georgeob1 wrote:An EU that is able to act independently of (and sometimes in opposition to) the United States will have to pay the price for its independence (that means more defense spending and more serious engagement of the emerging threats to the West.) The new EU must now face both of these issues in the context of an emergingly resentful and authoritarian Russia that is clearly animated by the, perhaps understandable, desire to reclaim much of its former empire - or at least the power and influence it once had by virtue of its military, if not moral, power.
On all of this, too, we agree, completely.
(Scary, isnt it?)
However, here's a bone of reassuringly traditional contention:
georgeob1 wrote:I think it is a rather large stretch to assert that the United States has "profited" from the tensions among the new and old EU nations. The underlying issue here is the ambition among many in Europe to escape the security dependence (and influence) of the United States. That, of course, is their right, but it does involve a bit of something somewhere between ingratitude and forgetfulness. We have attempted to minimize our losses that result from that ambition.
Here there is, in my mind:
- a falsehood (ie, about the US not having actively worked to create, or even "profited" from the tensions between new and old EU nations);
- and a rather twisted impression (ie, that refusing to join your country's head-dive into a disastrous war of choice was just petty ingratitude).
The assertion that the US has "profited" from the tensions among the new and old EU nations isn't just not a large stretch, its bloody obvious. Old Europe's choice of name - and its Bush administration-coined origin - might ring a bell in this context.
He is, I'm sure, talking about the run-up to the Iraq war. The US wanted it (yes, it did). And it did its usual tour of bribing and bullying of those countries that did not already rally spontaneously.
Surprisingly, resistance was far more entrenched than Bush had calculated. The West-European countries took the US administration's claims about WMD threats and Al-Qaeda links as serious assertions. No nudge, nudge, wink, wink we know what you're really after, and we'll go along with the charade of the rationale. No, they took the argument the US presented head on and vigorously disputed the persuasiveness of the "proof" Powell and colleagues brought.
Did the US have convincing proof that Iraq still had WMD, still was willing and able to use them, and actually presented a direct threat to the West? For months, not just European countries, but countries around the world simply looked at the argument. And overwhelmingly rejected its premises.
It wasnt just "Old Europe", as Rumsfeld and Cheney disparagingly called the opposition. In the Security Council, countries as varied as Mexico, Chile, Angola and Pakistan followed Germany's and France's lead and refused to budge. No, they were not going to sign off on the new resolution the US was shopping around. Outside the Security Council, Greece, South-Africa, Austria - little countries otherwise easily cowed into compliance refused to go along.
I think this was the first time that an international push by the US was refused or repudiated so vastly. And US politicians reacted unbelievingly, angrily. Like you, they argued that it was, on the part of the European opponents, just a question of ingratitude. Didnt we owe it to the US, because of WW2 and the Cold War, to join them in this folly of a disastrous military adventure that the Iraq war has, surely enough, proven to be?
Err, no. Of course we're grateful for what the generation of George Bush's grandparents did for us, way back, but no, gratitude and solidarity as emotions do not extend to joining you in what was from the start, as European and UN experts warned you at the time, going to be a fools errand. History has proven Joschka Fischer and his colleagues completely right to not have accepted Powell's "proof", and to not have succumbed to US pressure.
But pressure the US did bring to bear, of all kinds. While France was hysterically demonized, and Germany simply snubbed, the smaller countries were pressured by your usual combination of threats and promises. And yes, the barely recovering or just newly growing countries in Central and Eastern Europe needed Western investments; moreover, they also yearned for the kind of security guarantees that history had taught them they needed, and only the US and NATO seemed possible to offer.
You may imagine that the folks of "New Europe" happily marched into the "Coalition of the Willing" out of sheer conviction and enthusiasm, but in reality, the populations of these countries ranged from relatively indifferent to skeptical and outright hostile about the Iraq adventure, and the governments were pulled asunder by the enormous twin pressure forces of EU and US.
Yes, the Big Divide between so-called "Old Europe" and "New Europe" burst forth exactly at this time - the result of a whole lot of pushing and pulling at the Central and Eastern European countries by the US as much as by the bossiest of the big EU countries. Even the terms themselves date largely from those months.
Now, four years later, a great number of Central and East European countries have actually joined the EU. A lot of the tensions from 2003 were long reconciled. But with the expansion of the EU came new rounds of redividing the pies of decision-making power and generous EC funding. Conflicts between national interests on agriculture and labour migration, and intermittent clashes of secular western and more christian-conservative eastern values created new tensions. So the idea of separate "New Europe" interests is still there - though in practice its more an "each for himself" kind of fray than a clash of blocks. And as for the term "Old Europe" - aside from some arch- and neo-conservative folk across the ocean who cling on all they can to notions of a sinking, socialist Europe, you dont really ever hear it anymore, do you? Not in mainland Europe, anyway - neither in the Western or in the Eastern half.
