Whenever a conflagration occurred sufficiently grave to make its involvement inevitable – be it the Spanish Armada of 1588, Napoleon, the 1914-1918 War or World War II – Britain summoned the will to play a prominent military role for a limited yet damaging period that threatened to shatter its political framework. It was aware that it was choosing priorities for economic reasons and that the resultant strategic realities severely limited its options. Thus from the beginning of the 20th century, Britain was an over-extended power, its diplomacy reflecting limitations it tried to shield from the press and the general public but was unable to avoid.
The sensibilities derived from such a history form part of the background to Britain's ambivalent position in the world today. In the well-worn words of Dean Acheson in 1962, "Britain has lost an empire and not yet found a role." It is still looking for one. In 1956, Suez was a debacle that symbolized more powerfully than any previous event that neither Britain nor France had the final say anywhere in a world compelled by the USA and the USSR to promote decolonization and loss of hegemony for the former West European powers.
Not until the Falkland Islands conflict was the sting of that failure to some extent reversed, yet it is now widely recognized that the merchant marine and naval demands of that campaign could not be matched today. The highbrow Harold Macmillan aspired for Britain to be "the Greeks in this new Roman Empire of the Americans". But this was to some extent posturing without meaning. Britain and France had left the Far East for good and could not exercise any significant influence in the Middle East until they determined to rival Camp David with the Venice Declaration in the early 1980s. Yet each determined to remain a nuclear power and saw the European venture as a means of regaining influence, not least because Germany still abstained from participation in overseas troop commitments. British and French partial involvements in Africa (e.g. in Chad and Somalia) had to be carefully delimited both militarily and economically.
At the height of its close relationship with President Reagan, Britain suffered a major indignity over the US invasion of Grenada and yet determined to assist in the bombing of Libya. The inequality did much damage to grass roots relations; witness the demonstrations against President Bush and his Iraq policy. France, on the other hand, had no equivalent of the British-American 'special relationship' and French resentment of the MacDonalds culture and of Hollywood is part of a cultural defiance that also found expression in the testing of a nuclear device in the Pacific. Aspiration to 'La Gloire' has continued to permeate the Quai D'Orsay to the exasperation of the Americans and of much of the rest of the world.
The Europeans proved themselves unable to restrain a resurgent and aggressive Germany's Drang nach Osten, which (with US endorsement) had launched Croatian independence and caused the dismemberment of Yugoslavia. This has, perhaps, never been given quite the place it merits in the history of British and French failures. Neither French nor British protestations were backed by muscle against Germany, or, God forbid, against the United States, even when the Americans, ignoring a cease-fire agreement signed in Lisbon under European auspices by President Izabegovitch of Bosnia, President Tudgman of Croatia and President Milosevitch of Serbia, told Izatbegovitch not to ratify it because they would get him better terms, setting off an unnecessary three-year war that caused tens of thousands of dead and hundreds of thousands of refugees. After achieving its goal of defeating the Serbs, the United States imposed its peace terms, further demeaning the Europeans by doing this at Dayton, Ohio.
Yet even Germany, at the time Washington's preferred West European state, was unable to do anything serious without American approval. When it achieved unification, Chancellor Kohl proclaimed the need to revise the Polish frontier – to the admitted horror of Mrs. Thatcher and President Mitterand – but got no clear-cut go-ahead signal from the US and could not pursue the matter. On the other hand, Washington did not oppose German moves to strengthen its position within the European Community.
Former Conservative Cabinet Minister John Redwood, an Emeritus Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and one of the most able men in Parliament, has studied in depth the particular dilemmas of Britain's contemporary identity and the negative impact of the European phenomenon on the country. He suggested four different ways in which Britain could develop. One route could be closer integration in Europe. The second would bring Britain closer to America, by becoming at the least a member of NAFTA. Thirdly, says John Redwood, there could be a maintenance of the current balancing act, which has nearly always been the prevalent position, and fourthly a radical 'go it alone' policy with Britain placing itself as an independent force in the world.1 Each choice, however, has its repercussions: 'If the UK chooses more freedom and democracy, it will mean a stronger transatlantic alliance and give a great boost to the forces of freedom everywhere. If the UK chooses further continental entanglements, it will be a dark day for freedom and free trade and will usher in a long period of international tension.'2
One point is deceptively simple: From its politicians' statements it would appear that Britain does not feel able to act on its own very often, yet they repeatedly stress that this right must be preserved. Nonetheless, Britain has been cast in the role of Washington's most loyal European ally and it reacted unfavorably when under President Clinton it appeared that Germany was starting to usurp this position. Clinton was even wooed by the British government by being allowed to play a role in Northern Ireland. De Gaulle's view of Britain as a Trojan Horse for the USA in Europe may not have been quite right but such a vision accorded ill with his desire to play a dominant role in a Europe without another power while Germany was divided. When the Labour government failed to support the USA in Vietnam, it perhaps signaled a divide that is still at the heart of diplomacy, economics, trade and strategy today. The Labor Party has less admiration for American values than the Conservatives and less sense of global mission. But what has also happened since the days of Mrs. Thatcher is that Labor's official position has become much more European integrationist, whilst fundamentally the Conservatives, never internationalist, favor the preservation of nation states as independent entities in a world they see far more realistically than international institutions, including the European Union. Nevertheless, a Conservative Prime Minister, Ted Heath, led Britain into Europe. He gave assurances this did not mean political unity but only trading advantages, which was not quite true. Eventually the issue of Europe created one of the oddest political alliances in modern British politics: Tony Benn of the far left and Enoch Powell to the right of the Conservative Party combining to show that democracy and freedom of political action, indeed sovereignty itself, were at stake. They have been proven far-sighted. Some have maintained that Europe's determined development plans for a super-state put the fundamental freedoms of the American Revolution in jeopardy. Worse still, the EU frameworks have an anti-libertarian past and derive directly from Nazi plans transmitted into the molding ideas of the early European 'idealists'. Intellectual and institutional history are two important elements within the great internally dividing debate on the future place of Britain between Eurosceptics and Europhiles. The nature of the European movement towards integration reflects its intellectual antecedents and they are not pleasant.3
Again and again Europe has put forward ways such as the WEU by which to by-pass the authority of NATO, which it refuses to fund in any substantial way (85% is US funding). The EU has ambitions beyond what it has been willing to fund in terms of turning its economic weight into military-diplomatic capabilities. The much-vaunted rapid reaction force, for instance, supplying perhaps 20,000 men, requires all kinds of transportation capacity and equipment ranges in order to be able to react effectively, quite apart from complex logistical units and the command and control facilities linked to the political echelon. The EU has willingly used NATO without clear moral or legal justification to bomb a European capital (Belgrade) in an offensive capacity (though NATO was always defined as a defensive organization), with President Clinton's express agreement. Yet when the USA was attacked on September 11th, 2001, and Lord Robertson the NATO Secretary-General quite properly pledged NATO support, no follow-up occurred. The EU span into opposition to the 'war on terror' and even though the idea of a NATO say was perceived by the American administration as cramping its options, NATO's support was publicly displayed as bankrupt because 'Old Europe' desired to go a separate way. Britain has asserted the primary importance of NATO with obvious consistency almost whenever it has been questioned. Mrs. Thatcher commented that the USA had rescued Europe and also that Britain and the USA win when they act together. This reading of history is important for an understanding of Britain's dilemma but also for a grasp of its need not to jettison something so well established as 'English speaking peoples' with an intertwined cultural and historical past. This, as intimated above, is not really true of Britain and continental Europe. Britain has never been part of Europe, which, merely a continent until after World War II, felt up till then that its states had only certain political and cultural elements in common, such as the Roman Catholic Church and absolutism (both rejected by Britain in the 16th and 17th centuries). Even these only affected some areas of Europe.
The fierceness of the debate and disagreement between the various groups in Britain is partly a product of these historical forces but is also due to very deep divisions between Left and Right, especially over where interests should lie and what future developments are likely to be. Political parties and groups within them are separated by their different reading of contemporary history and economic or diplomatic data.
The debate about Britain's role and identity affects the entire world because of the very real differences between the USA and the EU and their impact on economic development, diplomacy and world (dis)order. Since the economic demise of the 'tiger economies' of the Far East, these differences affect most of the world's powerful economic and diplomatic forces. The United States is highly developed militarily; the EU is trying to become so and in the meantime is attempting to use a kind of ethical barricade to shield itself from a deep sense of militarily inferiority, but is at least almost convinced that it is not culturally inferior. In terms of economic and diplomatic positioning, Europe has a dilemma, much of it of its own making. Britain has potentially an even more exaggerated form of this.
"Europe's dilemma is acute. Far more dependent on West Asian oil than the US is, European leaders have carefully cultivated a three-pronged strategy for the region - a massive programme of aid for the Arab Mediterranean called MEDA, developing a free trade agreement with the Gulf states, and funding a huge programme for civil and economic regeneration in the putative Palestinian state." Commercial unilateralism has brought the United States into dispute with Europe on steel tariffs. Now the US unilateralism in the foreign policy sphere has seriously jeopardised Europe's carefully laid plans for peace and economic cooperation with the West Asian nations.4 The above, from an Indian magazine, shows something of how the world views the EU-USA relationship. Interpreting real differences that diplomats wish to underplay is difficult because, even when relations appear civil and easy, there seem to be genuine far-reaching differences that cannot be wished or negotiated away. Can Britain straddle them? Or is it bound to fall between two stools? Or alternatively, should it, as some Eurosceptics believe, make a real choice? It must be remembered that the Commonwealth, which appears to count for little, still represents values and symbols of some importance. Britain may count for little but represents far more than it counts for; and paradoxically, therefore, it means something, like the dignified elements of its constitution and its monarchy. Playing a prominent role in the EU and in Washington's relations with Europe, it matters globally more than in its own right.
The Macedonia issue showed that Berlin-Plus, designed to resolve the EU-USA defense problems in terms of NATO and European Security Defense Policy (ESDP) had not failed. However, "during the height of European opposition to the U.S. stance on Iraq, France, Germany, Belgium, and Luxembourg reopened the question, in effect calling Berlin-Plus into doubt. They advocated the establishment of an independent EU military headquarters in Tervuren, Belgium, with an independent planning capacity". Britain's role in patching up a compromise that made sense has been summed up thus:
"Critically, the Blair government steered the compromise so that the ESDP will work on projects only when NATO decides not to intervene in a crisis, and NATO retains the first right of refusal in a crisis situation. As with the Berlin-Plus agreement, the EU will continue to be allowed to draw on NATO assets--but only if the alliance as a whole approves, giving the U.S. a de facto veto over the process. What is most important for the United States is that, while there is an EU planning unit, the EU will not possess a separate headquarters for the ESDP process."5
It is precisely this bridging role that Britain may wish to play to the utmost as it seeks to belong to two separate well-defined spheres. Although some analysts argue that Britain may not count for much and outside observers (neither U.S. nor British) might try to underplay the 'special relationship', even from the US point of view, the bridge building can matter as Britain's leverage approximates the moral authority still maintained by Whitehall, especially in a crisis. During the two months following the tragedy of September 11th, Tony Blair had 54 meetings with world leaders, traveling more than 40,000 miles from Russia to Islamabad and from Syria to New York, thus showing that Britain punched above its weight.6
"Though President Clinton and Prime Minister Blair enjoyed a close friendship, President Clinton allowed a number of issues to fester and damage the pivotal relationship between the U.S. and Britain. It is important that issues relating to ballistic missile defense (BMD), the European Security and Defense Policy (ESDP), trade, and the future political shape of Europe be discussed and U.S. positions explained. This diplomatic clarity is essential to ensure that any policy differences between the United States and the U.K. are dealt with in such a way that this critical geopolitical link is not endangered." The description 'pivotal' comes from an American academic not from a British one. Dr. Hulsman labels the relationship with Britain "one of America's most durable and important alliances."7 He is correct to pick out the four issues which President Clinton left unresolved, not least since these highlight the divergence between the EU and USA.
The BMD area requires technology and finance at a very high level. Only a clear understanding why appeasement of terror regimes may utterly fail and produce blackmail will ultimately justify the kind of effort and expenditure required. Only the USA and Britain (perhaps with the new EU members and those outside the Franco-German axis) hold this to be the case. Already a number of NATO capitals are within reach of Arab long-range missile strikes. In the Jihadi environment now pertaining, with security alerts preventing aircraft flights, cooperation in this sphere remains a high long-term priority – for those who do not choose to be wilfully blind.
How NATO and the hopes and desires for a European military capability consummate with its economic power develop are still critical issues for the Western world. The capacity to integrate policy and command and control structures with the USA goes to the heart of the alliance, which has hitherto held firm enough, not least when confronted with Communist aspirations during the Cold War. The nuclear umbrella has been of immeasurable benefit to Europe judging by the years of MAD and the recognition by Soviet leaders after the Cuban missile crisis that force would probably be met with equal force (such as the Defcon. 3 alert of the US Sixth Fleet in 1973).
Britain may be able to respond in a persuasive and reasoned way, persuading many European states that the lack of gratitude sensed and commented upon by the U.S. when the Europeans failed to support sanctions against Iran and their attitude of blank incomprehension and disparagement towards the Iraq war bode ill for the West. No other power has an equally consistent a record for doing so. The so-called "free world" would be far more vulnerable without the priority given to common interests in the defense and security sphere. The very concept of 'Western Defense' would be damaged hugely if Britain could not voice the need for USA-EU cooperation in creating structures and policies. The forces pulling these two apart are serious and their implications and foreseeable results seem damaging.
Trade is one of the fundamentals when it comes to global policies relating to poverty and maintaining security or political power. British Eurosceptics argued that the dependence on Europe trumpeted by Europhiles is really a fraud – being partly a product of governmental pro-European policies and partly an inversion of the reality that with an adverse balance of payments with the EU, Britain needs Europe more than the EU needs it. Furthermore, as the EU expands, cheaper labour in Britain and the former Soviet satellite states will actually make the EU, with its high labour costs, even less globally competitive and Britain should steer well clear of being locked into a fortress of protectionist-minded overpricing states and companies receiving government help. Such a fortress Europe would be difficult for Far Eastern and American produce to penetrate, while its own internal markets would keep wages and prices artificially high while maintaining high unemployment figures and without developing a proper 'enterprise culture', such as famously exists in the USA.
'Britain's total deficit in goods and services in 2003 reached a record £35.8bn, official figures showed today. The increase, up from £31.4bn in 2002, was caused by a shrinking of the surplus in the services sector, Britain's traditional strength. The deficit on goods traded with the rest of the world narrowed slightly from last year's record to £46.4bn.
There was a marked deterioration in the United Kingdom's trade with the EU in 2003. The annual trade deficit with the EU reached a record £23.8bn, due to lower British exports and an increase in imports from Germany, Spain, Belgium and the Netherlands. There was an especially sharp rise in imports of cars.
Analysts expressed surprise and concern at the growth of the trade gap with the EU, particularly as the recovery in the manufacturing sector in the UK appeared to be stronger than on the continent. "There was a worrying increase in the trade deficit with the EU countries, a result of a combination of the recent sterling appreciation and weak economic growth on the continent," said Andrij Halushka, an economist with the Centre for Economics and Business Research. "An economic recovery in the US, on the other hand, caused exports to this trade partner to grow despite the high pound-dollar exchange rate."'8
It is not difficult to point to the disastrous 'Black Monday' when the ERM of the EMS saw Britain waste billions of pounds sterling on trying to stay in an exchange rate mechanism described previously by Mrs. Thatcher's special economic adviser Sir Alan Walters as "half baked", nor to point out the vindictive fervour with which French farmers burnt lamb in British lorries and the EU, with unseemly haste and determination, banned British beef. But the arguments for NAFTA instead or alongside EU membership have a sound enough basis in economic reality. In the summer of 1998, following a lecture at the Centre for Policy Studies by none other than Conrad Black, the Daily Telegraph commented on this in some detail, which merits reproducing here.9
"…Most interesting, however, has been the response of the critics. Almost no one has argued that Mr Black's dispensation would be undesirable. Instead, their complaint is that it is 'impractical'. This, of course, is a rather clever way of closing down the debate before it starts. But it is far from clear why the scheme should be impractical. Europhiles offer two reasons: first, that the Americans would not want it; second, that the Europeans would not allow it.
These are important objections, and worth considering separately. The notion that the Americans want Britain to be part of a European bloc is not wholly groundless, but it is becoming out of date. US commentators are waking up to the fact that the EU contains an important anti-American component. Henry Kissinger, perhaps the most influential of post-war foreign policy thinkers, recently warned against further European integration. Newt Gingrich, Speaker of the House of Representatives, has promised… to support any move by Congress to offer Britain associate membership of NAFTA. Senator Phil Gramm of Texas has since introduced precisely such a Bill. And in Canada, the leader of the opposition, Preston Manning, has written to the Daily Telegraph to support Mr Black's proposal. The only way to test how the North Americans would respond to a British application is, of course, to submit such an application. All the signs are that it would be favourably received.
The second objection - that the Europeans would resent Britain enjoying the benefits of Atlantic free trade, and would impose punitive sanctions - is oddly revealing. By making such a case, the Europhiles are implicitly conceding that Britain would be more prosperous as part of an expanded NAFTA. More than that, they are conceding that Britain's affluence would offend many Continental states. We do not believe that our allies in the EU would be so vindictive. But if the Europhiles know better, why do they want us to be in Europe at all? By their own logic, the politicians with whom they want us to share sovereignty are inherently spiteful and anti-British.
In any case, tariff barriers between Britain and the rest of the EU would damage the Continent far more than these islands. Since joining in 1972, Britain has had a negative trade balance with the other members in 21 out of 25 years, accumulating a total deficit of £155 billion. Over the same period, it has run a surplus with the rest of the world of £75 billion. It is not normal, in any negotiation, for salesmen to bully their clients.
A third objection is that, by joining NAFTA, Britain would become "the 51st state of the US." But this is not how NAFTA works. Canada has lost none of its independence under the agreement, despite deriving more than 40 per cent of its GNP from trade with the United States. As NAFTA expands into South America - and possibly into the peripheral areas of Europe - fears about US dominance will recede further. The notion that NAFTA could pose more of a threat to its members' sovereignty than the EU is preposterous.
The case for NAFTA membership is primarily a positive one. Britain conducts twice as much trade with North America as does the rest of the EU. We are the largest foreign investor in the US and this year became the main holders of US Treasury bonds. Little wonder that, in its formal assessment of whether Britain should join EMU, the Treasury had to concede that our economy was marching in step with North America, not Europe. And the trend is accelerating: British exports to the US are rising, while exports to Europe are falling. Modern technology is making our geographical proximity to Europe irrelevant. The case for associating with the New World does not rest simply on affinity of language, culture or political values. It is based on hard economic calculation. It is an idea whose time is coming."
The debate generally pushes such arguments aside as extreme and impractical. But it is undoubtedly true that many in Britain take seriously the alternatives to constant closer integration into a Europe they, regardless of their political leaders' reassurances, consider less than democratic, remote and unhelpful to elements they value, such as common law, independent economic decisions and self-determination. Tony Blair's government is well aware that in referenda on closer integration dealing with abandoning the Pound in favour of the Euro, opinion polls regularly show a 2:1 ratio against the Euro.
The future shape of Europe is a complex issue impinging on many ambitions and aspirations. But, only some Germans and French want ever closer ties. In England some even think that Britain gives concessions to the USA too easily for too little in return and justify a closer future relationship with Europe on this basis. Their model, something akin to a united states of Europe, is on offer in the "fast track" and in former French President Giscard D'Estaing's proposed new constitution for Europe. The flavour of the debate may be gauged by the following.
On the other hand, Shadow Foreign Minister Michael Ancram argued that adherence to the EU constitution would mean slapping new controls on the United Kingdom, which justified putting the issue to a vote of the people. "Tony Blair refuses to hold an honest debate on the EU constitution. All he will do is offer the British people a false choice between surrendering national sovereignty or pulling out of the EU," he said.
Mr.Ancram told conservatives.com, "It is true that there are those like UKIP who want to withdraw from Europe. There are those like Blair who want to create a European superpower. Conservatives want the middle way between these two extremes. We want to reform an enlarged Europe into a partnership of nations. He says that we can only have a referendum if there is 'a fundamental change to the British constitution'. Hasn't he noticed that this treaty, unlike all other treaties, is called a constitution? Of course a European constitution is a fundamental change to the way Britain is governed. It's dishonest to say otherwise. That is why the Conservative Party has campaigned for a referendum since December."
Mr Ancram added, "Under this constitution the EU would have a President, a Foreign Minister and legal personality. It will also have a legally binding charter of fundamental rights, which would cover everything from criminal rights to unemployment law, and new control over asylum and immigration. Such a… change can only be endorsed by consulting the British people."'10
Mrs Thatcher in a famous speech, which had a whole group named after it, outlined a Europe of nation states that preserved their sovereignty and freedom of action.11 "My first guiding principle is this: willing and active cooperation between independent sovereign states is the best way to build a successful European Community. To try to suppress nationhood and concentrate power at the centre of a European conglomerate would be highly damaging and would jeopardise the objectives we seek to achieve.
Europe will be stronger precisely because it has France as France, Spain as Spain, Britain as Britain, each with its own customs, traditions and identity. It would be folly to try to fit them into some sort of identikit European personality. Some of the founding fathers of the Community thought that the United States of America might be its model. But the whole history of America is quite different from Europe. People went there to get away from the intolerance and constraints of life in Europe. They sought liberty and opportunity; and their strong sense of purpose has, over two centuries, helped to create a new unity and pride in being American, just as our pride lies in being British or Belgian or Dutch or German.
I am the first to say that on many great issues the countries of Europe should try to speak with a single voice. I want to see us work more closely on the things we can do better together than alone. Europe is stronger when we do so, whether it be in trade, in defence or in our relations with the rest of the world. But working more closely together does not require power to be centralised in Brussels or decisions to be taken by an appointed bureaucracy.
Indeed, it is ironic that just when those countries such as the Soviet Union, which have tried to run everything from the centre, are learning that success depends on dispersing power and decisions away from the centre, there are some in the Community who seem to want to move in the opposite direction. We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain, only to see them re-imposed at a European level with a European super-state exercising a new dominance from Brussels.
Certainly we want to see Europe more united and with a greater sense of common purpose. But it must be in a way which preserves the different traditions, parliamentary powers and sense of national pride in one's own country; for these have been the source of Europe's vitality through the centuries… Let us have a Europe which plays its full part in the wider world, which looks outward not inward, and which preserves that Atlantic community - that Europe on both sides of the Atlantic - which is our noblest inheritance and our greatest strength.'
This speech marked the return to a definition favoring nation states as well as the alliance with the USA. It may have laid out the conditions under which Britain could straddle both sides of the divide then apparent. Since then Mrs. Thatcher has argued forcefully for a shift in Britain's position towards Europe and has become appreciably more Eurosceptic and appalled by the integrationist process.12
More than ten years later, the historian Professor Jeremy Black thinks Britain's attempt at straddling both worlds will fail and the result will be negative in both directions. He also sees Tony Blair as trying hard to push Britain into closer European integration. "In short, Blair's domestic and foreign policies work to diminish British identity and sovereignty, especially in regard to the EU….
…Over a longer period, American governments have supported the creation of the European Union seeing it as an anchor of anti-Communism, and pushed Britain to join, even though, in the event, the logic of a EU foreign and military policy has risked compromising NATO and creating a critic of American policies. Looking to the future, the mutual lack of comprehension about American and continental European attitudes and assumptions revealed by the present crisis raise serious issues of political management on both sides of the Atlantic. Understanding the parameters within which allies can be expected to operate demands knowledge, deftness and expertise, and this point underlines how delicate the china may be in the transatlantic shop.
Whatever the outcome of the present contretemps, Blair's sense that he could square circles has begun to wear thin, and this, in turn, makes the Prime Minister's roles as the primary intermediary between the USA and EU more problematical. While the UK will probably remain closely tied with the USA and EU, it will have difficulties influencing policy in either and will consequently fail as interlocutor. Pleasing as it is for a Briton to see his country as a bridge between America and Europe, both sides would be wiser to avoid relying totally on a span with questionable political moorings."13
The vitally important work of Robert Kagan and Robert Cooper shows that the differences between the perceptions of the world in the USA and Europe are very deep indeed. Both recognise that their understandings of the norms of international relations are very different. This cannot be emphasised enough when so many within the European hierarchy seek to represent their attitudes as relatively normal.14
Robert Kagan's and Robert Cooper's work cannot be ignored here, Kagan has pointed out: "…issues outside of Europe don't attract nearly as much interest among Europeans as purely European issues do. This has surprised and frustrated Americans on all sides of the political and strategic debate: Recall the profound disappointment of American liberals when Europeans failed to mount an effective protest against Bush's withdrawal from the abm treaty. But given the enormous and difficult agenda of integration, this European tendency to look inward is understandable. eu enlargement, the revision of the common economic and agricultural policies, the question of national sovereignty versus supranational governance, the so-called democracy deficit, the jostling of the large European powers, the dissatisfaction of the smaller powers, the establishment of a new European constitution - all these present serious and unavoidable challenges….
…Europe does not see a mission for itself that requires power. Its mission is to oppose power. It is revealing that the argument most often advanced by Europeans for augmenting their military strength these days is not that it will allow Europe to expand its strategic purview. It is merely to rein in and "multilateralize" the United States…."15
The point is that the US exercise of power has become utterly unthinkable to many Europeans. Only Britain bridges this divide in practice. For example Robert Cooper, a Blair adviser and major theoretician, believes in regime change and the need to use force. But he thinks Europe has a developed system of meeting threats not based on military weakness. He argues therefore that EU failures are lack of proper cooperation and a need to unify and standardize weapon systems in European states. He recognizes the essential requirements of power and security but suspects the form of European integration allowing national identity to be reflected in a wider sense of "us".16
This may, in the present writer's opinion, be too optimistic. Bat Ye'or has discerned much darker forces at work. She writes: "Strategically, the Euro-Arab Cooperation (EAD) was a political instrument for anti-Americanism in Europe." Its aim was to separate and weaken both two continents by incitement to hostility and permanent denigration of American policy in the Middle East. In her view, "the cultural infrastructure of the EAD allowed the traditional cultural baggage of Arab societies, with its anti-Christian and anti-Jewish prejudices and its hostility against Israel and the West, to be imported into Europe…."17 The EAD had tied the Arab strategies to destroy Israel to the European economy, but yielded the EU little influence in the Middle East while laying Europe open to Arab-Muslim influence
This helps to explain the depth of feeling engendered in the attitude of the EU towards the USA and their different understanding of the Middle East. The EU is competing with the USA for influence in that region and not a few European politicians are concerned that the USA supports Israel and accepts its actions against terrorism – a situation likely to foster anti-Semitism in Europe. On some occasions Washington has regarded the Europeans as half-hearted in their opposition to terrorism. Moreover, it suspects that the EC has turned a blind eye to the recruitment of terrorists and to financial support for their organizations on its soil. The Scott Enquiry and the near-jailing of the Matrix-Churchill directors exposed, finally, government support for super-gun parts exports to Iraq. The German government has always claimed that it cannot interfere with the selling of dual-use materials to some states characterised by President Bush as part of the "axis of evil".
The words of Margaret Thatcher, commemorating the man who resigned from the Cabinet because, off the record over a meal, he told a journalist, that Britain might as well have surrendered to Hitler as give control over the European economy to Chancellor Kohl, contain essential insight. "These Continental European countries' ideas, traditions and history are fundamentally different from our own. The kind of liberal individualism, which J.S. Mill's On Liberty describes, let alone the free economy of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, never took root there. The battles between the European left and right were essentially between different brands of collectivism, and they largely remain so. Moreover, in many cases there are deep-rooted tendencies toward bureaucracy, authoritarianism and corrupt abuse of power. Indeed, European politicians, dividing their time between courts, jails and debating chambers, have recently managed to give a whole new meaning to the expression 'conviction politics'."18 To sum up, Britain's eventual choice between the United States and the European Community may well affect political ideology and political practice beyond its borders. Britain cannot straddle both camps indefinitely if their differences on issues of major import become more and more intense. Authoritarian regimes are prominent in European history, but play a very small part in British history. Rejecting the continental tradition, the Founding Fathers of the United States stressed the values of liberty and accountability to the people, and insisted on framing them in the constitution. So if the ultimate choice faced by Britain and some other countries were between the American dream and the emergent European one, it would be wise to take into consideration that the former offers more freedom than the latter.
Notes
1 John Redwood, Stars and Strife The Coming Conflicts between the USA and the European Union, Palgrave, 2001, pp. 26-28.
2 Ibid., p. 184.
3 A thorough and well-documented exposition of this aspect is John Laughland, The Tainted Source The Undemocratic Origins of the European Idea, Warner Books, 1998.
4 Michael Hindley, (a Labour Party member of the European Parliament from 1984 to 1999), Blair's burden, Frontline, India, Volume 19 - Issue 10, May 11-24, 2002.
5 The above two quotations are from John C. Hulsman, Laying Down Clear Markers: Protecting American Interests from a Confusing European Constitution, The Heritage Foundation, Backgrounder Number 1712, December 12, 2003.
6 A BBC News/Open University calculation.
7 John C. Hulsman, Ph.D. is a Research Fellow in European Affairs in the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for International Studies at The Heritage Foundation. The comments are from his Executive Memorandum, An Opportunity to Strengthen America's Special Relationship with Britain, Heritage Foundation, February 20, 2001.
8 Mark Tran, Britain's trade deficit at record high, The Guardian, February 10, 2004.
9 The Case for NAFTA, The Daily Telegraph, July 30, 1998.
10 Blair Ducks Honest Debate on European Union, http://www.conservatives.com/news/article.cfm?obj_id=62521.
11 Margaret Thatcher, Speech to the College of Europe ("The Bruges Speech"), September 20, 1988.
12 See the thorough analysis in Margaret Thatcher, Statecraft, 2003.
13 Jeremy Black, Blair, Britain, Europe And International Relations?, Watch on the West A Newsletter of FPRI’s Center for the Study of America and the West, Foreign Policy Research Institute, Volume 3, Number 9, November 2002.
14 Cf. for example, Rory Watson, EU begins to mend divisions over war, The Times, April 15, 2003.
15 Robert Kagan, Power and Weakness, Policy Review, Number 113, June, 2002. See also his Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order, Atlantic Books, 2003.
16 See Robert Cooper, The Breaking of Nations Order and Chaos in the Twenty-First Century, Atlantic Books, 2003.
17 Bat Ye’or, Eurabia The Road to Munich, National Review Online, October 9, 2002.
18 Margaret Thatcher, Nicholas Ridley Memorial Lecture, November 22, 1996.
