An American View on "Euro-Nationalism"

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The Curse of Euro-Nationalism: Why the U.S. should beware the EU

By John O'Sullivan
Posted: Thursday, August 9, 2001
ARTICLES
National Review (New York City)
Publication Date: August 6, 2001

The ancient city of Constantinople, whose mosques and minarets look down on the Bosporus that divides Asia from Europe and links the Black Sea to the Mediterranean, might seem an odd place from which to contemplate the new phenomenon of Euro-nationalism. Yet its long history should remind us that how far authority extends may not be the best measure of its real power. As the capital of the sprawling multiethnic Ottoman Empire, Istanbul was in constant crisis as its rulers sought simultaneously to maintain control in its decaying provinces and to fend off hostile neighbors. As the leading commercial city of a Turkish nation-state confined to Anatolia and a toehold in Europe, it has been a source of strategic stability and forward defense for the Western alliance in a notoriously unstable and dangerous region.

The Turks today, however, themselves feel their stability threatened-and not by their immediate fractious neighbors but by their longtime NATO allies. The European Union's policy of creating its own defense organization-the so-called European Security and Defense Policy or ESDP-has made the Turks fearful of being second-class allies who could be called upon to fight but excluded from a share in command. Nor are these fears groundless. As currently envisaged, the ESDP would draw upon NATO resources to deal with crises from which NATO wishes to hold aloof, but only EU member-states would have a say in how these NATO resources were used. At a recent Istanbul conference on security in Eastern Europe and the Caucasus (organized by the Turkish ARI Foundation, Germany's Friedrich Naumann Foundation, and the New Atlantic Initiative), Turkish generals and diplomats pointed out the unreasonableness of such a division of labor when almost all of the potential "crises" identified by the EU strategists are in the immediate vicinity of Turkey (notably the Balkans)-and when Turkey, with the second largest army in Europe, would almost certainly be asked to contribute the lion's share of military resources.

Such a problem would not arise if Turkey were a member of the EU. But Turkey, though promised that its application for EU membership will be favorably considered in the next round of enlargement in 2004, is losing faith in that prospect. The EU's reluctance to admit Turkey-seeing it as not truly European-is too plain to ignore. In the meantime, its offer to allow Turkey a consultative role on how the EU might deploy Turkish troops in a local crisis was widely denounced in Istanbul as insultingly inadequate.

Usually, the Turks could rely on the U.S. to take their side in such a dispute-but the U.S. is supporting the EU's "compromise" offer. Turkey's ambassador to NATO, Onur Oymen, told Martin Sieff of UPI that in his view the U.S. was taking a more indulgent view of ESDP in deference to Britain's Tony Blair, on whom it relies to keep the project subordinate to NATO. If so, it is a dangerous calculation. For the ESDP risks driving Turkey into a much colder relationship with NATO and, just conceivably if EU hostility stirs Turkish public opinion sufficiently, away from its Western orientation into a closer identification with the Islamic world.

So what inspires apparently sane statesmen to make such a bad bargain? The very badness of the bargain should alert us to the fact that a strong emotional force is driving it; no calculation of mere interest would dictate such a deal. As always in politics, the first suspect in any lineup of emotions has to be nationalism-in this case, the Euro-nationalism of the EU, which seeks the ESDP not for any reason of military necessity or even strategy, but merely as the military expression of its burgeoning statehood. What has prevented people from seeing this more clearly is that this particular nationalist suspect is in drag.

Huey Long once said that if fascism ever came to America, it would be under the guise of an antifascist party. The EU has accomplished an analogous feat. The Euro-nationalists' proudest boast is that the EU is the embodiment of antinationalism, having overcome the shameful legacy of the lesser European nationalisms that were allegedly responsible for two world wars and that threaten the peace of the Balkans even today. As a result of its foundation in the mid 1950s, the EU has ensured that European nations like France and Germany will never go to war again; the U.S. should be grateful for this achievement since it means that American boys will never again be brought over to die in European civil wars. These arguments are advanced with such predictable regularity at Euro-American conferences that I have sometimes thought of putting them in rhyming form to the tune of "Over There."

Yet every single point in the list is either plainly false or highly questionable. To begin with, it is rather odd to describe as antinationalist a movement that claims that Europeans are a single people united by culture, whose manifest destiny is to form a single state with its own flag, currency, citizenship, foreign policy, armed forces, and government. All other movements with these aims are known as nationalist movements.

Nor is it true that the world wars were caused by nationalism. Half of the states involved in World War I, notably the ones that started it, were multinational empires (Austria-Hungary, Tsarist Russia). The best judgment of historians is that the war began as the result of Imperial Germany's militaristic ambitions in the context of rivalry between states of different kinds.

World War II provides an even more decisive refutation of the Euro-nationalist case, because it was caused by the colliding ambitions of two great transnational ideologies, both hostile to nationalism: Nazism with its belief in a racial hierarchy transcending nations and Communism with its belief in a class hierarchy transcending nations. Local nationalisms in Britain and occupied Europe provided some of the morale to resist these evil ideologies; whereas Euro-nationalism, insofar as it existed at the time, was explicitly cited by Nazis and their Vichy collaborators as justification for their strategic ambitions.

Finally, the EU is less the cause of the present peace in Western Europe than its consequence. Dates here are decisive. The European Coal and Steel Community (sometimes seen as the EU's precursor) was founded in 1951, two years after the foundation of NATO; the EU itself began life in 1957, two years after the admission of German troops into NATO. In other words, the French and Germans were military allies, jointly taking orders from American generals, before they even formed the EU. All of these things were possible because the U.S. was firmly planted in Europe as a military presence-as a result of which no European power feared its neighbors. The only event likely to drag American boys back to solve Europe's quarrels is a withdrawal of U.S. troops, perhaps because Congress feels the ESDP has removed the need for them, followed by the resurgence of old rivalries in a new Euro-context.

These historical questions are important because the EU, by presenting itself as an antidote to European nationalism rather than its most recent incarnation, has escaped the scrutiny that any such movement should properly receive. Yet there are some very dubious aspects to Euro-nationalism: notably that within Europe it has an ambiguous attitude towards democracy, and that outside Europe it is developing superpower ambitions that threaten to bring it into conflict with the U.S. Recently, for instance, Belgium's foreign minister advised the Austrians not to hold a referendum unless the government was certain it would produce a result favorable to the EU. And-referring to the recent Irish referendum on the Nice Treaty-he asked ominously: "Should one nation be able to stand in the way of the progress of Europe?" Admittedly, Euro-nationalists concede that the EU suffers from a "democratic deficit" not merely in the political attitudes revealed by the foreign minister's remark but also in the EU's political structures-for example, the fact the power to propose new European policies is in the hands of an unelected and largely unaccountable European Commission. Yet they seem to think that a simple acknowledgement will settle the matter. Reforms of the EU proposed from time to time barely touch these basic problems of democratic accountability.

It is, however, the EU's international ambitions that are of most interest to the U.S. The Euro-nationalists, who used to be coy about their superpower ambitions, now admit them frankly-but place them in a comforting context. They argue that unipolarity (i.e., the situation in which the U.S., with the assistance of multiple weaker allies, exercises a broad geopolitical dominance) is an unhealthy and unstable state of affairs; that it imposes excessive burdens on the U.S. as well as on others; and that it therefore requires some balancing from a united Europe. This argument is appealing to the progressive wing of the U.S. foreign-policy establishment, which is uncomfortable with America's geopolitical power and with some of the interests (e.g., opposition to Kyoto) that American power advances. Yet the Euro-nationalist argument for multipolarity is not only false-a situation in which several powers are competing for predominance is transparently less stable than one in which all recognize the superior strength of one-it is radically inconsistent with the Euro-nationalist argument that the several jostling nationalisms of 1914 caused World War I. If they took their own historical argument seriously, they would be compelled to endorse U.S. geopolitical dominance.

Some Euro-nationalists, seeing the force of this, argue for American complacency on the grounds that the EU will be America's loyal partner in upholding international order. Just such a claim was advanced at length in the Washington Post recently by Charles Grant in an article entitled "Euro-Muscle: The EU Is Emerging as a Superpower, and That's Good for the U.S., Too." Grant, director of the Centre for European Reform, is a skillful polemicist, but even he stretched one's credulity at times. He claimed, for instance, that "the most successful European foreign policy of all has been enlargement," because it has forced the former Communist satellites to reform their economies and to raise their "standards of democracy, civil society and human rights"; but in fact, the EU has yet to admit a single new member twelve years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. It is, of course, NATO enlargement-which the U.S. pushed strongly against European inertia-that fostered the reform movements in the post-Communist world. When it came to extending the zone of stability and prosperity in its own backyard, the EU was out to lunch.

The remainder of Grant's article was a series of assurances that the U.S. will feel a great deal better when it can no longer get its own way in international politics-or, indeed, at home. Thus, as he sees it, the U.S. has resisted including competition policy in trade talks on grounds of national sovereignty, but the EU's prohibition of the General Electric-Honeywell merger shows that "national or regional sovereignty in monopoly regulation is an outmoded concept." Similarly, the rise of the euro (presumably that is when the euro stops falling) "could restrict America's freedom to maneuver in certain circumstances" and "make it costlier for the United States to borrow the capital it needs to finance its massive current account deficit." And in general the U.S. "must recognize that unilateral actions on its part, without regard to what Europeans or others think, will not often be the best way to promote American interests and influence." That last tortured tautology hardly disguises the hint of menace in all these friendly observations.

What explains the menace, of course, is that any European superpower worthy of the name would inevitably develop its own interests-and these would inevitably clash at times with the interests of the U.S. Quite simply, that is how international politics operates, and no amount of talk about how the EU would be a new kind of superpower should disguise that reality.

In the case of the EU, the drift to a rival and perhaps hostile set of policies is made more likely by two other factors. The first is that much of the psychological drive for Euro-nationalism is provided by anti-Americanism. There are any number of quotations in which prominent Europeans say that hostility to the U.S. is the reason for European integration. The objection always raised to these quotations is that they are taken from unrepresentative French sources (e.g., the present French president, his predecessor, the present prime minister, etc.), but in fact these opinions are much more widely held. They have been expressed by such diverse figures as the left-wing Swedish prime minister, Goran Persson, who recently told the Gothenburg demonstrators that European unity was needed to counterbalance America's excessive power, and the conservative foreign-affairs spokesman of Germany's Christian Democrats, Karl Lammers, who repeatedly argues that American hegemony is a problem to which the answer is a more unified Europe.

The second factor is Europe's political culture, which-though it varies from country to country-is generally to the left of America's. It is more statist, more wedded to welfare, more respectful of international organizations, more devoted to arms control, and in general more bureaucratic and less democratic than is America.

Such ideological divisions created relatively few problems for the alliance when it was composed of one superpower surrounded by 15 allies, since some allies-notably Britain-were politically closer to the U.S. than to their continental neighbors. The establishment of a Euro-Atlantic Union incorporating the EU and the U.S. would create fewer problems, because it would contain and reconcile differences of opinion between European social democracy and American capitalism in the ordinary course of political debate. By dividing the West into two approximately equal halves, however, we maximize the likelihood of conflict between the two sides of the Atlantic.

Hence the growing number of European complaints about American "unilateralism." When examined, these invariably boil down to the U.S. disagreeing with either an instinctive or a painfully achieved European consensus. Hence too the recent list of European actions that show a rampaging desire, rather than a reluctance born of necessity, to challenge the leading U.S. position in world politics. Among such actions: the recent EU delegation to North Korea after President Bush had suggested that America might take a harder line with the Stalinist rogue state; the quiet complicity in the plot to oust the U.S. from its seat on the U.N. Human Rights Commission in Geneva; and the EU's attempts to curb U.S. influence in Middle East politics on the grounds that it is insufficiently evenhanded (i.e., too favorable to Israel).

What strikes one about these and other European initiatives is their complete irrelevance to any real-world European interest. They seem to have been undertaken solely in order to annoy Uncle Sam-the product not of a rival interest but of a sheer sense of rivalry itself. To be sure, there may still be close cooperation, based on common interest, between the EU and the U.S. on trade policy, but that hardly compensates for the EU's deliberate diplomatic challenges to the U.S.

Just how far might this rivalry go? Euro-nationalists tend to argue, soothingly, that the EU is a different kind of superpower whose domain is the "soft power" of international agreements rather than military hardware. The ESDP, on this theory, is a kind of glorified police force, to be used only in local emergencies and no rival to NATO. For the foreseeable future, that is probably correct. But the emotional force of Euro-nationalism in Europe's political elites, the desire to cut a dash on the world stage, the anti-American temptation, and the facts of history should not be underestimated. Europe is wealthy and technologically advanced enough to be able to build a major military force in a short time if necessary. And if the EU should continue to clash with the U.S.

diplomatically, its leaders might well conclude at some stage that they can no longer rely on the U.S. (and thus NATO) to defend, for instance, their access to Middle Eastern or Central Asian oil. EU-U.S. rivalry would then ratchet up to a crucial stage-and both sides might then begin seeking allies in Asia rather than across the Atlantic. Russia, of course, is already seeking such an outcome.

For the moment, however, that is the political version of science fiction. Europe's international policy today is to create a world in which the EU rather than the U.S. reshapes international politics in its own image. In international environmental regulation, the EU is currently urging Japan and Russia to join with it in signing the Kyoto treaty on the grounds that there will then be enough signatures to make the treaty legally binding on the U.S. That is the not-so-innocent meaning of "soft power." Of course, it is-or ought to be-political fantasy to believe that the U.S. would be compelled by a treaty it never ratified to impose cuts in carbon emission levels that were rejected 95-0 by the U.S. Senate. It would outrage the U.S. Constitution, national sovereignty, and any notion of democratic governance-as Jeremy Rabkin of Cornell University has farsightedly warned. But it does not seem odd or outrageous to the EU-and it did not seem so to the former Eurocrat who advocated just such an idea at the Istanbul conference-because that is exactly how the EU operates internally. Politicians and bureaucrats agree on some new policies; they embody them in a treaty; and then, in the immortal words of the Belgian foreign minister, "Should one nation be able to stand in the way of the progress of Europe?"-even if that nation is the U.S?

Can anything be done? Quite a few things-but the first step is to recognize that Euro-nationalism is a gale blowing through Europe and that it will buffet the U.S. if no obstacle is placed in its way. As yet that recognition has not dawned on the U.S. government. Indeed, in mid July, Condoleezza Rice told the National Press Club in a prepared speech:

The president . . . will also continue something else he started . . . doing away with years of mixed signals and ambivalent body language from Washington to make clear that the United States welcomes the European Union's efforts to forge a European Security Identity. The president made clear that we welcome this emerging identity so long as it is NATO-compatible and NATO-friendly. We are prepared to welcome the EU as a foreign-policy actor, if it is prepared to take on real responsibilities.

Tell that to the Marines-or to the Turks.


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