Anglo-Saxon attitude

National Review, Sept 14, 1998 by John O'Sullivan

Our foreign-policy establishment has long pressed for a United Europe. We could still be saved from their error.

AFTER "second thoughts" on the Vietnam War and the Sixties, are we about to have second thoughts on European unity? That would be an innovation insofar as most of the second-thoughters until now have been former radicals, like Peter Collier and David Horowitz, reconsidering left-wing causes, while those now discovering what the British call Euro-skepticism are members in good standing of the foreign-policy establishment and of Bosnywash Academy, and they are rethinking one of the staples of postwar American diplomacy.

You could hardly have two men more securely rooted in the establishment than Henry Kissinger and Martin Feldstein. Yet Dr. Kissinger recently astonished the Trilateral Commission when he expressed anxiety that a united Europe might be a rival to America rather than an ally. And in Foreign Affairs Martin Feldstein of Harvard poured cold water on Europe's forthcoming single currency, the Euro, as no panacea but likely instead to aggravate economic and political strains in Europe.

And at several recent international conferences, where the clinking of champagne flutes is a more familiar sound than the breaking of bottles, tightlipped rows have broken out between European politicians boasting that a united Europe with its own currency, flag, and armed forces would no longer have to take orders from Uncle Sam, and bewildered American participants asking, "Hey, aren't we all supposed to be Atlanticists?"

These rows have been a long time coming, but they were inevitable. The American dream of a united Europe as the "second pillar" of the Atlantic community -- a wealthy superstate able to afford more of its own defense, and a reliable ally of the United States in maintaining world stability "out of [NATO's] area" -- was a characteristically American delusion. Superpowers do not remain reliable allies, especially not subordinate ones, even when they have the same world views. They develop foreign policies in line with their own distinctive interests and become rivals. With the collapse of the Soviet threat, European states no longer had such a strong community of interest with the United States. They could afford to differ more openly with the United States over such matters as economic sanctions on Cuba and Iran, and they did.

More significantly, Europe -- France in particular -- has a general view of world politics that separates it from the United States. It regards the liberal international order of free trade and free capital movements as "the Anglo-Saxon system" and would prefer a more managed structure. Domestically it prefers its high-welfare, high-cost, high-unemployment "Rhineland capitalism" to, again, "Anglo-Saxon" free-market capitalism with its stress on such virtues as transparency and shareholder value. And at its worst this world view is self-consciously anti-American, as when, according to Georges-Marc Benamou in Le Dernier Mitterrand, Francois Mitterrand said: "France does not know it but we are at war with America. Yes, a permanent war, a vital war, an economic war, a war without death. Yes, they are very hard, the Americans, they are voracious, they want undivided power over the world."

Such attitudes were a mere irritant when Europe was a collection of small- and medium-sized powers under general American leadership in NATO. Few other countries shared French attitudes in toto, and some -- notably Britain but also some of the smaller nations like Denmark -- were closer to the American outlook. But the accelerating pace of European federal integration, under Franco-German direction, has suddenly begun to create more serious strains in the Atlantic alliance over Bosnia, the Middle East, the West's response to Saddam Hussein, and much else. Not only does France, as one of the two dominant states within the European Union, set much of its policy and most of its tone, but also the political class across Europe is intoxicated by the idea of playing a superpower role in world politics after fifty years of trotting along after Uncle Sam. (It is not of course prepared to provide the higher defense expenditure that would be needed for such independent glory.)

Two developments in particular promise further trouble. Whether the Euro succeeds or fails, as Owen Harries of The National Interest has pointed out, it will cause problems with America. If it succeeds, it will offer an alternative haven for international speculative flows, both putting pressure on U.S. budgetary finances and increasing international monetary instability. If it fails, America will have to help Europe pick up the pieces. And the long-promised European common foreign policy is likely to be a) anti-American much of the time, as in its occasional policy declarations on the Middle East, but also b) characterized by paralysis and indecision, as in the EU's attitude toward Bosnia, and sometimes c) both, as when British Prime Minister Tony Blair, during his six months as President of the EU Council of Ministers, was criticized as being too supportive of America's military threats against Saddam Hussein by countries which themselves could not agree on a common line.