And another interesting article from the International Herald Tribune
on transatlanticism.

http://www.iht.com/articles/125649.html

What does Europe want? Rhetoric and reality

PARIS This is the second of two articles
.
Barely a week ago, Peter Struck, the German defense minister, told a
political forum in Berlin that Europe must become a world political
actor with a determining role, ready for "wide-ranging preventative
engagement." That required greater military capabilities, he said.
.
In the next days, the Defense Ministry said it would cut E26 billion,
or $32 billion, from previously budgeted programs to allow Germany's
military to fashion itself a kind of global reach. At the least, this
looked like a difficult ambition since there was no indication German
defense outlays would actually rise from a current level of 1.5
percent of gross national product, about half of West Germany's
targets of 25 years ago, and less comparatively than Italy spends now.

And another interesting article from the International Herald Tribune
on transatlanticism.

http://www.iht.com/articles/125649.html

What does Europe want? Rhetoric and reality

PARIS This is the second of two articles
.
Barely a week ago, Peter Struck, the German defense minister, told a
political forum in Berlin that Europe must become a world political
actor with a determining role, ready for "wide-ranging preventative
engagement." That required greater military capabilities, he said.

.
In the next days, the Defense Ministry said it would cut E26 billion,
or $32 billion, from previously budgeted programs to allow Germany's
military to fashion itself a kind of global reach. At the least, this
looked like a difficult ambition since there was no indication German
defense outlays would actually rise from a current level of 1.5
percent of gross national product, about half of West Germany's
targets of 25 years ago, and less comparatively than Italy spends now.
.
This comes in a period of relative estrangement between the United
States and parts of Europe, and at a time when the Bush administration
continues to see significant political elements in Europe incapable of
acting frontally against obvious threats to peace. Opposing this among
some of the United States' old allies, there is a description of the
administration as both systematically applying power and military
solutions to negotiable problems, and being instinctively drawn to the
use of the United States' predominant force in every kind of
relationship.
.
The recommended response from the Europeans who regard present-day
America in this way is to build the European Union into a credible
grouping that can look the United States in the eye from an equal
level of political and military power - an undertaking that Guy
Verhofstadt, the Belgian prime minister, insists on calling Europe's
"emancipation."
.
"The international emancipation of the European Union is both
inevitable and desirable," Verhofstadt wrote. "It means that the
European Union develops a credible international policy, which is
based on European defense. The United States sees the European defense
plans as a threat. To my regret, I've noticed that the United States
too often considers" European "integration running counter to its own
position of power."
.
Putting more money into defense, in part because it is said to be
America's gauge of respect, and the parallel creation of a real EU
common foreign policy are held by the backers of this creed in France
and Germany as the essentials in creating what the French call "Europe
puissance," or very roughly, Power Europe.
.
But reality enters here, and it is not certain if its intrusion
intensifies or winds down the alienation. The fact is, statements like
the German defense minister's on a global political ambition for
Europe as a determining player and the German press's description of
the country's diminished military spending do not necessarily match
up. Neither is there much positive evidence to shore up the idea of a
cohesive Europe ready for "wide-ranging preventative engagement" in
the implosion of talks on a new EU constitution last month, or last
week in the European Commission's decision to take France and Germany
and others to court for destroying the EU's Stability and Growth Pact.
.
This disarray cannot be explained alone by European suspicions of
American attempts at disaggregating the EU, or a so-called lack of
American respect for European ideals of enlightened environmentalism
or the universal primacy of international institutions. Europe's
miasma of dissatisfaction with itself in 2003, its palpable nonunity,
its public opinion's very vague interest in power, has not disappeared
like an old address book with the new year.
.
Polling over the past two weeks shows that 59 percent of European
public opinion, headed by Germany and Italy, considers that the euro,
once the EU's most glowing achievement, has disadvantages in
comparison with the abandoned national currencies. In France, perhaps
because Europe's expansion in May to 25 members signals a sharp
decline in French influence, a rising majority of 55 percent now
opposes taking the America-friendly countries of the old Soviet bloc
into the democracy and modernity of the EU.
.
Not much surprise then, when a senior administration official in
Washington commented that "Europeans' aggravation with the United
States is in some ways about their own inability to complete their
vision. Their anxiety about us is deflected anxiety. It's not about
the U.S. alone. It's about Europe."
.
But there is something close to startling when Hubert Vedrine, the
former French Socialist foreign minister, who in 1998 called the
United States under President Bill Clinton a unilateralist hyperpower
that needed restraint by a multilateral network of nations, also
suggests these days that a serious element of Europe's so-called
alienation from America is really a Europe-on- Europe question. To the
extent that both Chancellor Gerhard Schröder of Germany and President
Jacques Chirac of France have pulled back considerably from day-to-day
confrontation with the Americans, and have reassured businessmen at
home that they are going find big contracts in Iraq after all, this
change in tone suggests moderately less spiky circumstances in 2004.
European unity, as conceived on both sides of the Rhine, could be
becoming less assertively a matter of opposition to the United States
than a year ago when the French and Germans appointed themselves,
without consultation, the joint EU-voice of confrontation with the
Americans. In one of a series of interviews for this article, Vedrine
spoke of France's lack of ease with the United States. "There's
jealousy," he said. "The United States became what France wanted to
be, the universal country. When I criticize the French, I recognize
the neurosis here."
.
As for Europe, although Vedrine wanted it to emerge as an influential
pole in a multipolar world, it was "simplistic" to talk of a Europe as
a counterweight to the United States. Real cooperation, real
partnership was what he believed in, and accepting this, Vedrine said,
would represent a real sacrifice by the United States. Besides, he
went on, it was "not clear" at all if Europeans wanted to become a
power.
.
"This will change," he said, "if the Europeans ever think one day that
their lifestyle is in danger. Otherwise, they don't give a damn."
.
Indeed, Vedrine considered that all the European demonstrations
against the war in Iraq in early 2003 weren't so much tens of
thousands shouting for a Power Europe, but Europeans expressing their
phobia to the use of force - and in the particular instance, American
force.
.
Egon Bahr, the German geopolitical gadfly who was the architect of
Ostpolitik under Willy Brandt, insists these days that Europe's
chasing after the United States in an attempt to appear respectable
militarily is a pathetic and futile waste of time that actually
perpetuates trans-Atlantic tensions and Europe's inferiority complex
in relation to the Americans.
.
He called for a redefinition of the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization: let America serve as the armed torque in what he called
"forcing" peace, and Europe as the mutually recognized central element
in "the maintenance of peace."
.
"That would be a partnership," Bahr said in an article. "It takes in a
European independence that is not defined as opposed to but alongside
America." This sense of contradiction, of European ambiguity about
what Europe does or can do - make peace, for example, but not war -
carries into the public opinion surveys that last fall showed
Europeans much less confident about American leadership. The polling
by the German Marshall Fund, supported in part by American
contributors, marked declines in respect for U.S. sagacity even in
traditionally Atlanticist countries like the Netherlands and Britain.
But other findings in the poll, barely noted in Europe, savaged the
premise of deep public support for calls like Struck's for a decisive
global role for a Europe bolstered by its own expanded military
capability. In the case of Germany, none of the poll's hypotheses that
projected the use of international force - responding to terrorist or
nuclear threats even with the approval of the UN Security Council, the
EU and NATO - got majority support.
.
In one example, when the German Marshall Fund asked Germans
specifically if they would support a Security Council-authorized
attack (countries and means unspecified) on Iran to force it to give
up weapons of mass destruction, a majority of Germans said they would
not. A strong majority in the United States, and much thinner ones in
Britain and France, answered that they would. But concerning North
Korea in the same circumstances, a UN-sanctioned attack got majority
backing in neither France nor Germany.
.
It is against the psychological backdrop of the issue of how Europe
deals with the menace of violence the world over - conscious
disengagement or limited responsibility seem to define the parameters
of European public opinion on the subject - that the harshest attacks
on the United States of President George W. Bush resound.
.
At their theoretical extreme, to counteract America's course there is
a call for a literal union of France and Germany. This alliance, a
French advocate wrote, "ipso facto, would be the second power in the
world. Economic power, nuclear power, armed with a Security Council
seat, it would be an incontrovertible force even for the United
States."
.
Jacques Julliard, the French political journalist who has published a
short book advancing this thesis, describes Bush as gaining power
through a judicial coup d'état. When it comes to advocating France and
Germany's explicit seizure of European leadership, he acknowledges
other European "governments won't fail to denounce the power grab of
our two nations. Of course. But so what?"
.
At the anti-Bush arguments' most intense, John le Carré, the British
spy novelist, has referred to a neoconservative junta seizing power in
America and "limiting human rights in the United States to an extent
that is quite unimaginable." The junta's "adventurism" involved its
links with Israel, and paraphrasing a part of the diary of Victor
Klemperer, a Jew hiding from the Nazis in Germany during World War II,
le Carré said, "I'm waiting for the real Americans to return." To a
radio interviewer who asked if there was an implied association
between the Bush administration and the Nazi regime, le Carré replied,
"I did not make that association myself."
.
Frits Bolkestein, a Dutch European commissioner and a committed
Atlanticist, talking about European alienation and anti-Americanism in
Europe, said that "it has been and will always be there." "In this
sharper phase, the Bush crowd is the detonator. In my country even
responsible people say America is the cause of instability in the
world - and they are not contradicted. That's new and perhaps a sea
change. How do we get out of this hole? Not so easy. People don't like
to be dependent, although they are." But for some European
politicians, the Bush bogeyman characterization, finding daily
resupply in arguments from the U.S. domestic political scene, is a
type of diversion from focusing on more painful issues closer afield.
.
Bernard Kouchner, the French Socialist who polls show remains the most
popular opposition figure in his country in spite of his criticism of
the government's position on Iraq, said of the French, "We've turned
Bush into the great enemy as if that could cement together a scared
and hesitant country."
.
"Yes, the French are anti-American, and something new, anti-Semitic
and racist," Kouchner told a French reporter. "Something's gone wrong
in France's head." Denis MacShane, Britain's minister for Europe, said
at the end of the 1990's, "We awakened with an enfeebled Europe in
every sphere. Maybe not socially or culturally, but our general
attractiveness was zilch. We had also lived through the humiliation of
Bosnia and Kosovo."
.
European-American alienation in terms of this reality, he said, "is
all about Europe's sense of growing inferiority." Indeed, MacShane
said the Bush administration's first year in power was incoherent, and
its policies since, on China or Russia for example, often
inconsistent.
.
But Europe, he said, had made the mistake of "patronizing" Bush in its
longing for Clinton, "a Social Democrat who put Europe on Valium, who
could schmooze Europe, talk European."
.
After Clinton, when what MacShane called "old America" reappeared,
Europe was caught by surprise. But the United States was not immutable
or dense or unaware it made mistakes. Now, MacShane felt, "America has
had its year and a half of neocon glory."
.
Although MacShane did talk about it, an official in Brussels pointed
to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's extreme caution in avoiding any
personal involvement in the tense discussion through December about
the possible creation of an EU military planning headquarters separate
from NATO. He suggested it was a clear change in American fine-tuning
in its approach to Europe.
.
"There's a recognition that deeper-lying state interests exist and the
United States is reverting back to them," said MacShane.
.
José Manuel Durão Barroso, Portugal's prime minister, a rare European
leader in the sense that he has actually lived and worked in the
United States outside any official capacity, talks readily about
differences in "sensitivity and style" between America and Europe, and
the administration's failure "to pay enough attention to the
presentation" of its arguments.
.
Estrangement? In some respects, he said in an interview, America's
more pragmatic culture grates. But a certain kind of pragmatism, he
felt, would serve Europe well in relation to the United States. "In
some European capitals there's the idea that we'll be more integrated
if we're a counterweight to America. My position on building Europe is
that you should think of it as a counterpart. A European defense
identity, yes. But a counterweight? Constructing America as an
adversary? What's strategically intelligent in building an identity
against the United States?"
.
That's stupid, Durão Barroso said. Silly, he went on. Nonsense

And another interesting article from the International Herald Tribune
on transatlanticism.