|
 ow
much more concrete does European integration get?
Last Saturday,
while eating out in Washington, I got my hands for the first time
on a set of new, shiny, freshly released Euro coins. After dessert,
a friend who had recently traveled home to Paris proudly displayed
that for which 12 European countries have just abandoned their national
currencies.
The Euro's
official unveiling on January 1 and its stability on financial markets
since have been remarkable achievements. Now, as expected, customers
are using the three-month phase-out period to surrender their national
bills and coins and switch to the new monetary unit.
So, where does
the European Union go now? And what does it mean for the United
States?
The logical
answer to the first question would be the creation of a European
federal state, an event one would expect to be the final stage of
the integration process that began in 1952, with the creation of
the European Coal and Steel Community. The problem is that the European
Union has never spelled out its final goal so clearly, nor can it
really do so. Political realities, for one, threaten to make a mockery
of the dreams of even the most ardent Europhiles.
The E.U's basic
problem is that as long as Europeans think of themselves as citizens
of nation-states rather than as partners in a larger entity, the
15 member states will hold more power than the all-community institutions.
Thus, even if it negotiates trade treaties and drafts the basic
outlines of much E.U. policy, the European Commission, which is
beholden to no one country, is not truly an executive branch. The
same goes for the European parliament, which can review E.U. legislation,
but lacks the all-important power to tax. Therefore, the opinions
of 15 member states, or at least of the largest or most powerful
among them, continue to matter more than any statement by common
E.U. institutions in attempts to forge a common European policy.
E.U. foreign
policy is especially shaky. In 1993, the then-12 member states created
the much-vaunted Common Foreign and Security Policy, as thousands
of Bosnian women and children were being massacred at their door.
However, the CSFP did not produce a strong deterrent to Slobodan
Milosevic's persecution of Kosovo Albanians in 1999, and it was
left — once again — to the United States to lead the effort
to stop massacres and deportations.
The E.U.'s
effort at a common-security policy turned comical at its last summit,
in December, when Belgian Foreign Minister Louis Michel proudly
announced that the 15 would create a 3,000-men peacekeeping force
for duty in post-Taliban Afghanistan. It took Mr. Michel's embarrassed
peers only minutes to rebuke him, insisting they had never meant
to do such a thing. Germany's Joschka Fischer was one of those pointing
out that the European Union simply does not have the structures
or resources to deploy troops in the Afghan theater.
It is hard
to imagine Brussels-based policymaking getting much smoother, as
the European Union prepares to welcome at least 12 eastern and southern
European countries into its ranks. The Union is slated to admit
most of the Warsaw Pact, as well as Malta and Cyprus, over a period
of several years beginning in 2004. If, however, 15 countries find
it hard to put together a coherent foreign and security policy,
how will things turn out when they are 27?
This dilemma
answers our second question: What role will the United States have
to play as Europe proceeds in fits and starts towards an unclear
horizon? In fact, the very basic structural challenges of E.U. policymaking
are the best guarantee for a continued U.S. presence in European
security affairs and for the strength of transatlantic relations.
The arrests
of extremist Muslim militants in several European countries since
September 11th have shown that democracies on both sides of the
Atlantic share a common enemy. In fact, few in the United States
may remember that Western Europe has a long experience contending
with Islamic terrorist groups. In 1995, Algerian extremists even
carried out a string of deadly bombings in Paris subway stations.
They have formed dozens of cells in Belgium, Germany, Netherlands,
the United Kingdom, Italy, and others. The presence of three British
Muslims among the batch of al Qaeda terrorists transferred this
week to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, suggests shows how far the formation
of parallel Islamic extremist networks in Western countries has
come.
If some European
countries have now managed to act against radical Muslim groups,
the structural weaknesses documented above help explain the paltry
record of the E.U., as an entity, when military action was needed
against Milosevic or bin Laden. That is why the United States must,
and will, remain, central to the effort to defeat the enemies of
a democratic Europe. Washington alone has the capacity to put together
a force capable of dealing with the contingencies of the terrorist
age.
So, does the
Euro-Atlantic community exist? On one side stands a nation, committed
to free trade and liberty of the individual. On the other, massive
welfare states struggle as best they can and where political-intellectual
elites seemingly have an apparent fixation with the use of the death
penalty in the United States. The story of the last 50 years, however,
is the best reminder that the American military umbrella is what
allows these differences to exist in the first place.
|
