Is there a doctor in the house? The EC's fantasies of superpowerdom have had consequences that are all too real - European Community's failure to respond to the crisis in Bosnia-Herzegovina

National Review, July 5, 1993 by Noel Malcolm

DOCTORS and psychiatrists will be familiar with Munchausen's Syndrome, a condition--named after the eighteenth-century German equivalent of Walter Mitty--in which the patient invents a complex medical history full of life-threatening diseases in order to gain attention. A less common variant of this mental illness is known as Munchausen's Syndrome by Proxy. Here the patient's fantasies are projected onto someone else: typically, a mother will invent illnesses for her child in order to gain not only attention, but also admiration for having saved the child's life. In some cases the mother may cause real harm to the child in order to make the symptoms look more convincing--like those firemen who become secret arsonists in order to have more opportunities to display their heroism.

Something curiously similar has been happening in the foreign ministries of Europe over the last two years. The fantasy here is that Europe (or at least, that group of 12 countries which has appropriated the name of the whole continent) can act on the world stage as a single force with super-power potential, shouldering the burden of responsibility which superpower status entails. And the suffering children onto which this fantasy has been projected are the infant states of ex-Yugoslavia.

That these states had life-threatening illnesses in the first place goes without saying: but their sufferings have been made much, much worse by the determination of EC politicians to show that this was a crisis which only they could solve. "This is the hour of Europe," cried M. Jacques Poos, the foreign minister of Luxembourg, when the fighting broke out two years ago this month. There was a kind of manic exhilaration in that remark, and also a disturbing degree of possessiveness: the warning signs were there. Unfortunately the international community is not yet empowered to bring foreign ministers in for psychiatric treatment. The fantasy of the single European foreign policy goes back a long way. Although most of the rounding fathers of the European Community wanted their creation to develop into a federal state eventually, they did not dare include such openly political aims in the original Treaty of Rome. But during the 1970s the first tentative steps were taken, when the member states began co-ordinating their stances on foreign affairs. The first large-scale revision of the Treaty of Rome (the Single European Act of 1986) set up "a European foreign policy" as an official goal of the European Community. And at Maastricht five years later, the heads of government included in their list of "objectives" the following grand design: "to assert its identity on the international scene, in particular through the implementation of a common foreign and security policy including the eventual framing of a common defense policy, which might in time lead to a common defense."

The omens for united European action all looked good to begin with. The ending of the Cold War seemed to remove most of the old disagreements between European doves and hawks. No longer would countries argue over whether or not to station cruise missiles; no longer would German policy be skewed by the obsession with East Germany, or Greek policy be that of a quasi-satellite of the Kremlin. On the other hand it was widely believed that the shambles of European "cooperation" in the Gulf War (when Britain and France had had to act independently of the EC, and Belgium had even refused to sell ammunition to the British army) had taught everyone a lesson. "Never again" was the refrain at the end of that dismal experience. Henceforth, to use the buzz-phrase, Europe would act "as one."

Bursting the Bubble

AND THEN came Yugoslavia. The six-month rotating presidency of the EC had just passed to Luxembourg in the summer of 1991: and so it was the ineffable M. Poos whose duty and privilege it was to speak for Europe. Forming a "troika" with the Dutch and Italian foreign ministers, he shuttled between Belgrade, Zagreb, and Ljubljana, assuring the local population: "This is a European problem. We shall find a European solution." For a while, the fantasy was shared. The Croats were flattered that such important people were busying themselves with their affairs, and the Slovenes did not even seem to mind when the foreign minister of Luxembourg (a country smaller than Rhode Island, with a total population well below that of Nashville, Tennessee) informed them that Slovenia was "too small" to be a viable state. Only gradually, as they learned that the EC's decisive response consisted mainly of sending in small numbers of white-coated observers (known as "ice-cream men" to the locals), did the Croats and Slovenes begin to feel about M. Poos the way one does when realizing that the man one has let into one's home is not, as he claims, a special representative of the Pope or a talent-spotter for MGM, but a dangerously unstable fantasist.

The instability was in the EC's policies themselves. On the one hand there was the inbuilt tendency of a multinational federation-in-the-making to assume that multinational federal states are a Good Thing. This coincided with the natural fear that any break-up of Yugoslavia might be regarded as a precedent for the melt-down of the Soviet Union. The EC had sent strong signals to Belgrade in the months before the Croatian and Slovenian declarations of independence (that is, the months after the people of those republics had approved independence by overwhelming votes) saying that it would not accept the break-up of Yugoslavia. One EC Commissioner, Mr. Abel Matutes, even said in public that the EC would "refuse all high-level contacts" with any breakaway republic. This had the effect of assuring the Serbs that they could respond to the declarations of independence with military attacks on Slovenia and Croatia, so long as they dressed up those attacks as defenses of the integrity of the Yugoslav federal state.