along its borders’.13
At the time, this was not a formulation welcome in official discourses on Europe. A decade later, the term it loosed with irony has become a common coin of complacency. As the countdown to Iraq proceeded, the British diplomat Robert Cooper, special adviser on security to Blair, and later to Prodi as head of the Commission, explained the merits of empire to readers of Prospect. ‘A system in which the strong protect the weak, in which the efficient and well-governed export stability and liberty, in which the world is open for investment and growth—all of these seem eminently desirable’. Of course, ‘in a world of human rights and bourgeois values, a new imperialism will . . . have to be very different from the old’. It would be a ‘voluntary imperialism’, of the sort admirably displayed by the EU in the Balkans. Enlargement ahead, he concluded, the Union was en route to the ‘noble dream’ of a ‘cooperative empire’.14
Enlargement in the bag, the Polish theorist Jan Zielonka, now at Oxford, exults in his book Europe as Empire that its ‘design was truly imperialist’—‘power politics at its best, even though the term “power” was never mentioned in the official enlargement discourse’, for this was a ‘benign empire in action’.15
In more tough-minded style, the German strategist Herfried Münkler, holder of the chair of political theory at the Humboldt University in Berlin, has expounded the world-historical logic of empires—which stabilize adjacent power vacuums or turbulent border zones, holding barbarians or terrorists at bay—in an ambitious comparative work, Imperien, whose ideas were first presented as an aide-mémoire to a conference of the ambassadors called by the Aussenamt. While naturally loyal to the West, Münkler disavows normative considerations. Human rights messianism is a moral luxury even the American empire can ill afford. Europe, for its part, should take the measure of its emergent role as a sub-imperial system, and match its required tasks to its capabilities without excessive professions of uplifting intent.
The prefix, of course, poses the question that is the crux of the new identity Europe has awarded itself. How independent of the United States is it? The answer is cruel, as even a cursory glance at the record shows. In many ways, perhaps at no time since 1950 has it been less so. The history of enlargement, the Union’s major achievement—extending the frontiers of freedom, or ascending to the rank of empire, or both at once, as the claim may be—is an index. Expansion to the East was piloted by Washington: in every case, the former Soviet satellites were incorporated into NATO, under US command, before they were admitted to the EU. Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic had joined NATO already in 1999, five years before entry into the Union; Bulgaria and Romania in 2004, three years before entry; even Slovakia, Slovenia and the Baltics, a gratuitous month—just to rub in the symbolic point?—before entry (planning for the Baltics started in 1998). Croatia, Macedonia and Albania are next in line for the same sequence.
The expansion of NATO to former Soviet borders, casting aside undertakings given to Gorbachev at the end of the Cold War, was the work of the Clinton administration. Twelve days after the first levy of Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic had joined the Alliance, the Balkan War was launched—the first full-scale military offensive in NATO’s history. The successful blitz was an American operation, with token auxiliaries from Europe, and virtually no dissent in public opinion. These were harmonious days in Euro-American relations. There was no race between the EU and NATO in the East: Brussels deferred to the priority of Washington, which encouraged and prompted the advance of Brussels. So natural has this asymmetrical symbiosis now become that the United States can openly specify what further states should join the Union. When Bush told European leaders in Ankara, at a gathering of NATO, that Turkey must be admitted into the EU, Chirac was heard to grumble that the US would not like being instructed by Europeans to welcome Mexico into the federation; but when the European Council met to decide whether to open accession negotiations with Turkey, Condoleezza Rice could telephone the assembled leaders from Washington to ensure the right outcome, without hearing any inappropriate complaints from them about sovereignty. At this level, friction between Europe and America remains minimal.
Why then has there been that sense of a general crisis in transatlantic relations, which has given rise to such an extensive literature? In the EU, media and public opinion are at one in holding the conduct of the Republican administration outside NATO to be essentially responsible. Scanting the Kyoto Protocol and the International Criminal Court, sidelining the UN, trampling on the Geneva Convention, and stampeding into the Middle East, the Bush regime has on this view exposed a darker side of the United States, one which has understandably been met with near-universal abhorrence in Europe, even if etiquette has restrained expressions of it at diplomatic level. Above all, revulsion at the war in Iraq has, more than any other single episode since 1945, led to the rift recorded in the painful title of Habermas’s latest work, The Divided West.
In this vision, there is a sharp contrast between the Clinton and Bush presidencies, and it is the break in the continuity of American foreign policy—the jettisoning of consensual leadership for an arrogant unilateralism—that has alienated Europeans. There is no question of the intensity of this perception. But in the orchestrations of America’s Weltpolitik, style is easily mistaken for substance. The brusque manners of the Bush administration, its impatience with the euphemisms of the ‘international community’, and blunt rejection of Kyoto and the ICC, offended European sensibilities from the start. Clinton’s emollient gestures were more tactful, if in practice their upshot—neither Kyoto nor the ICC ever risked passage into law while he was in office—was often much the same. More fundamentally, as political operations, a straight line led from the war in the Balkans to the war in Mesopotamia. In both, a casus belli—imminent genocide, imminent nuclear weapons—was trumped up; the Security Council ignored; international law set aside; and an assault unleashed.
United over Yugoslavia, Europe split over Iraq, where the strategic risks were higher. But the extent of European opposition to the march on Baghdad was always something of an illusion. On the streets, in Italy, Spain, Germany, Britain, huge numbers of people demonstrated against the invasion. Opinion polls showed majorities against it everywhere. But once it had occurred, there was little protest against the occupation, let alone support for the resistance to it. Most European governments—Britain, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, Denmark, Portugal in the West; all in the East—backed the invasion, and sent troops to bulk up the US forces holding the country down. Out of the fifteen member-states of the EU in 2003, just three—France, Germany and Belgium—came out against the prospect of war before the event. None condemned the attack when it was launched. But the declared opposition of Paris and Berlin to the plans of Washington and London gave popular sentiment across Europe a point of concentration, confirming and amplifying its sense of distance from power and opinion in America. The notion of an incipient Declaration of Independence by the Old World was born here.
Realities were rather different. Chirac and Schröder had a domestic interest in countering the invasion. Each judged their electorates well, and gained substantially—Schröder securing reelection—from their stance. On the other hand, American will was not to be trifled with. So each compensated in deeds for what they proclaimed in words, opposing the war in public, while colluding with it sub rosa. Behind closed doors in Washington, France’s ambassador Jean-David Levitte—currently diplomatic adviser to Sarkozy—gave the White House a green light for the war, provided it was on the basis of the first generic UN Resolution 1441, as Cheney urged, without returning to the Security Council for the second explicit authorization to attack which Blair wanted, that would force France to veto it. In ciphers from Baghdad, German intelligence agents provided the Pentagon with targets and coordinates for the first US missiles to hit the city, in the downpour of Shock and Awe. Once the ground war began, France provided airspace for USAF missions to Iraq (passage Chirac had denied Reagan’s bombing of Libya), and Germany the key transport hub for the campaign. Both countries voted for the UN resolution ratifying the US occupation of Iraq, and lost no time recognizing the client regime patched together by Washington.
As for the EU, its choice of
