“While a unified Europe may some time in the next century act as a single power, its initial disarray and disjointed national responses to the crisis in the Persian Gulf again illustrate that ‘Europe’ does not qualify even as a player on the world stage.” This sharp judgment, rendered in the authoritative pages of Foreign Affairs, gives a fair idea of how Europe’s position in the world after the Gulf crisis is perceived by outsiders, and even by some Europeans themselves. And indeed, Europe’s behavior during the war, both singly and as a plurality of different nations, supports the judgment: in this crisis, all organized political cooperation among the twelve nations of the European Community (EC) proved dramatically ineffective.
The inability of the EC to shape even the slightest role for itself was, some said, inevitable; these observers had long espoused the view that the EC member-states, given their divergent aims and ambitions, would always take autonomous positions on the world scene. Others, however, had been convinced that a new collective actor, with interests of its own that went beyond those of its constituent parts, should and would assume a place on the international chessboard. Now the two schools of thought have drawn from the events in the Gulf a lesson strictly coherent with their own convictions: the first, that the illusion of a common European stand in world affairs definitively capsized in the Persian Gulf; the second, that the crisis has proved even more urgently the need to join forces.
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If the record of the European Community was dismal, what about the record of individual European countries?
Germany, to begin with, was at first reluctant to commit itself to a tough position against Saddam Hussein, and even allowed itself to become implicated in Moscow’s maneuvers of mediation; only at the very last minute did Germany align itself with the U.S.-led coalition.
Such behavior is not difficult to explain: first in Germany’s list of priorities, all through the Gulf crisis, was the aim of not complicating its relations with the USSR at a moment when the Supreme Soviet was discussing the ratification of the “Two-plus-Four” treaty on German reunification. Eventually the treaty was saved, but for Germany, the risk of ending up in a legal limbo had been very serious. And many Germans, unaware of the increasing irritation of the Bush administration with them, were rather irritated with the White House for not having taken into consideration the schedule of their Soviet problem in planning Operation Desert Shield.
In other words, as a country without direct or preeminent interests in the Gulf region, but with certain tactical requirements and objects, Germany remained fixed on the classic goals of its own foreign policy, having to do as always with the issues of national unity, the security of its borders, and relations with the Slavic world.
As for Great Britain, which on this occasion positioned itself at the opposite end of the EC spectrum from Germany, its political elite showed a strong instinct in understanding from the very beginning that President Bush was going to carry his initiative to its logical conclusion in a head-on military fight with Iraq. At the same time, in appealing to its European partners to join in support of the U.S., the British government had its eye on the future architecture of European security, to which it wished to keep the Americans moored as strongly as possible.
Whatever imperial nostalgia there may have been in sending the Queen’s “Desert Rats” east of Suez once more, London did not have aims of its own in the crisis or an autonomous line distinct from that of the U.S. Nor, frankly, did it need to: like Germany, Great Britain has no real interest in the Gulf region, and even if it did, it (again like Germany) lacks the international power and relevance to project influence there or, for that matter, in any of the other regional conflicts which the post-1989 world has inherited from the era of the cold war.
Even France, which was in the Gulf mainly in order to prove that it still is a global power, is preoccupied these days with the “demonstration effect” of that power within the European framework, where it seeks to counterbalance German economic superiority. But there is a difference: France, and to varying degrees the other Mediterranean EC members as well, has permanent interests in the Arab world, and one might therefore have expected the French to exercise diplomatic influence among their Arab friends in favor of the UN-sponsored coalition. Yet the countries of the Maghreb, the Arab neighbors with which France enjoys the closest relationship, were among the very few to express open hostility to the coalition.
In short, if the events in the Gulf have shown just how distant is the goal of a single European foreign policy and a common defense, they have also shown the folly of believing that individual European nations, preoccupied as they are with the balance-of-power situation within the European theater itself, can take up the slack.
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What, then, are the causes of Europe’s lamentable performance? Here a comparison may prove useful. In the Soviet Union, internal disunity is as serious as, if not indeed more serious than, in the EC. After all, there are no territorial disputes setting Belgians against Dutch, or Spanish against Portuguese; nor have there been armed clashes or reciprocal massacres as between Azerbaidjanis and Armenians, Moldavians and Ukrainians, Russians and Lithuanians. It is also obvious that the long-term evolutionary trend of the EC is the reverse of the USSR. In Western Europe, the issue is how to perfect a union among peoples who until 50 years ago were at each other’s throats; in the Soviet Union, the issue is whether or not to dismantle a political entity in which peoples have lived for more than 70 years.
Nevertheless, in spite of its centrifugal tendencies and the risks of fragmentation, the Soviet Union was able to pursue a very active diplomacy during the Gulf crisis. True, in the end its policy was a losing one, but it did create a moment of great uneasiness for President Bush and it reestablished a truth which seemed to have been somewhat forgotten in the new “unipolar” order: that the Soviet Union remains a particularly interested spectator in questions of the Middle East.
One might conclude from this comparison that what Western Europe lacks is a well-attuned institutional machinery for the formulation and execution of its foreign-policy aims. The USSR, on this reading, whatever its present degree of decomposition, still is organized enough to have a “line,” and even to launch foreign-policy initiatives, while what is missing in Brussels are the technical instruments for the conversion of general political aims into diplomatic action.
Upon closer inspection, however, this explanation is too simple. Apart from the availability or nonavailability of a decision-making mechanism, what has to be taken into consideration is the relationship between domestic and foreign-policy aims. The Europeans are still in a phase of internal soul-searching, while the Soviets, in spite of their domestic difficulties, or rather because of their domestic difficulties, know very clearly what they want: namely, to survive. (Moscow’s search for a “compromise” in the Persian Gulf war was sparked in some measure by the pro-Iraq feelings widespread in the Muslim republics of the southeastern USSR, the very republics that until now have remained relatively loyal to Moscow, and also by the fear that those feelings, if unaccommodated, might add fuel to the ethnic and national quarrels on the shores of the Baltic and in the gorges of the Caucasus.)
The EC, on the other hand, is still an infant, still taking its first steps. Its objective in the crisis could not go much beyond giving some signal of its existence, and as an objective this was too vague to be translated into a “line.” As for the individual nation-states of Western Europe, they have not yet found the courage to confess even to themselves their serious and ever-growing problems of identity, problems whose resolution must logically precede any definition of their interest in issues that do not impinge immediately on them. In fact, the European nation-states have still not faced explicitly the question of their capacity to be actors in world politics, although every day they acquire more painful evidence of the unspeakable truth that—taken one by one—they enjoy a very reduced relevance in today’s world.
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It is owing to this painful conflict between their pride and the hard facts that the European countries oscillated between two very different views of the situation created by the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait on August 2, and the ensuing UN condemnation.
At the beginning, they believed that participating in the multinational force in the Gulf would mean buying a rather inexpensive entry ticket to a classic diplomatic exercise of colonial rearrangement from which they might well stand to benefit. The most outspoken adherent of this view was President Ozal of Turkey, who explained that his country had joined the compaign against Saddam Hussein in order to secure a place at the negotiating table, where, he added, Turkey wanted to be “on the list of guests, not on the menu.” Other governments were less candid, but all of them dreamed of a return to an era when European countries at least enjoyed the status, if no longer the economic and industrial strength, of “great powers.”
Later on, however, all this changed as the Europeans came to understand just how determined the U.S. was to resolve the crisis by military as opposed to diplomatic means. Then there ensued a rush, not always very elegant or dignified, to align with the indisputable leader of the new “unipolar” order, no longer in the hope of carving out a piece of the Middle Eastern pie but out of plain fear of being punished for malingering.
The behavior of the United States should have been enough to cause Europe to awaken from the dream which it had come to nourish after the so-called “revolution of 1989.” In late summer 1990 most European observers still believed that the Soviet “resignation” from superpower status could lead from the bipolar world of the cold war to a multipolar order in which the economic dynamism and the technological sophistication of the Europeans and the Japanese would place them on an equal footing with the United States. After the Gulf War, it is difficult to harbor such illusions. The United States, whatever its own economic difficulties, has reestablished the international hierarchy of power along lines similar to those that emerged from World War II. International “rank” can be attained only by those with the nerve to risk and face military confrontation. Even this, however, has not stopped some Europeans from dreaming.
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Roughly speaking, the process of European unification has brought to the fore three different and sometimes contradictory political projects.
The first of these, the idea of Europe simply as a free-trade area, is no dream. It has to a large extent been translated into reality, at least among those West European countries which were forced by the Soviet threat into becoming a bloc. It has also been an authentic success, to the point of bringing about the late arrival of Britain and today even the decision of some Scandinavian countries to apply for membership. The only problem is that since the logic of free trade does not apply to Europe alone, as time goes by it has become harder to understand what constitutes the outer borders of Europe, and why the EC should not also include the ex-satellite countries and Morocco and Turkey as well, or indeed whoever else makes a request for admission.
For those disturbed by the failure of the EC to carve out a role for itself in the Gulf crisis, however, this hardly exhausts the meaning of a united Europe. Their project, the second of the three, starts from the perception of Europe as a group of middle-sized powers, or ex-great powers, seriously frustrated in their ambitions and desirous of recovering a degree of influence and standing—of prestige—which they cannot achieve one by one. Some of these people are on the fringe: it is a curious fact that representatives of the most violent nationalisms, the neo-fascists like the Front National in France, the MSI in Italy, or the Republikaner in Germany, have become, on the surface at least, pro-European union. But beyond these there is a vast spectum of traditionalist forces which, in an era of continent-sized countries like the U.S., the USSR, or China, wish to revive the old ambition of a “place in the sun” through the instrument of a body that will have a say on all world problems.
Altogether different is the third European project, which harks back to the vision of the postwar founding fathers of a united Europe: Adenauer, De Gasperi, Monnet, Spinelli. Its essence consists in a historic and final reconciliation between France and Germany, linking the fate of the two great nations whose rivalry has for centuries engendered endless struggle and terrible bloodshed and has been a calamity for the entire continent, not to say the world. Those who favor European unity in this sense do not have in mind an alliance aimed at joining the total forces of the member-countries. When it comes to international action, a unified Europe would resemble, rather, a collective peace and security system, aiming not at joining but at balancing and reciprocally neutralizing the forces of the different nations of the Old Continent, and in the first instance France and Germany.
During the cold war, such a reconciliation, desirable as it was, could not by itself have guaranteed peace, because peace was then threatened not by rivalries among Europeans but rather by Soviet and Communist aggression. Now that the cold war is over and European customs barriers are disappearing, are the demons of the past disappearing as well? Unfortunately, the answer is unclear. The reunification of Germany has altered the balance within the very heart of the EC, bringing back to the surface certain unsavory qualities of nationalism and political rivalry. We might now be witnessing new, or rather old, threats to peace from the interior of Western Europe itself. If so, the Monnet-Spinelli project retains all the importance and urgency it had during World War II.
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Of the three political projects, the first (the market) is not incompatible with the other two, and indeed could even constitute a point of departure for them. But the second and third projects—overcoming frustration through a quest for “rank” or prestige, forging a lasting peace—are not only incompatible, they form different alternatives. They were able to coexist in the European imagination as long as the Soviet threat and the balance of terror pushed the Europeans to seek shelter under the American nuclear umbrella, transformed their quest for national glory into a mere dream, and relegated the Franco-German rivalry to history. Today, when this crucial external constraint no longer exists, Europe is confronted with the choice between a drive for power that will avenge a half-century of irrelevance and dependence, and peace.
For Europeans serious about implementing the latter choice, an instructive historical precedent lies in the example of the United States at its origin. Just as the American colonies, in creating the Union, aimed at founding not only a new country but a new social order, so at the very heart of the Europeanist project lies the hope of creating a newly peaceful social order, made possible by the renunciation by France and Germany of their hegemonic ambitions. And just as the American Revolution represented, as it has been said, a “rupture of the political connection with timeworn Europe,” so European unification must mean a rupture of the political connection with the war-worn Europe of the past. But above all, what remains relevant to a Europe bent on peace is the old American principle of “nonentanglement.”
For the American ex-colonies, nonentanglement meant the refusal of any extra-continental alliance, not only with the former enemy, England, but also with the France of the Bourbons. But of course the world has become much smaller and interdependent since then, and it is unthinkable that even a united Western Europe could confront alone the dangers of chaos and war which come today from the East and the South, dangers different from those of the recent past but no less disturbing. For this reason, one alliance remains fundamental for Europe, and that is its alliance with the United States. Europe must maintain it by giving, in exchange, loyal support—and, when needed, encouragement—to the efforts by the U.S. to meet its responsibilities as guarantor of the international order across the whole of the planet.
But there are many other situations in which Europe can act unentangled, and on its own—not only with regard to the protection of the European civil population (for example, in the case of biological warfare in neighboring zones), but also with regard to the protection of borders and the struggle against illegal immigration; not only with regard to the verification of disarmament agreements, but also with regard to the transfer of military technology; not only with regard to the suppression of the international drug trade, but also with regard to the struggle against terrorism; not only with regard to participation in multinational task forces, but also with regard to the prevention and mediation of conflicts among nationalities in the Balkans or in Central and Eastern Europe—as, most recently, in Yugoslavia. These are not areas that involve “grand politics,” the type of politics which jolt the imagination of the masses and lead to global notoriety. But they represent an arena of action where Europe can play an essential role in helping to keep the world at peace.
The most important role the Europeans can play in pursuing this objective, however, is the one embodied in the original Europeanist vision, which remains the best way to avoid a revival of the old nationalist quarrels and to overcome the tragic and murderous past. If the Gulf War finally leads the affluent, spoiled, and sometimes childishly excitable West Europeans to a rediscovery of this vision, it will turn out to have been a blessing in disguise.
