AFTER THE IRAQ WAR, A NEW BALANCING ACT IN U.S.-EUROPEAN RELATIONS

  Artículo de John Vinocur en “The International Herald Tribune” del 13.05.2003

PARIS Proposition A: If the Iraq war's run-up and denouement proved anything, it showed that Europe has faint appetite for a future built on a policy defined in opposition to the United States. Proposition B: If the Americans' handling of the European Union, pre- and post-Iraq, reaffirmed a trend in U.S. policy, it is to deal separately with the parts of the EU that align with U.S. goals, while disregarding their sum. (Often, say the Americans, because there is none.)

These two hardly contradictory but abrasive notions run through much of the thinking these days on how Europe and the United States approach one another. The issue is not so much one of a common redefinition of their relationship. Rather it comes in drawing separate conclusions from facts that Iraq has made hard to escape. One of them is the now incontestable reality that some European countries, led by France, seek a European Union defined as a self-contained pole - functioning against, in opposition, or as a counterweight - to the United States.

Before Iraq, this position had an element of comfortable deniability; whoever identified it as conceived to thwart the United States could be accused of being excessive or short on nuance. But through Iraq, this judgment has become a commonplace, both a badge of honor for those who support it, and for many others in Europe, the description of an EU in permanent confrontation with America that they never want to come into being.

Europe's politics, and the potential for the United States' reaction, have significantly changed - perhaps in a salutary way - because leaders now talk openly about the EU's future development involving a choice that includes butting heads with the United States. In the weeks before and after the initiative by France, Belgium, Luxembourg and Germany to set up a European military headquarters, President Vaclav Klaus of the Czech Republic, Prime Minister Peter Medgyessy of Hungary and Foreign Minister Jaap de Hoop Scheffer of the Netherlands all said, with varying phraseology, that they did not want circumstances setting up a European identity in opposition to the United States. Their remarks fit the line taken by Prime Minister Tony Blair, who has argued that multiple would-be poles of power meant a world of new rivalries and instability. A U.S. official in Washington, talking about the development, said last week, "It's interesting to see the evolution in what visitors here say. There are more now who acknowledge they are faced with a choice that includes setting themselves up as an opposition pole. Others still run from (acknowledging) it."

Parallel to this, there were good clear indications in France that its policy seeking to define Europe as a counter-power to the United States was intact.

The current issue of L'Express magazine produced an interview with Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin in which it repeated three times his statement, "Let's make no mistake about it: the choice, for sure, is between two visions of the world." A columnist for L'Express, Bernard Guetta, refashioned the idea in more specific terms. He wrote, "It's a fact, France has the ambition of creating an EU that is a counterweight to the United States."

But France hardly looked like the winning horse. In an article over the weekend for its French-language clients, Agence France-Presse wrote, "France has enormous difficulties finding its place against an increasingly unilateralist America tempted by other allies in 'the New Europe.'" In these circumstances, the news agency said, France ran the risk "of barely having a grip on events."

In leading a worldwide attempt to stop the U.S.-British strike on Saddam Hussein, France wound up being blamed for its attempted blockade of NATO's decision-making apparatus, at odds with all of the EU's new Eastern European members who backed the Americans and British, and apparently excluded from serious participation in the reconstruction of Iraq.

Although Germany tailed after France during the Iraq debate, its coordinator for German-American relations, Karsten Voigt, has now repeated what he said late last year about the future of Europe. In an expanded EU, he asserted, "there is no majority for a policy creating a Europe that would be an opposite pole to the United States. In any event, it is not German policy."

Yet all this is accompanied by a new kind of concern in Europe that the United States might be making the "disaggregation" of Europe - dealing with like-minded individual parts rather than the unified whole of its aspirations - the basis of future American policy.

Coming out of the Iraq experience in which the Bush Administration may believe it successfully isolated its opponents, disaggregation or "cherry-picking" in relation to the EU would bring the United States into contradiction with its traditional position in favor of European integration. More important, it would turn America into a perceived opponent of what the project for European unity retains of idealism and political ambition.

Europe, including politicians from countries who want to escape an EU that sees itself as a counter-pole to the United States, emphatically does not like the disaggregation talk. "It would put everybody in the position of constantly having to choose," a British official said. "And that's a bad position."

Javier Solana, the chief voice of the EU on foreign policy, said last week: "I am concerned when I hear influential voices asking whether the United States would be better served by disaggregating Europe. Such an approach would not only contradict generations of American wisdom, it would also be profoundly misguided. Different voices must be heard and respected, not ostracized or punished."

The expression of concern relates to a meeting last month in Washington at which, according to news agency reports, a State Department official said that disaggregation was now America's approach to the EU.

Solana said he did not believe this was the policy of President George W. Bush. And a non-American participant at the meeting, who said such a policy would alarm all of Europe, described the official involved as saying disaggregation was a personal recommendation, not policy.

But in a statement, the State Department hardly put the issue to rest. "We work with the European Union as a whole, and we work with individual governments in the European Unions," a spokesman told Reuters. "It's not a question of one or the other. Some things are matters for the (European) Commission, some are matters for individual governments."

Last week, Francois Bayrou, an influential member of the French government's Parliament majority, described Europe these days as "politically in shreds" and "only a facade."

Regardless of the reality of this characterization, a friend of the United States who had knowledge of the Washington meeting said the disaggregation talk was "quite alarming" and, quite obviously, could not serve European or American interests. International Herald Tribune