European Views II
Behind the allied rift
Europe has a different sense of danger
Richard Bernstein
The New York Times Saturday, February 15, 2003
BRUSSELS As anti-war demonstrators prepared for what they said would be among the largest protest marches in history this weekend, many in Europe are asking themselves: How did trans-Atlantic relations, which were so good so recently, get so bad so quickly?
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What has become clear to many here is that the Bush administration's preparations for a possible war with Iraq have provoked something far beyond the normal disagreements that sometimes take place among allies - as happened many times during the Cold War and, more recently, over such questions as the Kyoto Protocol on global warming or the International Criminal Court, both favored in Europe but rejected in Washington.
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Now, something deep and fundamental in the different views of Europe and the United States seems to have been brought to the surface by the Iraqi crisis. With as many as several hundred thousand anti-war protesters expected Saturday on the streets of London alone, it has become clear that the European public - from Britain to Poland, from "old" Europe to "new" Europe - is against war in Iraq.
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Indeed, it is almost as if President George W. Bush and his administration have unwittingly brought about a popular unity on this Continent that belies the sharp differences among Europe's governments, which are openly divided on the question of a war to dislodge President Saddam Hussein of Iraq.
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With turmoil in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, divisions in the UN Security Council and undiplomatic words being shouted across the Atlantic, many Europeans have started to worry about the prospect of permanent damage to the structures on which European peace and prosperity have been based for the last half century and more.
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"Everything's falling to pieces; that's really the case, I believe," Michael Stuermer, a professor of history and an editorial writer at the conservative German daily Die Welt, said in a recent conversation. "We have various problems, all knotted together."
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It may be - and some diplomats in Brussels, the seat of the European community, are predicting this - that over the next few weeks the trans-Atlantic gaps are going to be bridged and that such alarming spectacles as the current disarray in NATO will disappear.
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In this optimistic perspective, the United States will manage to get a resolution approved in the Security Council that will authorize force, and then the French, who have led the charge against war, will move from opposing military action to taking part in it.
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But such an outcome looks remote. One of the reasons the leaders of Germany and France have so publicly defied the United States, in the United Nations as well as in NATO, is that it is popular to do so.
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Certainly, it did not look like that just a few weeks ago. To be sure, American opposition to the Kyoto treaty, coupled with a kind of visceral distrust of the Bush administration, might have prepared the ground for widespread European opposition to American plans for war in Iraq.
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But essentially, last autumn, sympathy still prompted by the losses of Sept. 11 was widespread, and on the strategic front developments seemed positive.
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Both NATO and the European Union were in the process of historic and tandem expansions, incorporating the former members of the Eastern bloc and spreading the net of military security, economic expansion and democratic governments to the very borders of Russia. A majority of Europeans supported the United States in earlier military actions, from the Gulf War of 1991 to the Kosovo conflict of 1999 to the military action in Afghanistan after Sept. 11, 2001.
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Now all that has been turned on its head. The German government, for the first time in its postwar history, has put itself in direct conflict over a major issue with the United States, and this is a very big change.
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For years, even though Germany was a close partner with France when it came to powering the European Community forward, it resisted the Gaullist impulse to keep a certain distance from America. In only a few weeks, however, Germany, Europe's largest country and its most important economy by far, has entered into a sort of informal coalition whose very identity is opposition to a policy that an American administration deems vital to the security of the United States and the world.
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To some extent, the divisions express what some have identified as growing fundamental cultural differences between Europe and the United States.
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Most conspicuously, in the wake of Sept. 11, a gap has opened up in the European and American perceptions of danger. While Americans intensely sense a new vulnerability and an urgent new need for self-defense, Europeans, after the end of the Cold War, do not. Put bluntly, the people of Berlin now feel safer even as the people of New York sense a new danger.
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"I do think that there are different perceptions of risks on both sides," Javier Solana, the foreign affairs chief for the European Union, said in an interview.
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While Americans recently experienced an attack on their mainland, Europeans, as Solana put it, are enjoying "the most secure period of our history."
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Americans, aware of European peace and security, believe that these happy conditions were made possible by 50 years of American military expenditures and protection, which they feel the Europeans appreciate less than they should.
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Europeans, while aware of American military protection, perhaps because of it, feel safe, safer than they should feel, in the view of some here. "My father fought in two wars, but it's impossible to think that my sons will fight in wars in Europe," Solana said. "But we are not aware enough of the danger of weapons of mass destruction, and we have to correct that. Weapons of mass destruction are not just an American problem, they are a problem for all of us."
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It is not that Europeans, about 70 percent of whom are shown by polls across Europe to be opposed to war, have any kind regard for Saddam and his government. But few of them seem to believe that Saddam is really anything more than another of the world's dictators, perhaps one of the most cutthroat of them, but not the most dangerous. Kim Jong Il, North Korea's leader, probably holds that distinction in the minds of many Europeans.
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By contrast, in many quarters in Europe, the public deems unbridled U.S. power in the service of a preemptive strike to be the greater international menace. "What happens in the future if China or Russia decide that some other country is a threat to them, and they decide to go to war?" asked an editor for a German publishing company attending an anti-war protest in Munich last weekend. "What are you going to do then?"
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There are those analyzing European-American differences who believe that this discrepancy in the view of threats could have a long-term effect on the main organizations of American-European cooperation, especially NATO.
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