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Balancing America: Europe's International Duties
David P. Calleo*
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Today, the USA is less in need of permanent allies than
at any time since 1945. While transatlantic clashes of
interest will emerge in geopolitical and economic terms
Europe is not (yet) prepared to do more than appease US
policy. A self-assertive Europe is needed to involve the
USA in the creation of multilateral structures of conflict
resolution.
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The Postwar Transatlantic Balance
The
Bush administration has put a new face on American power. Suddenly, it seems, the United States is behaving
like a traditional European hegemon.
Europeans are used to a different kind of American
leadership, one committed to multilateral solutions
and therefore solicitous of the views of allies.
Something, they think, has gone wrong with the
old America. This
is particularly distressing for those European states
and political groupings grown attached to what they
see as a global division of labor —one where the United
States is a “military” power and they are “civilian”
powers. It is a vision that harkens back to the Middle
Ages: America is the state and Europe is the church. The comfort of this arrangement depends on
a basic similarity of visions and aims.
Otherwise, unless the church can translate its
moral authority into political and military power, the
state calls the tune. This appears to be what has happened in the
Atlantic Alliance.
The former identity of transatlantic perspectives
seems suddenly to have vanished. Americans now have different goals and norms
from Europeans. Since
the American government controls the alliance’s military
power, it feels free to pursue its own aims, whether
European allies approve or not. Europeans, dismayed, want to know how this change came about, and
what they should do about it.
They search for clues by studying the new habits
of “successor generations,” or the growing influence
of the non-Europeans in American culture and politics.
Perhaps a more reliable analytical tool is the old-fashioned
balance of power. The
collapse of the Soviet Union was, after all, a geopolitical
revolution. It was not the end of history, but it was the end of a long period
where American military power had been seriously counterbalanced
by Soviet military power, above all on the European
continent. The existence of the bipolar balance had obvious
effects on transatlantic relations.
So did its abrupt disappearance.
It is difficult to calculate who are the real
winners and losers from this revolution.
The Americans are winners, it is said, because
they are now the world’s only superpower. The Russians seem losers because they are no
longer a superpower, although they are, in fact, probably
much better off for having purged themselves of their
communist incubus. Europe’s situation is more complex still. In certain respects, Western Europe derived
many special advantages from the particular circumstances
of the Cold War. Despite their military dependency, European
states felt secure and believed they had great influence
over American policy.
Some Europeans imagined those particular circumstances
to be more permanent than they really were. It is such Europeans who are particularly dismayed
at the Bush administration’s foreign policy. Others — General de Gaulle comes to mind — long ago warned against
the “neurasthenia” of those who presumed that the Cold
War’s transatlantic identity of interests would last
indefinitely. Of
course, there were numerous transatlantic clashes during
the Cold War itself. Perhaps it would be useful to reflect
further on how the postwar transatlantic balance evolved
and what changed when the Cold War endet.
_____________________________________________________________
America’s need and capacity for financing its
big external deficits became a key dimension to the
transatlantic balance of power.
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In the Western world, the balance of power
is at least as much economic as military.
We confidently assume that direct military
confrontations are no longer imaginable between
the United States and the West European states,
presumably because we believe mature democracies
do not go to war with one another. But we cannot ignore the transatlantic economic rivalry that was
a major feature of postwar relations and which
has, if anything, intensified since the Cold
War ended.
While we like to believe that purely
economic competition, properly conducted,
leads to mutual gain, we cannot deny that
transatlantic economic relationships are highly
politicized.
This is particularly true of monetary
relations, the history of which often serves
as a metaphor for the underlying geopolitical
balance between Europe and America.
During the Cold War, international monetary
issues were often closely tied to another
set of politicized economic questions — those
to do with military “free-riding” and “burden-sharing.” Throughout most of the postwar period, U.S. military spending was
proportionally much heavier than European
— even though Europe was the principal region
where Western security was threatened. Since the United States was a Western democracy
as well as a military hegemon, it had increasing
difficulty juggling its heavy military spending
with growing demands for civilian spending. By the 1970’s, the United States was beginning
to run significant fiscal and external deficits. Americans tended to count these deficits as
signs that free-riding Europe was taking unfair
economic advantage of America’s military role.
Americans grew perpetually aggrieved
at what they saw as European free-riding and
frequently demanded more equitable burden-sharing.
Monetary issues came into play because
the deficits were generally financed by manipulating
the dollar in one fashion or another, often
at the expense of America’s allies.
Accordingly, monetary arrangements
were a constant bone of transatlantic contention.
Given these considerable sources of transatlantic
conflict, what explains Europe’s comfortable
position during the Cold War? Why were the Americans not more successful
in extracting burden-sharing?
While it is often noted how, during
the Cold War, Western Europe flourished as
a free-rider on the security provided by the
United States, it is seldom observed that
Western Europe was also a free-rider on the
Soviet Union — on the balance provided by
Russia against the United States.
Given the Soviet Union’s huge land
forces and its formidable strategic deterrent,
the United States could not afford to alienate
the West Europeans any more than they could
afford to alienate the Americans. Had Western Europe somehow moved to the Soviet
camp, the balance of world forces would have
shifted against America.
The whole situation was a great inducement
to mutual reasonableness across the Atlantic. No doubt American domination at its worst
would have been far more agreeable for Western
Europe than Soviet domination.
But thanks to the Cold War, Western
Europe suffered neither.
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For Europeans, the Soviet threat contained
the American threat
_____________________________________________________________
Anyone who doubts that the Cold War contained the Americans as well
as the Soviets should recall postwar transatlantic
relations before the Cold War. American officials
were dreaming of an American Century,
a new world system where global free
trade would give free rein to American industry’s
overwhelming competitive superiority.
Little of this was welcome to the European
states, trying to shelter and transform their
national economies until they reached American
levels of productivity, and trying at the same
time to build welfare systems that would end
the terrible social conflicts of the interwar
years. Anyone who doubts the toughness of the transatlantic
confrontations over these matters should read
the third volume of Robert Skidelsky’s superb
new biography of John Maynard Keynes, Fighting for Britain.
Keynes led the fight to gain the financing Britain desperately needed
from America.
He died in the process, his health undoubtedly
weakened by the harsh negotiations and his own
vivid realization of Britain’s dismal financial
situation.
It did not help that Britain’s plight
stemmed in no small part from the calculating
wartime policies of the United States, which
had regulated the flow of aid so that Britain
would be without reserves at the end.
Ultimately, Britain was rescued not by Keynes
but by Stalin.
With the advent of the Cold War and the
prospect that America might “lose” Europe to
Russia, the United States grew solicitous, not
only of its old wartime ally, Britain, but of
Western Europe in general.
In Germany, for example, the vindictiveness
of the Morganthau Plan gave way to the generosity
of the Marshall Plan.
Americans became open-handed patrons
not only of European recovery but of European
integration.
Despite the misgivings of the old free-traders
in the State Department, Europe was encouraged
to form a bloc with enough scale to compete
comfortably with the Americans.
Thus, for Europeans, the Soviet threat
contained the American threat.
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European states present themselves as
too weakened from their long Cold War dependency
to behave like serious world powers, conscious
of their own interests and capable of standing
up for them effectively.
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The continental West Europeans
made good use of their Cold War opportunities.
To a considerable extent, they could ignore
their military weakness and concentrate their
resources on economic growth and social peace.
Behind their American military shield,
they constructed a political-economic union that
began to rival the United States economically,
and also carried great political potential.
As this Europe grew much stronger, transatlantic
friction over trade and monetary questions grew
more acute. As
noted a moment ago, the United States, pursuing
both guns and butter, was regularly in danger
of one form or another of “overstretch.” America’s big deficits envenomed transatlantic
trade and monetary issues.
“Burden sharing” became a major transatlantic
issue.
As a practical matter, the real question was
not how America was going to bring its accounts
into balance but how it was going to finance
its deficits.
Successive U.S. administrations grew
highly adept at doing so by manipulating the
dollar. After the collapse of the Bretton Woods system,
the United States oscillated between two courses. In most of the 1970’s, it financed deficits
by creating dollars and exporting them to creditors. When the resulting abundant credit and weak dollar began to threaten
an upsurge of domestic inflation, as it did
in the Carter administration, the United States
tightened credit and began to finance its deficits
by borrowing back from abroad much of the money
it had exported earlier. This was the American formula for most of the
Reagan era.
Both the exporting and importing of dollars
were greatly eased by the dollar’s being the
world’s reserve and transactions currency, which
meant that the demand for dollars was strong
and the supply abundant.
America’s oscillating monetary policies
naturally involved wide fluctuations in the
dollar’s exchange rate.
Here the United States enjoyed a further
advantage over national European economies.
The comparatively huge size and self-sufficiency
of its economy left the United States relatively
indifferent to the dollar’s exchange rate, since
it had comparatively little effect on domestic
prices. European economies were much more open
to foreign trade and therefore more troubled
by changes in their exchange rates. In addition, the effects of a volatile dollar
fell unevenly on Europe’s national currencies
and thereby created problems for the nascent
“Single Market.
Over the postwar decades, European governments grew increasingly irritated
at what they saw as America’s asymmetrical economic
advantages.
The European Community was mobilized
to right the balance. Early on, the Community centralized and took
over trade diplomacy so that Europeans were
able to negotiate on far more equal terms.
Complaints about American monetary hegemony
were already heard loudly in the 1960’s, and
first efforts at European monetary integration
began in the early 1970’s. By the 1980’s, the European Community also
began to consider structures to organize common
diplomacy and defense. In short, the postwar economic relationship
had no shortage of grievances.
America’s need and capacity for financing
its big external deficits became a key dimension
to the transatlantic balance of power. So long as the Cold War lasted, however, the
underlying antagonisms inherent in the transatlantic
relationship continued to be contained by compelling
military interests.
West European states still needed their
American protector. And the United States needed its affluent allies,
who not only financed America’s habitual deficits
but who themselves formed an indispensable element
in the global political-economic power balance
that contained the Soviets.
In effect, the Cold War balance was tripolar.
The Soviet Demise and Europe's Ambitious Response
With the collapse of the Soviet
Union, the mutual enemy that bound America and
Europe to a community of fate was gone.
There was no longer any compelling reason
why the defense of Europe should be America’s
primary strategic aim.
Nor was there any reason why Europe’s own
security should depend on its American alliance. Of course, the old habits of military cooperation
lingered on.
Americans still enjoyed exercising military
leadership, tried to think up new common projects,
and generally clung to their entrenched position
in NATO, at least until Yugoslavia required them
to do something serious. And Europeans still hoped to enjoy the benefits
of free-riding, as well as the influence the alliance
gave them over American policy.
But without a Soviet superpower to contend
with, NATO became a habit rather than a necessity. In the post Cold War world, Europe and America
were both looking for new identities and roles. Increasingly, moreover, they were on separate
geopolitical wavelengths.
European states saw the Soviet collapse as
a critical challenge to the European Community.
The Soviet withdrawal automatically recreated
a big Germany, with a weak Eastern Europe ripe
for German domination.
The old “German Problem” thus threatened
to revive and the continent risked falling back
into its familiar self-destructive quarrels. Under the circumstances, Europeans believed their integration would
either go forward sharply or begin to disintegrate. Europe’s response was Maastricht. The European Community was to become the European
Union. It
was to complete its monetary integration, develop
common foreign and security policy and ultimately
common defense.
Meanwhile, it was to reach out to take
in the European states of the old Soviet bloc. And it was to overhaul its constitution so
that a union of up to 30 countries, endowed
with the collective attributes of a great power,
could act with efficiency and dispatch and still
avoid a “democratic deficit.”
In short, Maastricht registered the determination
of the European powers to use the EU to make
themselves masters of the reopened Pan-European
space. While it is still not clear how the EU can
square enlargement with its institutions, the
historical record of the 1990’s suggests the
powerful geopolitical will and logic behind
the EU’s efforts.
_____________________________________________________________
Without a Soviet superpower to contend
with, NATO became a habit rather than a necessity.
_____________________________________________________________
Monetary union (EMU) was, for example, an accomplishment
full of long-term strategic implications.
Europe was not explicitly aiming to supplant
the dollar as the world’s reserve currency.
Primarily, it was trying to stabilize monetary
conditions within the EU itself. Nevertheless, by creating the euro, Europe
implicitly declared its independence from the
dollar. The euro would inevitably rival the dollar and, by its very existence,
create a plural rather than unipolar monetary
order. In effect, the scale of Europe’s own regional
ambitions implied a world order with a variety
of regional great powers, rather than a single
superpower — a vision that put the EU more in
tune with the aspirations of other rising Eurasian
powers, like China, Russia or India, than of Europe’s
old ally, the United States.
The
New American Century: Clinton Version
Americans, meanwhile, were concocting revolutionary
geopolitical dreams of their own.
America’s post-Cold War world project has
unfolded in two acts: Clinton’s globalist “Wilsonian”
model and Bush’s “war on terrorism.” While these models are radically different in some respects, they
share one fundamental idea: that the end of the
bipolar world system naturally means the advent
of a “unipolar” world system.
From this it follows that the United States,
the sole remaining superpower, is the world’s natural
hegemon and must inevitably dominate the new global
order. The
nature of the order imagined, however, varies considerably
between the two models. The Bush model is, of course, still taking
form. The
Clinton model, which flourished in a period of rare
geopolitical confidence and macroeconomic improvement,
now seems to have collapsed.
Its rise and fall over the last decade perhaps
reveals something about the real balance of forces
across the Atlantic.
Clinton came into office not very interested
in traditional geopolitics.
He was uncomfortable with the use of force
and had uneasy relations with America’s military
establishment.
In later years, his administration grew
more active militarily — particularly as NATO’s
enlargement and “Partnership for Peace” opened
the way for American troops on Russia’s borders
or in Central Asia. And, of course, the U.S. military
was reluctantly involved in Yugoslavia. But Clinton’s
enduring first concern was rejuvenating the American economy. He faced the accumulated fiscal and monetary
messes left behind by previous administrations
caught in the rigors of Cold War budgeting.
Thanks to the end of the Cold War, sharp
cuts in military spending permitted Clinton’s
administration to reverse the large federal fiscal
deficits that seemed to be growing out of control.
Cutting the fiscal deficit had the effects
it was supposed to have.
Capital flowed into private investment;
growth and productivity picked up and fed a remarkable
boom. Domestic
success stoked Clinton’s geopolitical imagination. NATO enlargement and the “Partnership for Peace” brought the American
military deep in Russia’s old sphere. But Clinton’s
primary goals were “geo-economic.” An integrated
world economy, where American prowess would dominate
the advanced industries and services, was to ensure
America long-lasting global preeminence. Europe
was potentially America’s greatest competitor,
but the ambitions of Maastricht were not taken
seriously by most American leaders and analysts.
Why has the Clinton model seemed to collapse
in recent years?
The present downturn has gradually been
recognized as something more than a normal cycle.
Commentaries abound on the economy’s various
structural maladjustments.
The most obvious is the
striking macroeconomic imbalance, expressed
through a large and growing current-account deficit.
This means, in effect, that the American economy “absorbs” — consumes
and invests — substantially more than it produces. The difference comes from abroad; hence the big current-account
deficit. This
habit of “over-absorption” has its roots in the
Cold War, where it was bound up with the Cold
War’s perennial burden-sharing issues.
But even though sharp cuts in defense spending
did allow the Clinton administration to balance
the federal budget, the external or current-account
deficit nevertheless kept growing.
The United States went on absorbing substantially
more than it produced. As the government spent less, the civilian
economy absorbed still more.
As a result, the old need to finance the
external deficit remained.
For several years, the boom provided its own
solution, as large inflows of investment capital
came to America from Europe and Japan, whose own
economies were languishing. In the euphoria of the moment, the American
boom appeared to be self-sustaining.
The more the United States spent, the more
it grew. The more it grew, the more it attracted the
foreign capital needed to finance its spending
— its outsized consumption and investment that
led to the current account deficit. The normal signs of inflation were absent, even when the economy
had manifestly reached full-employment.
“Globalization” and the high dollar made
it difficult for American producers to raise prices
or wages. A
“new paradigm” had supposedly made inflation obsolescent. High investment and productivity growth, fed
by “information technology,”promised an abundant
and ever more efficient increase in supply.
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The Clinton boom’s
twin foundations have vanished.
The atrocities of September 11 ended
the geopolitical confidence of the 1990’s, while
renewed military spending and tax cuts, with
effects magnified by the recession’s falling
revenues, have destroyed Clinton’s fiscal balance.
_____________________________________________________________
When
inflation finally did appear, it came in the alluring
form of “asset inflation.” Excess money, swollen still further by a generous Federal Reserve,
flowed into equity and real estate markets. Prices for equities reached vertiginous levels in relation to real
earnings, which in some cases began to be depressed
by the high dollar.
By the beginning of the new decade, the stock
market was crashing, paced by a series of giant
bankrupcies and accounting scandals.
Not surprisingly, foreign investors have
grown wary and capital inflows are greatly reduced.
A weaker dollar is the natural consequence.
It is not clear how far this process will
continue, given the huge annual current account
deficit, and the continuing need for fresh large
capital inflows to finance it. If the dollar does continue to fall, the euro’s
function as an international reserve currency may
evolve very rapidly.
A very low dollar should eventually help
America’s trade balance.
But European protectionism seems a likely
further consequence. The tendency toward a world of blocs is already
evident and seems a logical outcome of wildly unstable
exchange rates.
All in all, economic events at the start of the
new century suggest a rather different world from
the triumphalist Wilsonian vision so influential
in the Clinton administration. The Clinton boom’s twin foundations have vanished.
The atrocities of September 11 ended the
geopolitical confidence of the 1990’s, while renewed
military spending and tax cuts, with effects magnified
by the recession’s falling revenues, have destroyed
Clinton’s fiscal balance. It has become very clear, moreover, that America’s current prosperity
depends on its ability to absorb more than it
produces, in other words, on its ability to finance
a very large current account deficit. Traditionally, financing that deficit has depended
on a compensating “exorbitant privilege” — America’s
ability to print and borrow international money
at will. The
installationof the euro as Europe’s common currency
suggests that the scope of America’s privilege
is likely to be reduced considerably. If so, the United States will find it more
expensive to finance its deficits and the pressure
to reduce them should increase greatly.
But there will be no easy economic policy
for doing so.
Cutting absorption in the United States
will mean either reducing consumption — which
will lower living standards — or reducing investment
—which will lower economic growth and probably
productivity growth as well. The effects will not only be unwelcome in the
United States but in many other parts of the world
— Asia particularly— where the United States has
often served as “consumer of last resort.” Cutting absorption will grow still more difficult
insofar as the American government returns to
the military budgets of the Cold War, and the
fiscal deficits that accompanied them.
Power Versus Equilibrum
The fate of the Clinton model suggests that American
economic dominance can hardly be taken for granted
in the global economy of the post-Cold War era.
In and of themselves, today’s economic
trends suggest a more plural future — a world
of several major powers rather than a closely
integrated system with one dominant power.
There is, to be sure, something artificial
and incomplete about an analysis that talks about
economic trends isolated from political and military
power. It implies an autonomy of economics that does
not, in fact, exist in the real world.
The failure of the Clinton model repeats
a recurring pattern of American overstretch, probably
no more egregious than the breakdown of earlier
highly touted models of American economic superiority
— the Kennedy-Johnson “New Economy” of the 1960’s,
for example, or the “Reagan Revolution” of the
1980’s. So
long as America’s military power remained intact,
and needed by its rich allies, the American economy
was soon able to find its way back to prosperity
with some new macroeconomic model, one able to
finance the continuing deficits. In other words,
the old bad habits soon found a way to perpetuate
itself.
Clinton, of course, generally avoided brandishing
America’s superior military power to ensure its
economic success.
Perhaps he imagined that in the post Cold
War world, such power had grown obsolescent and
retrograde — even unusable.
He wanted an America whose preeminence
flowed from high intelligence, practical creativity
and nimble entrepreneurship, as opposed to the
martial virtues of unyielding courage, unswerving
loyalties and inflexible principles. He represented a generation for whom the use of military force had
lost its legitimacy.
In his vision of the future, America’s
military power, left over from the Cold War, would
be devalued and multilateralized.
The New American Century: Bush Version
The succeeding Bush administration clearly has
a different world view — more military and unilateral. Bush’s government is much more comfortable
with the use of military power.
From its first days, it has been looking
for enemies and has made clear that it does not
wish to be hobbled by multilateral agreements
or alliances. These tendencies were clearly established
before September 11. The atrocities of that day merely reinforced
them. The
Bush administration used the public reaction to
legitimize a major re-armament, with the fiscal
consequences discussed above.
Some elements of the administration also
flaunt an Manichaean vision of a world divided
between good and evil — a view out of fashion
since the early Cold War. The war on terrorism is thus defined as a war
of good against evil.
The world is divided between allies and
the "enemy." "Terrorism" is a more satisfactory enemy than the former
Soviet Union, which was a real country whose military
resources put strict limits on the use of American
military power, a constraint that was a great
inducement to constructive diplomacy.
Terror by contrast, is an ineffable and
inexhaustible evil. And, although terrorism does not really balance
American power in any practical sense, it nevertheless
justifies an infinite build-up of it.
In the worst case, the Bush unipolar vision
— combined with enhanced military power, a penchant
for unilateralism, and perhaps a declining economy
— sets the United States on a course opposing
the rise of all the other big powers in the world.
The United States inserts its superior
military power into the spheres of the others
in order to thwart their ambitions.
Europe's Options: Appeasement and Balancing
What is Europe’s proper response
to the aggressive policies of the Bush administration? Three options have been suggested for our discussion — appeasement,
balancing, and multilateralism.
One, of course, does not necessarily exclude
the others. Multilateralism, however, seems to me a false
option — more a technique of foreign policy than
a policy in itself. Almost all diplomacy makes use of multilateral
structures. Even
Stalin had his Warsaw Pact.
Such structures may be good or bad in themselves,
depending on who dominates them and for what purposes.
For a country to cooperate with its neighbors
as a matter of principle is doubtless praiseworthy
in most cases, although not in all.
It was not praiseworthy, for example, when
the Vichy regime collaborated with the Nazi regime
to send French Jews to their deaths.
A country profoundly committed to building
a durable confederacy might make multilateral
cooperation the primary goal of its foreign policy—
as might be the case with France and Germany in
their mutual determination to build the European
Union. The
value of their cooperation depends on the value
of what they achieve. A weak country might be deeply devoted to a
multilateral alliance so that it can block the
policies of more powerful neighbors.
Until the Bush administration declared
its independence, being able to shape American
initiatives seemed one of the primary benefits
to Europeans of belonging to NATO.
The value of such cooperation for the weak
depends on how the outcomes are affected. Multilateral structures without an underlying balance of power are
not likely to provide much relief from hegemony.
If multilateralism is regarded as a technique
rather than a policy, Europe’s real policy options
are either appeasement or balancing.
The argument for appeasement is that U.S.
policies are not all that opposed to Europe’s
own interests, or that Europe cannot stop them
in any event. Therefor it might better go along
in the hopes of shaping things, at least at the
margins, in order to benefit itself.
The first argument assumes a closeness
of transatlantic interests that cannot be taken
for granted.
The United States is heavily engaged with
Europe’s southern neighbors in the Arab world
and also closely involved with the Russians.
In neither case can it be said with much
assurance that American policies and European
interests are easily compatible.
Despite the heroic efforts of Secretary
of State Powell, the Bush administration seems
set on a course in Israel and Palestine that promises
to alienate a large part of the Arab world.
And with the administration’s apparent
obsession with invading Iraq, American policy
threatens a revolutionary upheaval with all sorts
of dire consequences, including the use of weapons
of mass destruction or an explosion of terrorism
in Western countries.
While the Americans will not be immune
from the effects, geography seems to make the
Europeans more vulnerable.
The Arabs are Europe’s close neighbors.
Increasingly, they form a significant portion
of Europe’s own population. The cost of some deep and permanent alienation with the Arab world
is likely to weigh very heavily on Europe’s future.
_____________________________________________________________
Multilateral structures without an underlying balance
of power are not likely to provide much relief from
hegemony.
_____________________________________________________________
The same argument may also be made about the
effects of U.S. policy toward Russia. Since NATO’s enlargement and its Partnership for Peace, the United
States has been taking advantage of Russia’s current
weakness to extend American military power deep
into Russia’s traditional sphere of influence. At the same time, recent months have also seen
the United States seeking a “special relationship”
with Russia — through direct contacts between
Bush and Putin.
The new relationship pointedly excludes
the Europeans and is widely seen as a device to
inhibit close bilateral cooperation between Russia
and Europe. While
it is difficult to know the real significance
of this latter Machiavellian game, it seems unlikely
to be in Europe’s interest.
Certainly the alienation of Russia through
NATO enlargement is not. Russia is Europe’s close neighbor — a semi-European country with
whom the EU countries should have intimate economic
and cultural ties. Indeed, the successful development of these
ties seems critical for Europe’s own long-term
prospects. Poisoning those prospects by resurrecting old
Cold War antagonisms is clearly not to Europe’s
benefit. The cost will be very high. In short, appeasing current U.S. policy in
the two regions of greatest concern to Europe
— the Middle East and Russia — is not easy to
reconcile with Europe’s own long-term interests.
Europe Helpless?
Is Europe helpless to do anything other than support
the Americans?
This is a proposition whose truth does
not seem self-evident. Why should Europe not be able to stop local
American initiatives it really does not like?
A war against Iraq would be unlikely without
European bases. In theory, the EU countries could even deny
the Americans the use of NATO assets.
And NATO enlargements that offend Russia’s
strategic interests could not take place without
European acquiescence.
Most European governments go along with
American initiatives in public but speak against
them privately.
This pluckless course is responsible for
much of the current widespread contempt for the
European powers — in Russia, the Middle East and
the United States as well.
European states present themselves as too
weakened from their long Cold War dependency to
behave like serious world powers, conscious of
their own interests and capable of standing up
for them effectively.
While creating the euro suggests that Europe’s
geopolitical will is far from exhausted, in strategic
and military matters many Europeans are still
hoping to cling to the geopolitical framework
of the Cold War, where the United States, Western
Europe, and Russia were all locked together in
a three-legged balance particularly favorable
to Europe’s interests.
But the Soviet collapse has radically disrupted
that old balance. Maastricht seemed to indicate that European
statesmen understood this and were prepared to
act boldly to meet the challenge, ultimately in
its military as well as its economic and political
dimensions. But Europe’s transformation from military
dependency involves numerous complex and painful
issues among the European states themselves. The
backward-looking free-rider mentality of the Cold
War is well entrenched among Europe’s smaller
states, perhaps especially among the late arrivals
to the EU. Among
the big states, the British are schizophrenic
and the Germans reluctant.
Rather than accept a European responsibility
for creating a new balance, it is tempting all
around to hope that the inertia of ideas will
somehow maintain the old Cold War equilibrium,
still balancing the Americans even in the absence
of the Soviets.
Perhaps Clinton’s anti-militarism encouranged
that hope. By now there should be fewer illusions.
The Military Gap: Too Big
To Balance?
Europe clearly cannot hold up its end of the
Western geopolitical balance if it remains utterly
dependent on the United States for military protection.
It is commonplace to highlight a great gap between
European and American military capabilities and
spending. The perception of that gap is then used to
support the view that Europe is therefore bound
to U.S. policies, no matter how much it disapproves
of them. But comparing U.S. and European military
capabilities is a complex exercise.
And using the comparison to assess Europe’s
capacity for diplomatic independence is still
more so. A
few critical observations about Europe’s “gap”
may serve to make a more general point.
To begin with, it is not necessarily true that
Europe is handicapped geopolitically because it
does not match the United States in expenditure
or in all the various kinds of advanced technology
in the American arsenal.
The purpose of transatlantic military comparison
is not to show what would happen in a military
confrontation between Europe and the United States. Should such a situation occur, Europe’s sizeable
nuclear forces would presumably give it a “second
strike” capability and this strategic balance
would, we can hope, quickly limit the extent of
any conflict.
Most military comparisons are trying to measure
something else: Europe’s capacity to protect itself
in its own home territory or Europe’s capacity
for intervening elsewhere — in places where important
interests may need defending.
Home defense encompasses the need to fight
terrorism as well as the wars in Europe’s Near
Abroad — the Balkans in particular. Europe, of course, has a long experience with terrorism and does
not feel it has much to learn from the United
States, even though cooperation could conceivably
yield helpful results all around. The general public impression of Europe’s military weakness comes
primarily from Europe’s sorry showing in the initial
Yugoslav crisis. But this was less a question of military power
than of political cohesion.
Particularly damaging was the absence of
the usual Franco-German partnership — a result
both of Germany’s enthusiasm for Croatian independence,
together with Germany’s lingering Cold War disabilities
in the military realm.
These disabilities still remain a major
liability for collective European defense, but
are slowly being addressed.
Currently, German politicians seem to be
emphasizing the need for more rapid progress.
_____________________________________________________________
It is not healthy for America’s own inner balance
to have allies incapable of looking out for their
own interests.
If the transatlantic balance is not restored
by a strong EU, the United States will advance its
unipolar fantasy, using its power to sustain its
economy, and creating along the way the enemies
it needs to fill its world view.
_____________________________________________________________
European military forces are often said to be
suffering from various sorts of “technology
gaps.” The real military significance of such gaps
is often exaggerated.
Ever since Vietnam, the United States
has been trying to develop “smart weapons” that
will fight wars on the ground without risking
the lives of American soldiers. Whether forces based on this principle are
truly more effective militarily depends on the
terrain or on the nature of the opposing forces.
Above all, it depends on the purpose
of the mission.
Such forces are not ideal for pacifying
territory, or protecting civilian populations,
or even hunting down bands of terrorists. A military equipped in this way risks being
limited to strikes that are initially devastating
but which cannot be followed up successfully.
It may even be argued that European forces
are better balanced and therefore potentially
more effective for those missions where intervention
is actually needed. In their current state, however, European forces
are not even remotely comparable in their capacity
for projecting power beyond Europe.
To some extent, this is a simple lack
of planes for transporting troops. European governments, presumably giving a low priority to such external
interventions, have not bothered to spend the
money. Arguably, the war on terrorism should change
their strategic priorities.
Europe’s real military problem is not so much
military in a technological sense, but political
and geopolitical.
In the military sphere Europe remains
more a coalition than a federation. The three principal members, Britain, France and Germany, each have
formidable military traditions and resources. But one of the three, Germany, is relatively undeveloped. This gives Britain a critical role it lacks
in other dimensions of the European Union.
Europe’s collective military action thus
tends to reflect the uncertain stability of
an Anglo-French coalition — in the absence of
Germany. So long as Germany does not play its proper
role, Europe will remain weak in the military
sphere and the temptation to cling to the now
illusory comforts of free-riding will remain
strong. An appropriate new transatlantic balance
will not be created.
Europe's International Duties
Europe’s pusillanimity harms not only itself but
its American ally.
It is not healthy for America’s own inner
balance to have allies incapable of looking
out for their own interests.
Only an active great power who is a friend
can lead the American political imagination
out of its current unipolar impasse. A dysfunctional unipolar infatuation persists
in America, thanks in good part to the perception
of a diminished Europe, whose geopolitical will
is crippled.
If the transatlantic balance is not restored
by a strong EU, the United States will advance
its unipolar fantasy, using its power to sustain
its economy, and creating along the way the
enemies it needs to fill its world view.
In any case, Europe surely should have a greater
role in the new century than as a foil for American
imperial fantasies.
Since the 1950’s Europe has created what
is by far the most significant regional structure
in the world. The European Union is not merely another federal
superpower slowly in the making.
It embodies a genuinely new political
formula, where states retain their sovereignty
but pool it in a regular search for solutions
that represent mutual gains.
This is a talent the rest of the world
now needs urgently.
With Europe, Russia, and China all on
the rise, Eurasia’s pluralist trends are very
likely to prevail.
Huge intractable problems lie ahead over
economic redistribution and environmental degradation. The best hope for peace lies in a concert system
that gets used to confronting issues in a collective
spirit, and before they become unmanageable.
Europeans, who have been refining their
interstate mechanisms for decades, ought now
to be putting that rich experience to work developing
a post-Cold War system for Eurasia — a system
that not only offers a reasonable and mutually
profitable framework for Russia, but also reaches
out to embrace the rapidly rising power of China.
It is not too early to speak of a “Eurasia of
States.” The historic opportunity will not lie
around forever.
At so critical a time for shaping the
world, why should Western political imaginations
be so exclusively dominated by a more primitive
view of international politics — one that denigrates
the possibilities of cooperation and has an
unhealthy fascination with military force and
conflict?
Robert J.A. Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes, vol. 3, Fighting for
Britain, 1937-1946 (London: Macmillan, 2000).
Another fascinating book showing the intense confrontations
of this pre-Cold War period is Lanxin Xiang, Recasting
the Imperial Far East: Britain and America in China,
1945-1950, (Armonk NY [etc]: M.E. Sharpe, 1995),
a study of Anglo-American competition to
control the China trade between 1945 and the Korean
War. A pathbreaking
general study of European-American issues in this
period is Alan Milward, The Reconstruction of
Western Europe, 1945-1951 (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1984).
And, of course, there is Richard Gardner’s
early study of Anglo-American economic conflict,
Sterling-Dollar Diplomacy in Current Perspective:
the Origins and Prospects of Our International Economic
Order (New York: Columbia University Press,
1980).
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David P. Calleo *1934;
Dean Acheson Professor and Director of
European Studies, Paul H. Nitze School
of Advanced International Studies, Johns
Hopkins University, Washington, D.C.;
dpcalleo@aol.com
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