- Observer.co.uk,
- Sunday April 27 2003
It is important to recognise how far the development of an open international economy - the foundation for the astonishing, if uneven, global economic development over the past half-century - has rested on American multilateral leadership, and its partnership with west European states through multilateral institutions.
Australia and Canada were founder members of the post-1945 'west'; Japan from the 1970s became to a limited extent a partner in a broader coalition of industrial democracies, with Korea and Mexico also playing minor roles. It has been the transatlantic relationship, however, which has remained central: through successive trade rounds within the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, now the World Trade Organization (WTO), where the US and the European Union (EU) have defined the agenda and shaped the outcome; and within the overlapping bodies that manage the global economy, the International Monetary Fund, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, and the Group of Seven - now, with Russia, the G8.
The integration of the west European economy into a single market, reinforced by strong economic growth in the 1980s and a stream of direct investment within the US, made this a balanced and unavoidably close relationship. Nevertheless, the surge of technology-led growth in America through the 1990s, while the German economy and its neighbours struggled, has supported a resurgence of triumphalism within the US, a sense that there is less justification for compromising on international economic regulation with 'sclerotic' Europe.
The US was always more dominant in maintaining the security of the western world. A network of bilateral security treaties legitimised American dominance in east Asia. In western Europe, however, the underlying reality of American supremacy was moderated through the multilateral framework of NATO - an institutional hypocrisy which all except Gaullist France found useful, through which they could exert a degree of influence on American strategy.
In spite of the rapid expansion of UN membership in the 1960s and 1970s, these western allies retained a substantial degree of influence within this global institution, with three of the five permanent seats on the UN Security Council, two other west European seats, and Japan or Korea often occupying the Asian seat.
Thrown into question
Now all these institutions have been thrown into question. Many in Washington openly dismiss the entire global structure; right-wing think tanks with close links to the administration have been floating wild plans for an alternative body to the 'failed' UN, built around 'the three great powers - the US, Britain and Russia'. The future of NATO is yet again in doubt; civilians in the Pentagon have been talking of moving their bases eastward from Germany, to 'punish' that ungrateful ally.
The Doha WTO development round is in disarray almost before it has started; transatlantic differences on agricultural trade are among the most difficult issues it has to face. French President Jacques Chirac's attack on the alleged disloyalty of the candidate states throws doubt on whether ratification of the EU's eastern enlargement will be completed. In Paris and Brussels, with some support from Berlin, the idea of a 'core' Europe, built around Franco-German partnership, reinforced by Belgium and Luxembourg, has again been floated as a bastion against the malign influence of the Anglo-Saxons and the Nordics.
Each side of the Atlantic blames the other for this breakdown in trust and multilateral cooperation. Both deserve to share the blame, though for different reasons. The problem in Washington is that the foreign policy debate has been captured, to a remarkable extent, by ideological conservatives who reject multilateral constraints on American supremacy, see military power as the decisive factor in international politics, and underplay the importance to the US of the network of multilateral rules that underpin the global economy.
The problem in Europe is that no government is thinking about the continent's contribution to global order, or attempting to define shared European interests in promoting a stronger framework for that order. There is, therefore, no basis for a constructive transatlantic dialogue. Washington policy-makers see no reason to listen, and European governments have nothing to say.
The attacks on the World Trade Center, and the subsequent transformation of the 'war' on terrorism into a war on Iraq, have provided the immediate focus for this American rejection of international law and institutions as constraints. But the roots of this rejectionist strain in US foreign policy lie far deeper in American culture, tradition and religion.
In 1919, the Protestant Evangelical Churches of America denounced the League of Nations as 'the antichrist', drawing on the Book of Revelation then in the same way that Christian fundamentalists do today. President Ronald Reagan used puritan imagery when he described America as 'the city on the Hill', in the same way that contemporary conservatives insist that America is 'a righteous nation'.
A decade ago, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia argued that international law could not in any way constrain the domestic laws created under the US constitution. The veterans of the Reagan administration who came back into office with present President George Bush had a well-defined agenda for reasserting America's moral and military ascendancy, reinforced by the intellectual support of a younger generation of neo-conservatives.
Three longer-term developments have strengthened support for this 'Jacksonian' approach within the US. First has been the long rumble of American discontent with corruption and irresponsibility within the UN and UN agencies, from the time when Daniel Moynihan was US Ambassador to the UN thirty years ago. It has been a constant sub-theme of this rising chorus of congressional and administration discontent that the European allies have provided too little support for the reform of international institutions, failing to back Washington's justified criticisms of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in the 1980s; and acquiescing in the election of Libya to the chairmanship of the UN Human Rights Commission last year.
Second has been the failure of America's European partners to respond to successive calls, from President John Kennedy onwards, for more equitable transatlantic 'burden-sharing', most of all in the provision and projection of military power. West European governments increased this imbalance by taking their full share of the 'peace dividend' at the end of the Cold War. They then demonstrated their inability even to manage the conflict in neighbouring Yugoslavia, calling on America to provide the air and land power to contain Serbian expansionism.
NATO's subsequent Defence Capabilities Initiative has made no impact; and the parallel European Defence Initiative, with 'headline goals' for mobile military forces to be achieved this year, is going the same way.
The third justification for American unilateralism has been the sustained growth of the US economy throughout the 1990s, while Europe's regional growth was held back by German recession and resistance to deregulation in France and Italy.
Few in European governments are ready to admit that their own drift and self-preoccupation have contributed to American disillusion with the multilateral order which their enlightened predecessors built after the Second World War. Most Europeans are instinctively happier with Democratic administrations than Republican; with the America of the east and west coasts than with an administration and Congress dominated by the mountain states and the south.
September 11 2001 silenced the internationalist wing of the Democrats; they have not yet recovered their voice, nor found a credible candidate to recapture the White House next year. And for all its friendlier rhetoric, President Bill Clinton's administration was not able to deliver new American commitments to global cooperation on - for example - combating climate change, or the International Criminal Court. Without strong incentives, and active persuasion from European allies, a future Democratic administration might again find itself blocked by Senate scepticism.
How not to make Europe's case
Viewed from Washington, most European states justifiably look self-absorbed and sclerotic, while the idea of a coherent European approach to foreign policy beyond the EU's immediate borders seems a mirage. The British are exempted from general condemnation, thanks to Prime Minister Tony Blair's public support for the US since September 11 and the commitment of British forces to Iraq; but it is doubtful whether the limited influence over US foreign policy this has gained will be sustainable through the crisis and its aftermath.
French and German political leaders are seen as having played, very successfully, to their domestic audiences, without seriously engaging the broader issues. Italian foreign policy matters little to Washington; Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has offered Washington symbolic support, but the Italians have nothing more to contribute.
International institutions matter enormously to European governments; so, their leaders wish to argue, should they matter to intelligent policy-makers in the US. But the case can only be sustained against a sceptical elite in Washington if Europe can agree on the institutions it wants, and on how to reform and strengthen them.
French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin's Alastair Buchan lecture in March was a classic example of how not to make the case: full of exhortation to return to the institutions of global order, looking towards Europe playing a larger role among 'a number of regional poles, structured to face current threats,' which should 'not compete against each other, but complete each other,' but without any detail on how Europe might move from here to there.
Forge a coherent message
It should now be clear to British, French and German leaders that European influence in Washington can only be sustained through close cooperation, and through having a coherent message to deliver. That first requires a stronger EU - which alone can recapture American attention and respect - with real foreign policy capabilities and the projection of military power.
There's little evidence yet that any EU government is seriously committed to the compromises and commitments this will require; the EU Convention is discussing stronger institutions, but without the resources or the coordination of national policies to make them work. Behind the personal disdain that Chirac has for Blair, and the fascination with 'special' relations with Washington that has gripped the British prime minister, an understanding between France and Britain has to form the core of European integration in this field.
Britain and France, so far alone among European states, are prepared to commit troops to state reconstruction and nation building in Africa. Dutch-German deployments to Afghanistan, and Danish special forces in Afghanistan and elsewhere, indicate that others are moving, and that a basis for a more common approach to order and institutions outside the European region may slowly be emerging. It will not succeed, however, without political investment by the leaders of the major states, as well as those within the Brussels institutions, in redefining the agenda of European foreign policy. So far no politician in Paris, London, Berlin or Brussels has been willing to make this.
Rescue NATO
Next, European governments must redefine the purpose of NATO - unless they are content for it to wither, as American demands sink into scepticism in the face of Europe's passive response. NATO will collapse unless the European allies can integrate their limited resources into a more capable combined force, and agree on the rules of engagement under which this may be deployed beyond Europe. The imbalance within NATO between a dominant US and its querulous but impotent partners is not sustainable. That, of course, will only be possible on the basis of a more integrated common foreign policy, with a more constructive European approach to world order and global institutions.
Then European governments must combine their weight in global institutions and grapple with the agenda of UN reform - overcoming Franco-British rivalry on the Security Council, and the self-seeking compromises that other member states often strike.
EU states collectively underperform in global institutions. Yet they provide forty percent of the UN's regular budget and fifty percent of its peacekeeping budget; with twenty five members they will also form a substantial voting bloc. If Chirac would at last overcome his visceral defence of the Common Agricultural Policy, the EU could take the lead in pushing the Doha round forward, carrying a divided US administration with it.
American unilateralism rests both on domestically driven foundations and on the disillusioned perception of many in Washington that there are no others prepared to share the burden of global order. Since the end of the Cold War, and the end of the Japanese economic miracle, European states collectively are the only available balancer to American global domination: the only potential concentration of economic, political and military power that Washington realists might treat with respect. So far, most European leaders have preferred to criticise American leadership or bandwagon on American power; it remains to be seen if they are capable of providing a reasoned alternative vision of world order, backed by collective diplomacy and shared resources.
Lord Wallace is Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics and a member of the Chatham House Council.
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