[A-List] Europe/US rivalry: more EU integration, please

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

What Europe must do now

Simon Tisdall Only a multipolar world can resist US power

A curious reticence pervades the broader post-Iraq debate. Yet what happens
next in terms of the relationship between US hyperpower and Europe, the UN
and a seriously battered world order is of vastly greater significance than
the specifics of Iraq's rehabilitation. So how to explain this quietude,
this almost embarrassed silence?One answer is that, to varying degrees,
leading anti-war states like Germany and France are now engaged in pragmatic
repairs to bilateral relations. They have no wish, for now at least, to
pursue a damaging confrontation with the US. But another, more disturbing
answer is that they are at a total loss over what to do about what is
variously described as American-centred unipolarity or unilateralism or
hegemony or, more candidly, the Bush administration's unapologetic,
ideological and steadily advancing belief in the rightness and inevitability
of US global dominance.

Even if a clear counter-strategy existed, there would be no agreement in a
fractious European Union whose divisions the US is increasingly inclined to
exploit. This confusion found ultimate, symbolic expression in the UN's
inability to prevent the Iraq war despite the opposition of most of the
"international community".

Yet at bottom, it may be that the war's wider implications are not being
fully discussed and explored because the Iraq crisis held up a mirror to the
world - and the world was both shamed and repulsed by what it saw.

It saw the illusion of the security council as ultimate arbiter of the use
of force and guardian of international law shattered, perhaps beyond repair.
It saw the flailing impotence, or fawning acquiescence, of once great powers
in the face of America's will. It glimpsed the limits of democracy in the
smug insouciance with  which elected governments rejected the people's
protests.

This smoking mirror showed a world where reasoned argument, moral suasion,
humanitarian imperatives and intense diplomatic lobbying were overwhelmed
and swept aside by an insistence on brute military force.

More than that, it revealed a world in which a state's sovereign rights
counted for little (unless that state was America); in which truly global
concerns such as poverty, education, health, environmental degradation,
disease pandemics, the roots of terrorism and, yes, even nuclear weapons
proliferation could be and were shunted to one side; and in which one man,
the US president, could turn the planet inside out. Small wonder the likes
of Jacques Chirac do not want to talk about it right now. It is all too
galling, if not to say downright depressing.

Yet what is to be done about American power? The question will not go away.
There seem to be three alternatives. In his now familiar role as explicator
and facilitator of the American project, Tony Blair is emerging as prime
advocate of the first. Unipolarity should not be feared, he says, but
embraced. A "strategic partnership" between the US and Europe is the way
forward. Any other approach would only encourage rival power bases and a new
"cold war".

But Blair's argument ignores both history and reality. History suggests
sovereign states will rarely voluntarily accept domination by another; even
if it is forced upon them, they  will always work to defeat or circumvent
it. Reality suggests that, to American eyes, partnership means only one
thing: leadership. If it is to work, unipolarity assumes disinterested, wise
and beneficent leadership in Washington. Observing George Bush, even before
Iraq, one can only say: in your dreams, Tony.

The second possible response to US dominance is all-out resistance,
political, diplomatic and economic. This is not a promising idea. For sure,
the EU can apply leverage in foreign investment, raw materials, oil and
trade, upon which the US grows more dependent.

All the same, confronting the US would not only be damagingly
self-defeating; it is also undesirable. Which brings the argument back,
conclusively, to multipolarity - the third and only way of balancing US
power. Europeans cannot change America, but they can change themselves. And
this they must do to avoid the vassalage that lies implicit in Iraq's
cautionary tale.

For the EU, this means far greater integration through pooled sovereignty,
common defence, economic, monetary and foreign policy. For the UN, it means
root-and-branch security council reform in order more faithfully to
represent the peoples of a variegated planet that belongs to all, not to the
great powers of circa 1945, and not in future to America alone.

For Britain and France, in particular, this means surrendering power in
order to gain it. It means a whole new way of behaving and looking at
ourselves and the world. It means, logically, the prospective end of the
nation state as the prime political entity.

Threatened by US unipolarity and having failed to restructure the world
order in the post-communist era, it is time to take another look at
collectivism. And then, who knows, one day we may be able to face the mirror
without cringing.

The Guardian Weekly 20-3-0515, page 14