BRUSSELS - The huge compound housing SHAPE
(Supreme Headquarters of Allied Powers in Europe) lies
in the outskirts of the Belgian city of Mons, near
Brussels, but it might as well be in an Ohio suburb. It
is literally surrounded by gas stations, burger joints,
fitness clubs, used car lots, everything in English, not
French or Flemish. This is Europe's heart of darkness,
or the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's (NATO's)
heart of light: this is where the Americans listen to
the cacophony of Europe - and the world - and command
wars in Kosovo and Afghanistan by remote control. SHAPE
even listens, insiders say, among other things, to
French President Jacques Chirac's earpiece: French
intelligence still has not been capable of coming up
with an interference-proof device.
Dutchman Jaap
de Hoop Scheffer, the new NATO secretary general
post-Lord Robertson, is eager to assure suspicious
Europeans - for whom NATO, since the end of the Cold
War, has become just a political club charged of
promoting the American geostrategic vision - that the
new NATO "is not an instrument to serve our American
friends". The Atlantic alliance's new role, according to
him, is "to export security and stability, wholesale".
So what does that mean in practice, supposing a
crisis happens somewhere in Eurasia. Scheffer says that
there are three possible scenarios. 1) NATO intervenes.
2) If NATO "does not want to intervene", for unspecified
reasons, the European Union (EU) can use NATO's means.
3) The EU may intervene by itself. Scheffer insists that
the link between SHAPE (NATO's HQ)and NATO's liaison
officers with the EU (in the EU's HQ) "is a good thing,
and we will see in practice how it works out. I place
great importance in good relations between NATO and the
EU."
Sounds confusing? Well, that's because it
is. The secretary general maintains that "it's in the
interest of the Americans that the EU develops its own
foreign and defense policy". Tell that to a
neo-conservative in the Bush administration and Scheffer
would be dispatched to Mars. But in the next minute,
Scheffer himself lays down the law, as it stands: "The
Atlantic alliance has an integrated military structure
that is unique, while the European Union has limited
military capabilities."
Who's defending? That's quite an understatement. In 2000, the EU
created a Rapid Action Force (now with 60,000 men) and a
satellite center in Torrejon, Spain. And that's it. The
EU depends on American technology and weapons - like the
war in the Balkans demonstrated in full. In the Middle
East, the EU can only deploy money and ideas - not
force, the language that really makes a difference
locally. At the same time, most European diplomats are
very much aware that whatever the spin, the values
upheld by Brussels are extremely different from
Washington's, at least the Washington of the Bush
administration, with its contempt for international law
and love affair with the death penalty - unanimously
abolished by the European Union.
And that's the
whole point, post-preventive war in Iraq. The Americans
want an all-enveloping NATO with as many as three dozen
members, capable of intervening anywhere. The
Franco-German core of the European Union, plus Britain,
favors an EU militarily independent from the US. Anybody
in Brussels knows that there can be no Europe without an
integrated defense policy. Until now, the EU was
behaving like a subordinated empire inside the
capitalist world, interested only in defending its
markets. This situation may be about to change. Last
December, finally the Franco-German-British trio agreed
on the terms of creation of an EU defense HQ. Washington
didn't like it, but it will have to live with it.
Europe may still be disunited, but the shape of
things to come in terms of leadership of the real "new
Europe" is a de facto trio constituted by Paris, Berlin
and London. In Iran, their trio of ministers of foreign
relations succeeded in convincing the Islamic Republic
to abandon its nuclear weapons program.
Paris-Berlin-London plans go further. They are
elaborating a general political program to be presented
to the renewed European Commission, which will be
empowered in Brussels in late 2004. The key points will
be innovation and competition; reform of the labor
market; and research and post-graduate education. These
are essential issues to be addressed for the EU to reach
the objective it set itself in 2000 in Lisbon: to have a
more competitive economy than the US by 2010.
There's one big problem, though.
Paris-Berlin-London want to achieve all this without
spending more money, while the current European
Commission - presided by Professor Romano Prodi of Italy
- says a much larger budget is needed for the period
2007-2013. Anyway, a more competitive, integrated
economy inevitably will have to speak to the world with
an integrated defense and foreign policy voice.
Euro vs dollar The problems facing
the EU at the moment are mind-boggling. Take the
question of the strong euro vs the dollar. Everyone in
Brussels knows that once the budget deficit level of 3
percent of gross national product (GNP) is broken by an
EU member-state, its government is forced by Brussels to
fall back in line, even running the risk of compromising
economic recovery. There's nothing remotely similar in
the US, where the Bush administration, for instance, can
run a gargantuan budget deficit.
Says an
European diplomat: "It's not a level playing field. No
wonder Bush promises the moon and Mars to American
citizens, because the financing is assured: one just
needs to increase the American deficit and make the
world pay by printing dollars." This will go on unless -
adds another diplomat - "the euro becomes the world
reserve currency, and a non-Atlantic Europe buries the
Bretton Woods agreement". Patrick Artus, chief economist
for CDC in Paris, does not go so far, but he shows the
way out for the moment: "A strong euro is catastrophic.
It puts pressure over an industrial environment not
equipped to deal with a rapid rise of its currency. The
European Central Bank has to act without the US, and
coordinate with Japan."
The meaning of
democracy The Bush administration's adventure of
imposing "democracy" on Iraq by the barrel of a gun has
also led Brussels to discuss the meaning of democracy
itself. Is it a relative, or absolute concept? Is it a
system of beliefs, part of Western political culture,
which stops at the door of other cultures and beliefs?
Or is it an absolute value, the foundation of freedom,
and so the West must "convert" the whole world to
democracy? Merging with this discussion is the extremely
uncomfortable question of Europe as a "Christian club" -
invoked by some governments to justify the exclusion of
Turkey from the EU. Another diplomat says this is
nonsense: "Bosnia and Albania, with strong Muslim
majorities, will one day join the EU. The real question,
already posed by a few governments, is about Europe's
frontiers. Where does it stop? If Turkey is admitted,
who's next? Albania and the Ukraine?"
The "New
Europe" controversy is still echoing in Brussels. The
majority of diplomats and officials at the EU know that
NATO's enlargement first, and then the EU's, offer a
unique occasion for Washington to torpedo European
identity and reinforce its influence on the continent.
Most of Brussels considers as American Trojan horses in
the EU the new former communist, Eastern European
members, which will become part of the EU next May 1,
especially Poland. Spain, under Prime Minister Jose
Maria Aznar, is also considered a Trojan Horse.
Italy - under Silvio Berlusconi - squandered all
goodwill after its disastrous European presidency in the
second half of 2003 (see part 1): but nobody in Europe
likes Silvio anyway, and he can be easily neutralized.
Spain is a more difficult case: not only because of the
Bush love affair of Aznar, but especially because Spain
- which became a wealthy EU member mainly because of
heavy Brussels investment - now wants to have as
influential a voice as the big donors who really run the
show, France and Germany. Aznar now proudly touts Spain
as being at the forefront of the international stage,
while since the 19th century Spanish foreign policy was
subordinated to France's. But most diplomats in Brussels
- even some Spaniards - consider Aznar as no more than
"the third guy in the photo" (a reference to his public
appearance before the war on Iraq alongside George W
Bush and Tony Blair).
By bye
Balkans Among the new Eastern European members
about to join the EU, Slovenia makes the most
interesting case. Slovenia is very close to Trieste,
where Italy meets the Balkans, the windy city where
James Joyce conceived and started writing
Ulysses. Tiny Slovenia, with only 2 million
people, is arguably the best-prepared of the new EU
members. Its GNP per head is equivalent to Portugal's
and Greece's, and almost 75 percent of the EU's average.
Since becoming independent in 1991 after a quick war
with Slobodan Milosevic's "Yugoslavia", it entirely
reoriented its commerce from the former Yugoslav
republics towards the EU. This means that this former
member of the Austro-Hungarian empire is not counting on
the Balkans for its prosperity: Slovenia is betting on a
more civilized Central Europe. A Slovenian diplomat says
that "the Balkans must be Europeanized, and we must be
the example to follow". Slovenia's European credentials
are a complex balancing act. The country's political
elites favor a common European defense policy. But they
don't want two Europes proceeding at different speeds.
They supported Washington's position in the war on Iraq.
But they insist that being a friend of the US does not
mean being an enemy of the EU.
The Washington
neo-conservative attitude towards the EU may be
epitomized by their mouthpiece, the Weekly Standard, in
a cover story dated September 22, 2003, with a headline
that speaks for itself: "Against United Europe". For the
neo-cons, the emergence of what they see as an European
superstate is a threat to the US (but it's important to
remember that the US State Department has traditionally
been in favor of European integration). The neo-cons,
via Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's rather
cartoonish division of Europe between "new" (those who
favor our preventive wars) and "old" (those who don't),
thought they had the upper hand. But to start with, the
Rumsfeld "with us or against us" division was an
ill-informed lie. Historically, "new" Europe is
represented by the Franco-German reconciliation after
World War II. All Europe is trying to follow this model
- although very few countries have reached this kind of
maturity. "Old" Europe is really in the Balkans, or
further east, in Ukraine or Russia.
Dominique
Moisi, special adviser to the French Institute of
International Relations, says that the worst possible
scenario for the future would be America as an immense
Prussia - without an Otto von Bismarck to guide it - and
Europe as a giant Switzerland - egoist, prosperous,
provincial and impotent. Many of the best and brightest
in Brussels are conscious this is not such a far-fetched
scenario. But a look at what's going on in Brussels
nowadays at least confirms that the neo-con project of
breaking Europe's back has been a total failure.
Europe may look like it has been broken, but the
fact is the Franco-German duo - with increased British
input - rules and will remain ruling the show. The 10
new members, once admitted in the EU, will have to bow
to how Brussels dispenses with its funds: and the money
comes basically from Germany, France and the Benelux
countries. Prodi, as president of the European
Commission, has repeatedly warned that no one can
"entrust his wallet to Europe and his security to
America". Spain's Aznar, with his ambition of having an
European role, has been put in his (limited) place. And
the EU has begun to tackle its shortcomings and is now
fully engaged in building an integrated defense and
security policy.
As much as neo-cons might hate
it, the shape of things to come indicates that
Washington and Brussels won't be haggling only about
steel quotas, bananas and genetically-modified crops,
but geopolitics as well. It may take 30 years instead of
six months, but it will inevitably happen. And
additionally, it may represent America's best
opportunity to preserve its internationalist role and
not succumb to the temptation of a second-rate imperial
model.
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Feb 7, 2004
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