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Blair's balancing act
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This is not the time to ask Tony Blair hard questions about Europe. The prime minister is quietly celebrating a success for British diplomacy on the other side of the Atlantic. Looking across the Channel he sees mostly faint-hearts. What price now, some wonder, that long-promised pledge to cement Britain's place in Europe.
George W. Bush seems as determined as ever to confront Saddam Hussein. But at Camp David last weekend Mr Blair won the argument that the United Nations should have at least a first shot. An optimist would say that by taking the debate about Iraq on to international terrain, Mr Blair has blunted the sword of Washington's let's-go-to-war-whatever brigade. After listening to Mr Bush at the UN on Thursday, I am not sure for how long.
At home, Mr Blair deployed his political skills (he really is one of the best in the business) to quieten domestic critics at the Trades Union Congress. He will seek to pull off the same feat with his own MPs when parliament returns to debate Iraq later in the month. Next on the agenda with Mr Bush is an intensification of the effort to persuade the US administration to re-engage in the Middle East peace process. All in all, Mr Blair has had a good week.
That does not quite fit the picture drawn in Paris, Brussels or Berlin. Mr Blair's European colleagues lack his moral certainty. Somehow, it is not universally self-evident that regime change in Baghdad is an urgent imperative. These leaders worry when Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan's president, says that war against Iraq will inflame Islamic extremism in his country. Pakistan's nuclear weapons in the wrong hands - now, that really would be a clear and present danger. Ending the bloodshed between Israel and the Palestinians seems to most continental Europeans a more pressing first step towards regional stability than war against Iraq.
True, Jacques Chirac, with whom Mr Blair has always had a curiously cordial relationship, has made an astute tactical shift. If the US intends to remove the Iraqi regime come what may, the French president wants to keep his options open. Mr Chirac is watching Moscow. Gaullism occasionally has to strike a deal with pragmatism.
Gerhard Schröder, another leader whom Mr Blair used to claim as a close chum, is a different matter. These days the relationship between the two men is politely described as icy. Fighting for his political life before this month's election, Mr Schröder has said that come what may Germany will stand aside from a war to remove Mr Hussein.
That stance has done the German chancellor nothing but good in the opinion polls. But it attracts the charge from Downing Street that Mr Schröder's pacifism is the cheapest kind of opportunism. Shame. The chancellor might reply that it is hardly a crime for a politician to keep in touch with the mood of voters - even, God forbid, during an election campaign.
Why, anyway, they ask in Berlin, is Mr Blair so keen to go to war? Surely there are limits to what he will do to ingratiate himself with Mr Bush? Or is it simply that he has returned to the default setting of all British prime ministers? When trouble looms, keep on side with the Americans.
Mr Blair's transatlantic diplomacy invites bigger questions, though, than how to repair the spat with Germany should Mr Schröder win on September 22. Odd though it may seem, there is a view in London that the government's medium-term interests would be better served by Mr Schröder's re-election than by that of the more Atlanticist Edmund Stoiber, his centre-right opponent. Iraq apart, Mr Stoiber might upset Mr Blair's European plans by proving a more reliable ally to the French.
What plans? Sure, Mr Blair is a committed European, as much so as any postwar prime minister save Edward Heath in the early 1970s. But how much of that genuine instinct survives the magnetism of the single superpower?
Plenty, Mr Blair retorts. Only this week, in that same speech to trades unionists, he said that it would be a "vast error" for Britain to turn its back on Europe. For Britain to find itself marginalised on its own continent would "betray a total misunderstanding of the concept of national interest in the 21st century". The test of that, of course, is whether Britain joins the euro. So yes, Mr Blair said, he did want Britain to be part of this pivotal enterprise if the economic conditions were met.
Here the public and the private Mr Blair are as one. Not so long ago some visitors to Downing Street sought to test his resolve against what some have called the pro-European case for delaying a decision. Of course, Mr Blair's guests suggested, Britain could not sit indefinitely outside the European Union's central economic project. But for the moment, the EU was leaderless and rudderless. Fears that Britain would be shut out of the big decisions had proved groundless. The costs in terms of lost political influence of keeping sterling for another two or three years were minimal. The risks of losing an early referendum to take Britain in were immense. Why not wait three or four years?
The prime minister responded with one of those words that newspapers often replace with asterisks to avoid offending readers. Disarray in Europe, his argument ran, strengthened rather than weakened the case for Britain to move quickly to the centre of influence. This was a rare chance for Britain to seize the moment.
I think that Mr Blair is as sincere in that intention as he is in the conviction that it is Britain's duty to steer the US away from unilateralism. The unavoidable question, though, is whether both will soon collide with reality.
Mr Blair, I fear, underestimates the contempt of many of Mr Bush's advisers for the very concept of multilateralism. I once asked one of these hawks what he made of the prime minister's belief that the west could build a new international order on the ruins of the World Trade Center. The official did not try too hard to conceal his scorn. The administration would pursue US interests; if Britain wanted to come along for the ride, fine.
As for Europe, much depends on what now happens over Iraq at the UN. Mr Chirac will have to choose. Mr Blair's relationship with Mr Schröder is not irreparable, and, ultimately, Europe cannot build its own foreign policy without Britain. But Mr Blair's intentions towards the euro, like his efforts to shape US foreign policy, are easier to state than to achieve. Knowing where you want to be is not the same as getting there. |
