Re: [A-List] US-EU tension and the future of the world-system

["Michael Keaney" <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

Elson Boles writes of NATO's Kosovo adventure:

Also NATO
> wanted to be part of the action, which reduced the appearance of US
> unilateral action (even though the continued existence of NATO is about
> US power in/over Europe).  Recall  how the UK was excited about the NATO
> operations, as it is about this action.

------

Thanks for forwarding this interesting thread. We've touched on this
particular issue before on the A-list, including this post I forwarded a
while back which may give some indication of what motivated the apparently
manic Blair...

The irony of Blair's election in 1997 is that in
getting a much more congenial and loyal foreign policy partner, Clinton
also got the most enthusiastic pro-EU British leadership since Edward
Heath in the early 1970s. Blair and Brown have been savvy enough to play
a very delicate game of brinkmanship, in which slavish support of US
prerogatives (re Iraq, Kosovo, Afghanistan) has been used to avoid the
catastrophe of 1976 when an economic crisis was engineered in order that
the IMF could be used to impose tighter conditions on the British state
and economy by the US. Thus Britain plays a more active, decisive role
in EU developments than ever before whilst remaining committed, in name
at least, to the "special relationship". How long this will last is
anyone's guess, although it is not clear that the unilateralist Bush
administration cares for the delicacies of keeping one's European allies
in line, since Blair is regarded by some as an unreconstructed socialist
(!) owing to his leadership of something called "the Labour Party" and
his efforts to justify "state intervention" via something called the
"Third Way". Not to mention his friendship with that scoundrel Clinton.
The divergence over Arafat may be the pretext for the formal breaking of
the "special relationship" that has, in fact, been somewhat ragged ever
since Ronald Reagan left the White House in 1989.

But Yugoslavia was the litmus test of Britain's reliability as a US ally
for many within the Clinton administration, and Blair bought enough time
by his total commitment to the new doctrine of "humanitarian
intervention" (all the while ignoring the simultaneous developments in
East Timor, of course). It would have been better for Blair's purposes
if Gore had won the 2000 election and not Bush. But Blair has been able
to assert British interests in the process of European integration to
the point that he has achieved an irreversible shift away from the US
towards Europe in the trajectory of British state policy.

See http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/a-list/2002w26/msg00067.htm

Michael