Andrew Johnston :
©International Herald Tribune, August 15, 2001
Europe's Ties With America: New Cause for Concern
The problem with allies," Winston Churchill said, "is that they
sometimes develop opinions of their own."
International analysts are divided over whether the current
trans-Atlantic tension, evident in a new poll of European attitudes
toward George W. Bush, is just a bad case of overdeveloped
opinions or reflects a growing estrangement between the United
States and Europe.
But they agree that the future of the world's crucial geopolitical
relationship depends on how Mr. Bush chooses to handle things
from here on.
The poll, by the International Herald Tribune and the Pew
Research Center for the People and the Press, comes at a time
when two main schools of thought are emerging. One school,
championed by Antony Blinken, a National Security Council
official in the Clinton administration, says the United States and
Europe are actually converging.
"The 'crisis' in U.S.-European relations is largely a myth
manufactured by elites," Mr. Blinken wrote in Foreign Affairs
magazine.
But some of the IHT/Pew poll results challenge Mr. Blinken's
assertion that the views of politicians, intellectuals and the media
on this subject "clash with those of the people they purport to
represent."
The poll shows that most people in the four largest West European
countries sharply disagree with the way Mr. Bush is handling
international affairs, with few saying that he takes European
interests into account.
Pluralities of Europeans think the basic interests of the United
States and Europe have remained the same in recent years. But
their deep concern about Mr. Bush's approach appears to support
the opposing camp of analysts, represented by the French
commentator Dominique Moisi.
"For the first time since 1947 a mutual decoupling of the United
States from Europe is truly possible," Mr. Moisi, deputy director
of the French Institute of International Relations, argued in a
response to Mr. Blinken in the next issue of Foreign Affairs.
For Mr. Moisi, as for many other commentators, the end of the
Cold War, the changing nature of Europe and globalization have
caused a fundamental change in the 50-year relationship.
The United States in the 1920s and '30s was isolationist, refusing
even to join the League of Nations. All that was changed by
World War II and the generation of American internationalists
who rescued Europe from postwar economic misery with the
Marshall Plan and helped to found the United Nations and
NATO.
Faced with the Soviet military threat, Europe had to be content all
through the Cold War with a trans-Atlantic partnership in which
both sides contributed but Washington predominated. But since
the fall of the Berlin Wall, Europeans have been freer to question
some of the assumptions underlying the alliance.
What they see, Mr. Moisi and his camp argue, is an unequal
partnership with a military-minded America obsessed with rogue
states and weapons of mass destruction.
The new Europe, on the other hand, increasingly relies on treaties
and diplomacy to pursue goals linked to the future of the planet
and the less elevated aim of bolstering its own economy.
The countries of the consolidating and expanding European Union
have been finding, like everyone else, that not only do they have to
compete in the global marketplace but that they also must decide
what they want to protect from the market's ravages.
That means an emphasis on cultural values seen as European and a
need for something to push against. "One way for Europeans to
define their identity," Mr. Moisi says, "is to distinguish themselves
from the United States."
Mr. Blinken argues instead that on many such cultural issues - the
death penalty, genetically modified foods, the dominance of
American popular culture - the gap between Europeans and
Americans is often exaggerated.
Mr. Bush seems to have presented many Europeans with a
concentration of all their fears.
"Bush's popularity, or lack thereof in Europe, may be more
important now than it would have been in the Cold War," Dana
Allin, a policy analyst at the International Institute for Strategic
Studies in London, said in an interview.
Not only are Mr. Bush's values different, but he also goes about
things the wrong way, Europeans felt. "The new administration has
sinned against the first commandment of diplomacy: Line up your
ducks first," Josef Joffe, a German analyst, wrote in an opinion
article in The New York Times after Mr. Bush withdrew the
United States from the Kyoto Protocol without offering an
alternative to combat global warming.
After the Kyoto decision, "all the resentments about American
national life," wrote Henry Porter, the London editor of Vanity
Fair, "coalesced into a single charge sheet which damned
American society as being arrogant and out of touch with global
concerns."
Amid what has become a flood of international criticism of Mr.
Bush's performance so far, several influential commentators have
urged caution.
"Any new occupant of the Oval Office starts out as a neophyte in
foreign policy," Mr. Joffe said, and will offend because the United
States is the bull elephant of global politics: "Whichever way he
saunters, he will trample grass."
In a searching analysis in Foreign Affairs of attitudes and
problems, William Wallace, of the London School of Economics,
argued for a more balanced relationship and warned against a war
of words, saying: "Trans-Atlantic relations would benefit from a
process of moral disarmament, in which both sides moderate their
rhetoric and their attacks on each other's failings."
If a theme runs through the public worryings of analysts and
commentators, it is that the future of the trans-Atlantic partnership
lies in the hands of a man who is seen as managing clumsily the
transition from the governorship of Texas to the most powerful job
in the world.
Commentators emphasize that Americans are not about to turn
their backs on Europeans. But U.S. isolationism of the 1920s and
'30s is part of a recurring European nightmare.
"The greatest danger today," wrote Thomas Friedman, The New
York Times's foreign affairs columnist, "is not European
anti-Americanism, but American anti-Americanism. The greatest
danger is if America is no longer ready to play America - the
benign superpower that pays a disproportionate price to maintain
the system of which it is the biggest beneficiary."