CSM column on Europe's global role
I have a column in the CSM today. (Also accessible here.) It's titled Europe springs ahead.
It's datelined from Lille, France, and it starts out like this:
- With the United States becoming bogged down in Iraq, how ready might the European Union (EU) be to pick up the slack in global affairs left by the diminishment of American power?
I've been in Europe for nearly six weeks – in Britain, Belgium, and here in northern France. My clear impression is that the EU is too divided and too concerned with pressing internal issues to provide any real alternative to the role the US plays in world affairs. Expect China and India to fill that vacuum instead.
- Today's Europe is an exciting, engaging place to be. Most European economies are humming. The publics here are dealing with challenging issues of governance, including how to build a multicultural community that works for all its citizens. But there isn't much appetite or energy for running the wider world as well.
As Washington deals with the challenges that lie ahead in Iraq and elsewhere around the globe, it won't find a strong, unified Europe standing at its side. Perhaps the best help European countries can provide is to reassure Americans that life can still be good even after a retrenchment from global empire.
Anyway, I wrote the first draft of the piece on Monday. My editors at the CSM needed to cut it quite a bit and we then had a bit of friendly to and fro on how to do that.
The paragraph about the emergence of Scottish-ness and English-ness refers to something new and very interesting indeed. I think I'll write a whole separate blog post about that.
yes, as you note, Sarkozy is on record against the war in Iraq...at this point who isn't?...of more significance is that, unlike Chirac, he is an Atlanticist...One can expect him to look to the UK and Ireland, not the EU or Scandinavia, for an economic model to help ameliorate France's stagnation, high unemployment rates, etc...It is not by accident that, swallowing French pride, the universities there are being encouraged to promote the use of the English language. This would have been unimaginable a generation ago.
In foreign affairs he is as much an Americophile as there is - east of Tony Blair. He will not make Blair's mistake of blindly toeing the American policy de Jour. In less than 2 years time, the Bush Administration will be history and don't be surprised to see the next president - it is increasingly looking to me like Obama - held in high esteem in France (and elsewhere).
Helena
One of the biggest opportunities that has been missed by the EU over the last fifteen years has been the failure of the Euromed program.
This would have integrated the countries of the Southern and Eastern shores of the Mediterranean with the EU.
It has now been subsumed into the EU Neighbourhood program which unfortunately has faced East towards the Energy Producers under the influence of the German EU presidency.
The Military Weakness of the EU is now allowing the US masquerading as Nato to drag EU countries into their wars as a tax free source of cannon fodder sometimes contrary to their national interests.
Now that the US credibility as a military and political leader has collapsed in the Sands of Iraq and the Mountains of Afghanistan it remains to see when a European Leader will arise who will define the European role in the 21st century.
"Now that the US credibility as a military and political leader has collapsed in the Sands of Iraq and the Mountains of Afghanistan"
Does that mean we can finally take NATO behind the barn and do what should have been done in the early '90s?
"it remains to see when a European Leader will arise who will define the European role in the 21st century."
Oh, great. A "Leader". That's all we need.....
Randal
Shimon Peres started a recent talk by dedicating it to Jean Monnet. Monnet is the kind of leader I am talking about. Somebody with a worthwhile vision.
I agree with you about NATO. Aparently the question was "Out of Area or Out of Business."
Out of Area has the potential to get our young men and women running round Africa and Asia fighting US wars for them much like the auxilliaries of the Roman Empire or the Spanish and Romanian who got swallowed up in Russia with the Wehrmacht.
"Monnet is the kind of leader I am talking about. Somebody with a worthwhile vision."
Noted. Though one man's "worthwhile vision" is another man's foolish endeavour and a third man's evil plot.
"Out of Area has the potential to get our young men and women running round Africa and Asia fighting US wars for them much like the auxilliaries of the Roman Empire or the Spanish and Romanian who got swallowed up in Russia with the Wehrmacht."
Or, indeed, like the current situation in Afghanistan.
Out of Business was clearly the correct choice. I would have had no problem with a big celebration with self-congratulatory rhetoric and nice shiny gongs for the retiring military and political apparatchiks. The cost would have been more than recovered in the first year of not paying for NATO's operating costs.
For me, the problem of NATO being used to provide auxiliaries for US wars is only one part of the disadvantages of the continuation of NATO. Almost as bad is the fact that increased military capability represents a standing temptation to our contemptible political classes to make use of it to interfere in other folks' business, murderously. Maybe only an American functionary could be quite so crass as to state it openly, but I've no doubt most politicals think: "what's the point in having this great military if we never use it?"