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

National Review, August 6, 2001 by John O'Sullivan

Istanbul

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.