Euroland
How much more concrete does European integration get?

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.