Читать книгу Why Europe Will Run the 21st Century - Mark Leonard - Страница 11

There are few creatures more potent in Greek mythology than the Hydra, a beast with the body of a serpent and nine heads. Each time you chopped one head off, two others would grow in its place. With its many member-states, the EU is like a modern day hydra – as Colin Powell discovered when he tried to build an international coalition for invading Iraq. Each time he managed to sign one country up, he found another one still had doubts. In the immediate aftermath of the invasion, the conventional wisdom was that the Americans had won – dividing the European countries and prevailing on some of them to invade Iraq on American terms, without a United Nations mandate and against the wishes of a majority of European citizens. A headline in the Financial Times on 12 March 2003, as troops prepared to invade Iraq, seemed to say it all: ‘Europe is the first casualty of war.’¹⁵

Most people think that Iraq was a disaster for Europe, and I shared their distress at the political fall-out from the crisis. But with hindsight we can see that some good came out of it. The European project has survived the transatlantic train crash, and its multilateral agenda has in fact made a comeback. Though the Continent was divided on tactics for handling the United States, all EU countries shared three fundamental goals: to preserve the transatlantic alliance, to restore the authority of the United Nations, and to prevent unilateral preventive war from being established as a norm. Europe has somehow met all these objectives – not by putting up a united front, but by engaging the Americans with competing factions. The negotiations in the run-up to the war were reminiscent of the routines in so many Hollywood detective movies where the ‘bad cop’ scares the suspect into submission, while the ‘good cop’ wins his trust. Between them they manage to get him to confess.

In 2003, the transatlantic relationship seemed as if it was on the cusp of being discarded when the American Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, grouped Germany with ‘problem states’ like Iran and Libya and Germany’s justice minister compared George W. Bush to Hitler. Robert Kagan’s fashionable thesis that Europe and the United States were two tectonic plates inevitably moving apart seemed irrefutable. ¹⁶ In retrospect, however, the fact that some European countries supported the war meant that the transatlantic relationship survived. As long as Bush needed Blair alongside him, there was at least an incentive for America not to be too destructive towards a political project valued by the British government.

The United Nations was sidelined and mocked during the 1990s – powerless in the face of civilian massacres in Rwanda and Somalia, ignored over Kosovo, and starved of dues by big donors. But during the run-up to the Iraq war it became the crucible in which the arguments were aired and decisions on the basis for war were made. For the first time since the Cuban missile crisis, dramatic presentations at the United Nations dominated the media, and international public opinion rallied to its cause. Now the United States has turned to the United Nations to give credibility to the beleaguered Iraqi Governing Council – not something that would have seemed likely at the time of the invasion.

Most importantly, the doctrine of preventive war seems to have disappeared into the desert sands. The US national security strategy had outlined a doctrine of war that would allow the USA to attack potential enemies before they posed a direct threat to US security. At their most hubristic, the neoconservatives argued that the USA could take advantage of its victory in Iraq by unleashing a ‘democratic domino effect’ in Iran and Syria. The political and economic costs of invading Iraq make another occupation impossible for several years. France and Germany have made any future action harder by refusing to commit troops to Iraq or pay for reconstruction.

This success was a direct result of Europe’s structure. While the US administration was pursuing its policy of divide and rule – and talking separately to each of the Hydra’s heads – the European heads were busy watching each other and adapting their positions accordingly. There was certainly no ‘grand plan’ behind the approach of individual countries and, as the crisis reached its apotheosis, there was very little dialogue between the competing camps; but the actions of each European government were carried out in the knowledge of what the other camps were doing. The French and Germans could only afford to take a very aggressive approach because they knew that the ‘New Europe’ led by Blair, Aznar, Miller, and Berlusconi would stay on good terms with Bush. Equally, Tony Blair knew that, however far he went to support American action, it was likely that this would be a one-off that would not be repeated in Iran or Syria because of the depth of opposition in France and Germany. The fact that the European powers had such a strong consensus on the strategic goals – of Atlanticism, support for international law, and opposition to unilateral preventive war – meant that without any formal attempt to co-ordinate their positions, it was likely that these principles would shine through.

The European Union does not just have a ‘good cop’ and a ‘bad cop’: it is like an entire police force of good and bad cops. Other countries will always be able to find someone in the European system who is more sympathetic to their cause, and this will tend to draw them into a process of negotiation from which it is often hard to escape. The ‘good cops’ will then often hide behind the ‘bad cops’ in the EU system and manage to extract concessions. For example, British and Nordic enthusiasm for enlargement to the East allowed the countries of Central and Eastern Europe to ‘keep faith’ as they embarked on painful processes of internal reform. At the same time, French doubts allowed the European Commission to exact concessions from them in the protracted negotiations for accession. The key feature of this ‘good cop, bad cop’ dynamic is that, even though the disagreements are genuine, the core objectives of all European countries tend to be the same: a commitment to multilateral action; democracy, human rights and the international rule of law; negotiation and engagement rather than military force. Therefore, countries that seek to play Europeans off against each other tend to get pulled back to these basic principles.

However, in spite of all this success, many Euro-enthusiasts are not advocates for ‘Network Europe’. Even those who concede that the network works well for economic policy, because like Visa it gives its members access to economies of scale without removing the competition that drives innovation, will say it is hopeless for foreign policy. But as we have seen, the development of ‘Network Europe’ has paradoxically allowed the EU to become a global power to be reckoned with, not just ending the balance of power in its own backyard, but reversing it.

Our ‘Network Europe’ has not come about as a result of a conscious plan. It is the product of an uneasy truce between the traditional visions of a European superstate and a European free-trade area – but no single vision has managed to achieve unanimous support. And it never will. As Europe develops in the future, we must embrace its unique structure, and reform it to make it work to our advantage.

Of course, we need to get better at managing the divisions within Europe. The wounds inflicted by the Iraqi disagreements run deep, and Europe cannot afford to rip itself apart every time a major international issue arises. One lesson from the Iraq war is that Europeans can have greater influence if they develop a common position before a crisis erupts, as they have done towards Iran. However, we must recognize that the persistence of different views is a strength rather than a weakness, and that the EU’s structure is robust enough to accommodate disagreements of monumental proportions. Samuel Beckett said that if at first you don’t succeed ‘Fail, fail again, fail better’. The genius of Europe is that it carries on trying. And from every setback it has emerged stronger.