As European economies wilt under unchecked
fiscal imprudence and fears of contagious
sovereign defaults, it seems absurd that Britain
and France are leading a depleted North Atlantic
Treaty Organization (NATO) coalition to militarily
attack Libya. Financially imperiled states facing
mass protests from irate citizens are puzzlingly
prosecuting war in North Africa.
After an
initial burst of aerial strikes on Libyan dictator
Muammar Gaddafi's defenses by the United States,
the Barack Obama administration stepped back to
hand over the bulk of operations to Britain and
France under the NATO banner. The passing of the
baton made pragmatic sense for Washington, which
has been hard-pressed since the corporate bailouts
of 2008-2009 to cut its ballooning budget deficit.
Even playing second fiddle to Britain and
France in the Libyan
conflict has been
controversial in the US, with the Republican
opposition crying hoarse about Obama running a de
facto war without congressional authorization.
Last Friday, the House of Representatives
overwhelmingly voted against formal approval of
the ongoing American participation in the combat
in Libya.
The recent televised debates of
early hopefuls for the Republican presidential
nomination revealed an isolationist but fiscally
responsible streak among candidates backed by the
Tea Party movement. They broke ranks with
traditional Republicans by arguing that the US
must put its own indebted economy in order and
disentangle completely from the slow-attrition war
in Libya (besides pulling out bag and baggage from
Afghanistan).
But no such wisdom has yet
dawned in Britain and France, which are emptying
their depleted exchequers to pay for air assaults
in Libya. According to the French Defense
Ministry, Paris is spending US$1.4 million each
day in the Libyan war, while some predict that
Britain may incur a cost of $1.4 billion if it
continues hitting targets in Libya until
September.
Some Western media outlets
mocked at the ridiculous spectacle of Gaddafi
amusing himself with a game of chess against a
Russian sports official when Libya was on fire.
What the governments of Britain and France are
doing in Libya is no less an act of fiddling while
rioters are running amok in London and Paris
against benefit retrenchments.
If British
Prime Minister David Cameron and French President
Nicolas Sarkozy are gambling on the Libyan mission
as a diversionary tactic to pacify citizens
furious at their tanking economies, it is poor
politics. The eventual ouster of Gaddafi will not
restore British and French jobs, subsidized
college education, or welfare benefits.
If
Cameron and Sarkozy are placing bets on military
Keynesianism (a spinoff economic theory that big
war spending can pull a country out of recession
by revving up demand for the defense industry and
heavy machinery sectors), history shows that past
wars in Suez (1956) and the Falklands (1982) did
not magically pull Britain and France out of
economic slumps.
Cameron has even rebuked
senior British naval and air force officials who
have rung alarm bells that Britain's air fighting
capacity will be badly undermined if the Libyan
war goes on indefinitely. The Conservative prime
minister struck an adamant note that the British
military would keep waging war in Libya "as long
as is necessary".
One plausible reason why
deficit-laden London and Paris have plunged into
the Libyan war is geopolitical. American
strategists have commented that North Africa is a
"European affair", ie a sphere of influence that
has greater strategic value for Europe than for
the US.
Although Europe's global footprint
has been shrinking in the past few years while
China's shadow has lengthened, the urge to
dominate Africa is viewed by some European foreign
policy pundits as natural. Denomination of regions
of Africa as "Anglophone", "Francophone" and
"Lusophone" zones owes to this nostalgic
neo-colonial mentality.
Secondly, European
policymakers are growing jittery about a deadly
weapon that Gaddafi has unleashed since the war
began - African immigrants and refugees headed
towards Italy first and then seeping across open
borders to the rest of the European continent.
The Mediterranean boat people were
hitherto controlled by the Gaddafi regime in
exchange for symbolic and economic concessions
from the European Union. That sinister pact, where
desperate human beings were pawns in an
international diplomatic game, came unstuck once
NATO started bombing Libya.
So, Britain
and France (disregarding Italy's agony about a
deluge of refugees triggered by the NATO bombing
campaign) are apparently fighting to get rid of
Gaddafi and to install a friendlier government
that will curb the African exodus to the continent
as a matter of policy.
Here too, the
contradictions are glaring. A Europe that is aging
and demographically declining actually needs more
skilled and unskilled workers from the developing
world. Opening "fortress Europe" is good
economics, but bad politics, which is based on
racial discrimination and religious profiling in
both Britain and France.
It bears reminder
that France and Britain had for long coddled Arab
dictators in North Africa, including the ousted
Ben Ali of Tunisia and Gaddafi himself since his
diplomatic "rehabilitation" by the West and the
influx of European companies into Libya's oil
sector a few years ago. The best-case projection
for the Quixotic European war in Libya is that
Paris and London are making amends for their past
misdeeds and policy errors. But such course
corrections are costly and unsustainable in the
present economic doldrums.
The rhetorical
claim that Britain and France are rescuing the
people of Libya from state-sponsored massacres
through a war on humanitarian grounds raises a
deeper question: why are Cameron and Sarkozy not
moved by humanitarian concern for their own masses
who are reeling under acute economic distress?
The fragile economies of Europe are in
such abject state that they cannot wish away the
classic "guns versus butter" choice. Britain and
France saw the writing on the wall last November,
when they chose to share troops, aircraft carriers
and nuclear weapons facilities, thereby diluting
sovereignty in an attempt to notch up some direly
required savings in their respective military
budgets. But their joint war in Libya is proving
penny wise, pound foolish.
Germany, which
has been skewered in the Anglo-American press for
chicaning out of the Libyan war effort, is
behaving more humanely than Britain and France by
tending to its own citizens' plights in tough
times. Its neutral stance on Libya is proving to
be wiser and ironically in the greater interest of
the crisis-plagued European Union, whose survival
in one piece depends on stable economic recovery
rather than Pyrrhic military successes.
Cameron and Sarkozy are bankrupting their
treasuries and jeopardizing the wider European
integration project. The European Union's
skepticism is mounting among distressed European
publics by the day even as French and British jets
fly sorties over Libya. Nero's ghost has possessed
present ruling elites in London and Paris. These
two European capitals are condemned to keep
burning until more accountable politicians take
power and clean up the mess.
Sreeram
Chaulia is Professor and Vice Dean of the
Jindal School of International Affairs in Sonipat,
India, and the author of the new book
International Organizations and Civilian
Protection: Power, Ideas and Humanitarian Aid in
Conflict Zones (I B Tauris, London)
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