Dark days for Europe
The Iraq crisis has set back efforts to build a common EU foreign and security policy by years, writes Andrew Osborn
Friday March 14, 2003 The Guardian
No blood has yet been spilt in Iraq but in Brussels - the cauldron where a common European foreign and security policy (CFSP) has been simmering away for years - the figurative blood is already beginning to soak into the carpet.
Nobody seriously thought that Iraq would be the making of the grandly named CFSP but few could have predicted quite how wounded and bruised it would emerge from the current crisis either. As Chris Patten, the EU's external relations commissioner, says: the EU has cut "a sorry figure" in recent weeks and the CFSP has suffered "a severe setback".
A war in Iraq has not even started yet but already the CFSP looks like a bad joke dreamt up by fantasists and Europhiles woefully out of touch with reality. The idea, for example, that the EU could one day speak with a single voice on issues such as Iraq now seems unimaginable. Nor is it an exaggeration to say that the EU's large member states, such as France and Britain, have rarely seemed so far apart on the most important issue of the day.
When government ministers in Britain, including the prime minister, are openly calling French policy on Iraq "extraordinary" and "intransigent" and calling for special summits on "anti-Americanism" it is clear that the CFSP is in trouble. The "esprit communautaire" - spoken of in such hallowed tones by Eurocrats down the years - seems to have vanished without a trace. Getting it back won't be easy.
Nor will the two issues which have riven Europe asunder - war and America - go away overnight. They will keep popping up again and again in the years to come and Europe's response to those issues will ultimately determine its future.
The worry is (for Europhiles at least) that the European response to Iraq may be a sign of things to come. The internal battle lines are horribly clear, the splits embarrassingly wide and there is precious little common ground.
The depressing message for CFSP-lovers is also crystal clear - when push comes to shove the EU and belonging to the EU appear to count for very little when an international crisis looms.
On the one hand Britain, Spain and a host of east European countries who will be EU member states themselves next year have aligned themselves with the United States over Iraq. On the other France and Germany - backed by smaller states such as Belgium - have done everything they can to derail the apparently inevitable slide toward war and block America.
The gap between the two camps is - it goes without saying - clearly too wide to be breached and the implications of that painful reality are beginning to sink in. As EU diplomats gloomily mutter - "If you can't agree on the really big things like Iraq then what hope is there." And for many a divided EU is a weak EU.
Not that CFSP proponents have given up the ghost altogether. Chris Patten for one remains optimistic. "As we return to work," he told the European parliament this week, "we shall find, perhaps, a little more humility even among the large member states who can surely see how much they have damaged their common enterprise and how much they have reduced their common influence as a result of public squabbling."
Next year when 10 mostly east European countries join the EU the balance of power and opinion within the bloc will formally shift, and in Britain's favour - something which President Jacques Chirac is already beginning to have cold feet about. The EU will be wider but not deeper, runs the mantra, and that will have profound implications for its future. The main one is that the federalist vision of a strong, unified Europe that can punch its economic weight on the global stage and speak with a single voice on foreign policy and defence issues looks more distant than ever.
The "great European dream" looks as though it may never be realised. In fact it looks as though it is dying, slowly and messily.
Europhiles make no secret of the fact that they hope the EU will one day evolve into a powerful rival to the United States and become a moderating counterbalance to Washington in a dangerously unipolar world. That does not mean, they insist, that individual countries must give up their identities but it does imply greater integration, more pooling of sovereignty and more decision-making by majority voting without vetoes.
But vetoes, we have seen (albeit at UN level), are jealously guarded. And the idea of Britain giving up its own voice on the world stage along with its permanent seat on the United Nations security council in favour of a single EU voice today seems further away than ever - as does a more federal Europe.
The future of the EU - which currently hangs in the balance - looks to be tipping in favour of the Anglo-Saxon "Euro-realists". They see an EU where member states cooperate if they can but keep significant competences such as defence and foreign powers for themselves - where there is not one EU voice but many and where close relations with America are valued rather than scorned.
If the Iraqi crisis is anything to go by it looks as though they have won the day. And when that message finally sinks in - in Paris, Rome and Berlin - conclusions will be drawn and the losers are likely to turn inward, reviving controversial ideas about a two-speed Europe where a small core of integrationist-minded countries streak ahead pursuing greater federalism.
The future of Europe, it seems, is more of what we have seen in the past few weeks - division.
Email andrew.osborn at guardian.co.uk