huntington, hardly a hotheaded extremist, has already referred to the European Union as an anti-hegemonic coalition.

A hallmark of Clinton’s foreign policy has been that others, adversaries as well as allies, set the agenda. We, in turn, are left to react and become the victims of the agendas of others. This leaves American foreign policy in a miserable state — and parts of the world in quite a fragile position. Governor Bush has hinted he favors a NATO-style alliance in Asia. He ought not forget that, if it is to serve as a model, the old NATO itself is in need of some serious work.

Jeffrey Gedmin is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and executive director of the New Atlantic Initiative.