Why Europe and US don't see eye to eye
IAN DAVIDSON
IT IS no surprise that President George W. Bush's tour of Europe has been greeted by protests from Berlin to Rome. What is surprising is that, given the differences now arising between the United States and its allies, Mr Bush's meetings with Europe's leaders proceeded so smoothly.
Those disagreements are not only about Israel or US tariffs on steel imports from the European Union (EU), but they also increasingly embody a fundamentally different vision about how the world should work.
During the Cold War, when the West feared attack by the Soviet bloc, the US and Europe were united through Nato in standing up to that threat. Today, when the central fear in Western countries is of international instability and terrorism, the Nato allies are far less united in how to respond.
This is partly a question of trans-Atlantic differences in the levels of defence spending and, therefore, of military capability. The US spends far more on defence than its European allies and, as a result, its military capability is different in quality as well as in quantity.
The consequences of that gap can be seen in Afghanistan. Article 5 of the Nato Treaty was invoked as if the Sept 11 attack was an attack on the alliance.
Many expected that America would call for a collective Nato response. Instead, the Bush administration decided to wage the war essentially on its own; although in the latter stages of the fighting, French Mirage jets, and British, German, Danish and Norwegian special-forces troops were activated.
With America's planned increases in its defence budget, the trans-Atlantic gap in military capability will become a chasm. Gradually, effective military cooperation between the US and Europe will shift from being unnecessary and unwelcome, to being impossible. It may be argued that the Europeans should try to close this chasm by increasing their own defence spending. Perhaps they should, but there are two problems.
The first is that European Nato consists of 16 separate countries, defence budgets and defence forces. Even if they were, collectively, to match America's defence spending, they could not match US defence capability unless they combined their defence spending in a single budget. So Europe cannot begin to match the US unless it becomes a single federation.
The second, more important problem is that (for a variety of reasons) Europeans do not set as high a value as the US on purely military capability.
From Washington, the past half-century may look like the story of a victorious Cold War against an outside enemy; but from Europe, it looks more like the story of a slow, unremitting effort to find political, economic, legal and institutional alternatives to military power as a way of tackling geo-political problems.
For hundreds if not thousands of years, European countries made war repeatedly with each other. In the first half of the 20th century, they succeeded in turning these conflicts into two world wars. After World War II, they tried an entirely new tack, with the great experiment of European integration and institution building.
This institution building is far from complete, but the process transformed European attitudes. Europeans are now irrevocably committed to peaceful solutions for their own international problems, and they increasingly think that peaceful solutions, or at least partly peaceful solutions, will be useful for other peoples' conflicts.
The present US administration, by contrast, seems to put a much higher priority on war and the rhetoric of war. We see this contrast being acted out on the ground. In the Balkans, bombing was carried out mainly by the US; peacekeeping mainly by Europeans.
There are, of course, local reasons for the Europeans setting a high priority on peacekeeping and reconstruction in the Balkans. War in these countries is a direct threat to Europe's interests and stability, so European governments have a direct interest in promoting peace.
Moreover, EU governments decided that all these countries, like those in central and Eastern Europe, are legitimate candidates for membership in the EU. Therefore, it is in the EU's interest to help them qualify in terms of political, civil and economic stability.
It is this prospect of a massive enlargement that defines the central challenge facing the EU: how to strengthen its institutions to be able to handle a union whose membership will expand from 15 to 27 countries - perhaps more. That is the subject of the EU Convention now under way in Brussels.
If EU governments are able to strengthen central political institutions, enlargement may be successful; if not, it may be blocked. Moreover, with stronger central institutions, the EU may start to make progress in developing a more coherent European security and defence policy. But nobody should imagine that Europeans are ever likely to share the priority attached by America to the value of military power.
straitstimes.asia1.com.sg
The writer is an adviser to, and a columnist for, the European Policy Centre, Brussels, and a former Financial Times columnist. Copyright: Project Syndicate |
