Prodi looks to Europe's future while watching U.S.
Craig S. Smith NYT Monday, August 11, 2003
UCCELLINA NATIONAL PARK, Italy Sitting on a hilltop overlooking the sun-yellowed Tuscan countryside, Romano Prodi, the most visible representative of the European Union, can almost see the future for which he has worked long and hard - a day when Europe speaks with one voice on world affairs and is listened to by Washington.
But for the clouds.
There are gathering ones like a brewing accounting scandal at the European Union's statistics bureau in which more than E900,000, or $1 million, has disappeared. Distant ones like Turkey, whose proposed membership in the European Union could make unity on foreign policy difficult to attain. Finally, dark ones: the fact that the United States shows little interest in a Europe united behind a common foreign policy, and today often seems to find it in the U.S. interest to work against such a policy.
Prodi, 64, has come to Tuscany to relax and reflect before beginning the final year of his five-year term as president of the Union's executive body, the European Commission. He sat, sipping water and talking outside an ochre villa where he and his wife, who have two grown sons, were staying.
The Italian press has nicknamed him "the mortadella," after the bland sausage (known as baloney in the United States) made in Bologna, where he was an economics professor before entering politics. Born in Reggio Emilia, 80 kilometers, or 50 miles, from Bologna, he has little of the stiff formality of many Italian politicians - he is known as an enthusiastic bicyclist - and was dressed on this occasion in a wine-colored polo shirt and pale-green linen pants.
But he is a man of sharp opinions, given to emphatic Castro-like enunciation when speaking on subjects about which he feels passionate. European unity, and its importance not only to this continent but also to the United States, is one of them.
"In this complex world, nobody alone is able to dictate a policy, even a country so strong and so powerful like the United States," he said, his voice alternately gruff and purring. "The great risk of great powers is overstretching."
A unified Europe as America's partner would only increase global stability, he maintains. But Prodi worries that Americans understand neither the value of a united Europe nor the difficulty in securing that unity.
"Their prevalent doctrine today is to have a divided Europe," Prodi said of the United States, adding that he sees the doctrine as part of a "deep wave" in American history that goes beyond the current administration and is driven by the country's self-confidence, particularly after its post-Sept. 11 victories in Afghanistan and Iraq.
"It is so strong that I don't think that this wave will stop in a short time," he said, "remembering that in American history there have always been alternate periods of isolationism and international cooperation."
Meanwhile, Prodi says, Europeans are building something new and different.
"From our side there is a deep feeling that no European member state can have any voice in the future staying alone," he said. "But, how to aggregate, this is the challenge of today."
Prodi, a former Italian prime minister, likens 21st-century Europe to 15th-century Italy, whose component city-states, though individually powerful, had no significant impact on the world after the European discovery of the Americas. "The city-states didn't merge, they were divided, and Italy disappeared from the world map," he said. Today's Germany and France "are like Florence or Venice or Milan at that time."
That may suit the United States just fine, he acknowledged, because internal bickering keeps Europe from presenting a unified challenge to Washington's foreign policy, as in the months before the recent Iraq war.
But Prodi maintains that it is in the Americans' long-term interest to have a united Europe that can share the political and economic costs of world affairs.
"Look how difficult it is to invent a new policy for the postwar Iraq," he said.
In any case, Prodi says, it will be "decades, not years," before Europe has a totally united foreign policy because "it will be the last piece of sovereignty the member states will pool together." In the nearer term, he says, his hope for European unity - already complicated by competing national interests - could be difficult if Europe decides to include Turkey, a Muslim country that would be one of the largest members.
He says U.S. pressure to accelerate Turkey's application for membership - on the basis that having Turkey in the European Union will enhance regional security - overlooks the longer-term consequences of bringing the country into the Union.
"When they said the process is too slow, I told them, 'Look I was born in a country where when you were a kid to describe something frightful, you said, 'Mama, the Turks!'" Prodi said, adding, "We have to fight against this deep prejudice."
Last year, the European Union decided that Turkey had not yet met the standards to begin formal membership talks but promised to make another assessment by the end of next year. Prodi said he would deliver a "complete, fair and objective" opinion before the Nov. 1, 2004, end of his term as president.
He said that he accepted the strategic importance of Turkey as a bridge between Europe and the Middle East, but worried that the country's size, the peculiarities of its political institutions and its cultural ties to the Middle East could complicate European efforts to forge a common policy.
He said the matter of Turkey's membership was too politically sensitive to rush into because it would require approval from all of the Union's member states - 25 after the addition of 10 East European countries next year.
The New York Times
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