CNN Newsroom: Global View

home *** CD-ROM | disk | FTP | other *** search

/ CNN Newsroom: Global View / CNN Newsroom: Global View.iso / txt / ga / ga0492.001 next >

Wrap

Text File | 1994-06-28 | 52.2 KB | 995 lines

<text> <title> The Defense of Europe </title> <article> <hdr> Global Affairs, Spring 1992 The Defense of Europe </hdr> <body> Douglas Seay--investment consultant in Washington, D.C., who writes frequently on foreign affairs. Without warning, Europe's great moment has arrived. By demolishing predatory dictatorships and the military power that was their sole asset, the stunning revolutions in the East have also swept away the barriers that both shielded and confined Western Europe. These democratic revolutions liberated Western Europe as much as they did the East, and history may identify them as signaling the beginning of a Pax Europa. Never have Europe's prospects seemed so positive or its peace so secure. Europe's future, no longer tightly constrained by necessity, rests in the uncertain hands of its somewhat startled leaders. They have it in their collective power, as perhaps never before in the modern era, to assume control of the continent's destiny. What use they will make of this unique opportunity is still uncertain. In the onslaught of change, their awareness of new possibilities has been slow to take shape, and concrete actions have been few. The collapse of the Soviet empire was a victory for the West, and for its ideals and institutions. But the totality of that victory has reverberated back onto the West. The structures of post-World War II Western Europe which arose in response to the threat from the East, and within which the western portion of the continent was reshaped, have been weakened. Stable and familiar institutions such as NATO suddenly are afflicted with uncertainty and loss of purpose. New foundations must be established if the hard-won accomplishments of the last half-century are to be made lasting. Europe's leaders may yet successfully acquit themselves of this responsibility through some combination of enlightened vision and measured practicality. But confidence in their success is still premature. The uncertainty does not stem from a shortage of blueprints for the new Europe: so many have been put forward that the construction site has begun to resemble that of the Tower of Babel. The problem, however, is deeper than simply a lack of consensus on the direction in which to embark. A far greater danger is that there is little recognition in Western Europe that the structures that have shaped its postwar transformation are artificial and fragile. Europe's leaders have demonstrated little awareness that the collapse of the Soviet empire just as surely signifies the demise of Europe's made-in-America political order and its attendant stability, and the end of Western Europe as it has come to be defined for over four decades. In their place, in all likelihood, will be a resurgence of Europe's indigenous political order. It is this underlying order, the system that led to two suicidal wars in this century--rather than any external agent--that now poses the greatest threat to Europe's stability. An older Europe, one almost forgotten by citizens and statesmen alike, is now stirring. Beneath the modern fraternalism of Western Europe lies an historical political order of ceaseless struggle and permanent instability. That order was supplanted by the present cooperative one not so much by the actions of the Europeans themselves as by external forces over which they exercised little control. The military threat from the Soviet Union after World War II, and the resulting American return to the continent, were the key agents in that transformation. The more important was the role of the U.S. Through its wide-ranging policies and by its mere presence, the United States created an artificial environment that provided the setting for the transformation of Western Europe into the democratic, peaceful, prosperous, and generally cooperative reality of the present. The innovations of the post-World War II era, however, have not repealed Europe's underlying reality, but merely suppressed it. The danger is that, as the postwar era fades, the structures that have held those destructive forces in check may lose their efficacy, and that the many plans for the future may be overwhelmed by a return of the past. The first order of business for Europe's leaders, then, should be the reinforcement of Europe's stability. This can only be guaranteed by creating new institutions appropriate to the demands of the new era, the most important being a new European security system. The urgency of such an undertaking at a time when all major threats have seemingly disappeared may not be readily apparent. Not surprisingly, it has attracted only limited official attention. And such interest as does exist has been focused on arguments over which organization is to be responsible for addressing the few inchoate threats outside of Western Europe that sharp-eyed strategists can identify. But the sense of security resulting from the absence of an immediate external threat ignores the source of the true historical danger to the European states: the threat they pose to one another. It is this menace that Europe's leaders should be determined to neutralize. For only when secured against each other will Europe's states be able to enter into the more permanent forms of cooperation now being contemplated and on which Europe's future stability will rest. The European Revolutions The collapse of the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe and the dissolution of the Soviet Union itself have liberated a continent. Rarely has the demise of an imperial system come so swiftly or so peacefully and more rarely still have the results been as positive. The magnitude of change in the East inevitably has had profound impact in the West as well. The demise of the Soviet empire has suddenly ended the enforced military, political, and economic division of the continent and, with it, the familiar structures and concepts of the last half-century. "Western" Europe, a creation of the post-World War II era, is losing its political and cultural identity, as the frontier dividing free from unfree expands eastward. Europe has been enlarged and enriched as nations engulfed centuries ago reemerge and reclaim their rightful place as European states. Europe now extends farther east than many of Europe's statesmen yet realize, and with consequences they have yet fully to grasp. With its familiar institutions in disarray, Europe is in an unusually fluid state. At the same time, the continent is in a period of profound peace and relaxation, presenting its leaders with a unique opportunity to establish a new order of deliberate design rather than improvised necessity. A thorough rethinking of the range of political, economic, and military structures is necessary, as is devising ways of integrating the eastern portion of the continent fully into the European fold. Lacking any other forum, much of the discussion of Europe's future has centered on further integration of the European Community (EC). As the disintegration in the East gathered speed, it also accelerated the momentum toward further integration in the West. In December, the same month that the Soviet Union bowed out of formal existence, the leaders of the 12-nation European Community met in Maastricht in the Netherlands to map out the next, crucial steps toward pushing Europe beyond its present limited economic integration into a binding economic and political union. Although the meetings of necessity focused on the mundane nuts and bolts of technical issues, for many it appeared that the dream of European unity was on the verge of becoming a reality. Yet, even as the relative merits of alternative futures for the EC and for Europe are being debated, the ability to effect change may be receding. None of the proposals under discussion recognizes that Europe's present tranquillity rests on an artificial basis; most projections assume a continuation of conditions that are abnormal from the standpoint of European history. And so these plans risk becoming irrelevant: a resurgence of the past may overtake them all, forcing Europe's leaders increasingly to react to events rather than shape them. Europe today is dramatically different than it was a half-century ago, and a wholesale return to the past is improbable. The near-total democratization of the continent is alone sufficient to guarantee that the barbarisms of the past have been tamed. But it is an open question how many of the positive changes are permanent, and how many will prove to have been the temporary epiphenomena of a rapidly disappearing era. The Underlying Order Although there is much to celebrate in the new Europe, there also are great dangers. The collapse of the Soviet Union has ended the military threat that has hung over Europe for more than four decades; at the same time, it has reawakened long-buried security problems. To cite only one example, the conflict in Yugoslavia--the first war in Europe in decades--has raised concerns not only because of its effects on regional stability but also because it may represent the beginning of wide-scale ethnic strife throughout the former East bloc. Renewed debate over Europe's security is attempting to address many of these problems, albeit with little coherence and less persuasiveness. Part of the difficulty is attributable to the mental habits acquired during the postwar decades. In particular, the necessity of countering Moscow in the past continues to bias the debate toward concentration on external threats. Overlooked is the uncomfortable truth that the real threat to the security of Europe's states comes not from the outside, but from one another. This problem stems from the very essence of the European political order. Since the fall of the Roman Empire, Europe has been politically fragmented. Although many would-be conquerors, from Charlemagne to Hitler, have sought to subject all of Europe to their control, none ever succeeded. (Stalin and his successors have a prominent place on this list: but Russia, and especially the Soviet Union, are special cases--both inside Europe and outside of it, simultaneously.) This fragmentation is a defining characteristic of Europe. The absence of a central authority meant that neither order nor a stifling orthodoxy could be imposed. In their place arose ceaseless competition and a uniquely dynamic civilization, whose ever greater material and intellectual achievements allowed its constituent states to establish dominion over the entire planet and to overwhelm all other civilizations. So thorough was this domination of the non-European cultures that the survivors are but shadows of their former selves and are treated as the equivalent of endangered species. Major cultures such as the Indian and Chinese that appear to have maintained a separate existence in fact have undergone dramatic evolution under the unrelenting impact of the European world and continue to Europeanize themselves in their never-ending quest to "modernize." That such obfuscatory adjectives as "modern," "technological," "western," or "world" must now be applied to what remains identifiably "European" civilization is powerful testimony to its universal triumph. The price of this dynamism has been incessant conflict. For fifteen hundred years, at virtually no time was the continent entirely at peace. Even the occasional times of peace that did occur more often than not were periods of great stress and preparation for war, and were more akin to armed truces than to mutual coexistence. It was in this environment that the European states arose and took shape, not as the product of the social contract beloved of political theorists but of the harsh demands and the unforgiving environment of military conflict. The diplomacy practiced by these states was but a surrogate for war, and was often as unnerving, if less bloody, than open conflict. Margins of survival were quite thin. Miscalculations, correspondingly, could be fatal. Treachery and deceit were indispensable tools for success. Rulers excessively reliant on trust and altruism, however worthy in the ethical sense, could be punished by political extinction. In fact, the system rewarded deception and well-timed betrayal. Not for nothing was the most successful practitioner of this system--Great Britain--known as "perfidious Albion." The result was an abiding cynicism, with a focus on narrow self-interest. In the atmosphere of zero-sum game that prevailed, the interests of others were viewed either as threats to be countered or the raw material of manipulation. All alliances were accepted as temporary and hostage to their utility. Such an attitude is captured in a remark variously attributed to a number of European statesmen regarding their future course of action toward allies who had rendered crucial assistance in the past but who had ceased to be useful: "I will astound them with my ingratitude." The rules of the game were regarded as immutable and were assumed to be understood by all. Clausewitz' dictum that diplomacy and war were but two sides of the same coin was less an innovative insight than a formalized statement of what every competent practitioner of diplomacy already knew, much as Machiavelli had earlier made a name for himself by publishing a compendium of the trade secrets of successful politicians. While assuming the worst possible motives in both allies and enemies may not always have been accurate, it was certainly safer than counting on benign intentions. Consequently, policies claiming to be motivated by higher principles or by the common good, such as those of President Wilson after World War I, were regarded either as contemptibly naive or transparently duplicitous. Despite the rise and fall of powers and the constancy of change throughout Europe, the characteristics of the European state system remained largely fixed over a millennium. The records of international politics in 900 A.D. are wholly similar to those of a thousand years later, and immediately familiar. The most pronounced feature of that system was the bewildering array of cross-cutting alliances, many of them secret. The formal alliances themselves were only the most visible elements and often were eclipsed in number and importance by the ephemeral "understandings" arising from the fluctuation of interests. The great subtleties of this system, and the extensive opportunities for misunderstanding and miscalculation, only added to its dynamic character, marked as it was by the rise and fall of relative power and the ceaseless quest for position. Positioning, in fact, was everything. The general aim in an alliance was not necessarily a compelling military advantage but rather the reduction of the options open to one's opponents while increasing one's own. So abstract and obscure could the situation become that war often was the only means of revealing the true relationships of power. The temporary equilibria that punctuated this incessant state of flux were known as the "Balance of Power," less a function of the power of individual nations than of rival alliances. Alliances were the medium for the exercise of power, and Europe's diplomatic history revolved around their creation and destruction, in a constant interplay among the ambitious, the satiated, and the fearful. In the late 19th century, Bismarck's complex alliance system assured Germany's preeminent position not so much through military dominance as by the confusion he sowed among his rivals. Their uncertainty and mistrust of one another and their mutually contradictory ambitions constituted inexhaustible resources for him which he never lost an opportunity to further hone, and to exploit. Dynamic and inherently unstable, this system required masterful handling in the best of times. Unfortunately, as any reader of contemporary documents and memoirs can testify, the degree to which foolishness and recklessness were common in Europe's chancellories is truly astonishing, and disaster was often the result. It is important to note that the traditional European state system was not the product of choice or even of moral inadequacy but instead was the outgrowth of factors over which none of the actors had substantial control. The political fragmentation of Europe gave rise to a system from which there was no freedom to exit: states that could not compete ceased to exist or bought protection through subordinate status to those that could. No state was ever able to achieve a permanent hegemony, free to impose its own rules on the system as a whole. Instead, all states were subordinated to essentially the same types of pressures and survived with varying degrees of success and/or peril. It is for this reason that the obvious pathologies of this system, although easy to correct in theory, proved to be untreatable. The key problem was that while any number of states had hegemonic ambitions, none had either the interest or the power to enforce a common good acceptable to all. Even if a state had been willing to subordinate its own interests to a common good (in real terms, not just in the self-serving proclamations which litter European history), by doing so it would only have succeeded in creating opportunities for others to advance their own interests at its expense. Efforts to erect a cooperative order could not overcome the ambitions of those less than content with the status quo. Codes of behavior did arise. But they were effective only in increasing official hypocrisy and never were a serious restraint on preferred courses of action. Systems based on voluntary cooperation were the weakest guarantees of peace, being immediately vulnerable to changes in calculation of interest. The American Environment Compared with its stormy past, present-day Europe would seem to be an ocean of tranquillity, notwithstanding the continuing upheavals of its recent revolutions. In fact, the democratic, prosperous, and peaceful Europe of today would be unrecognizable to observers from half-a-century ago. Their incredulity would stem less from the extensive superficial changes wrought by technological advance than from a radical alteration in the very nature of Europe. A number of complex causes for this profound transformation may be located within Europe itself, but without doubt the most important changes have been the result of developments external to Europe--external, at any rate, to the western core. The first of these was the very tangible threat posed by the Soviet Union ever since the end of World War II. Having occupied most of central and southeastern Europe and installed its client regimes, the Soviet Union exercised political control over more than two-thirds of Europe. The western fringe of the continent that remained free of Soviet occupation faced not only the possibility of military conquest but also internal subversion from large and active communist parties, especially in Italy and France. The West Europeans' sense of vulnerability was a sober reaction to the reality of Soviet military power. Having destroyed the German military on their front and occupied half of Germany, Soviet military forces were permanently positioned in the heart of Europe and were encamped facing West only a short march to the English Channel. That distance seemed shorter still when compared with the Soviet army's massive and relentless advance from Moscow to Berlin, 1943-1945. Although it has long been fashionable in certain quarters in the West to dismiss the severity or even the reality of the Soviet military threat to Western Europe, this was not the perception of the late 1940s. It is highly unlikely that a concerted Soviet effort at conquest at that time could have been stopped by the exhausted West European states themselves. Over the decades that followed, the Soviet regime devoted staggering resources to its military, constructing an enormous force in Central Europe arrayed in offensive posture toward Western Europe. Even now, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union itself, the fate of the Soviet military establishment--still by far the world's largest--remains of great concern to the rest of the world. A consequence of this threat was to focus the attention of Western Europe's policy makers on their collective vulnerability, eventually inducing them to undertake progressively closer political and military cooperation. This cooperation became increasingly formalized through such instruments as the Brussels Treaty of 1947, in which Britain, France, and the Benelux countries pledged themselves to mutual defense against external aggression, and the formation of the Western European Union among the same five countries in 1948. Although Germany was the initial focus of these efforts, attention quickly shifted to the Soviet Union. A more important result produced by the Soviet threat was the return to Europe of the United States. True to its historical pattern of hemispheric isolationism and rapid demobilization after its wars, the U.S. had almost entirely withdrawn from Europe politically and militarily after Germany's defeat. The inadequacy of Western Europe's defenses against the Soviet Union, however, eventually persuaded U.S. leaders of the necessity of assuming ever-greater responsibilities, beginning with the Truman Doctrine in 1947 in the form of assistance to Greece and Turkey, and culminating in the formation of NATO in 1949. Along with this came broad political and economic involvement as well. The U.S.'s assumption of these and other responsibilities in Europe was not the product of a carefully designed and implemented plan but instead occurred in a halting, piecemeal, almost reluctant fashion. But once established, the U.S. presence had effects that extended far beyond the formal policy objectives of defending and reviving Europe. Few areas of Western Europe were to be left untouched by this intrusion. The greatest change separating postwar Europe from its past has been its thorough democratization. The effects of this continental innovation are difficult to exaggerate, as it has transformed the relations among states. In Europe, as around the world, democratization has had a pacifying effect on leaders and citizens alike, who now contentedly contemplate the empty parade grounds where conquerors once displayed their might. The U.S. played an indispensable role in this democratization, albeit much of it being attributable to the secondary effects of American military involvement in the war. Most basically, U.S. intervention in the war had ensured Britain's survival, and with it democracy's toehold in Europe. And the liberation of France, the Netherlands, and other countries in the West allowed for democracy's reestablishment in those areas where it had existed before the war. More directly, democracy was imposed on defeated Germany and Italy, and was strongly supported in Greece and elsewhere. Protected in this base, democracy was later to spread to other areas of Western Europe and finally to the East where its revolutionary effects are still unfolding. The U.S. also contributed to democracy's triumph in more indirect ways. The democratization of Europe was by no means inevitable; at no point in Europe's history had democracy been the dominant political system nor had there been any time when it seemed likely to become so. To the contrary, democracy's modest gains in the interwar period had been rolled back with surprising ease by the dictatorships. Continuous assaults by the political left and right had effectively discredited democracy in many countries long before the Germans marched in; intellectuals and political leaders alike abandoned it in droves in favor of more orderly forms of rule. Democracy's refurbishment was a direct outgrowth of the victory by the U.S. and the other "democracies," and the power they represented. As only one example, Turkey's leaders, whose authoritarianism of the 1930s and 1940s reflected the prevailing trends in Europe at the time, consciously embarked on democratic reforms in 1950 as a consequence of this victory and a desire to enter the protective ranks of the West. In the unlikely event that Germany could have been defeated without American participation in the war, the fate of democracy in Europe would have been far different. The record of Soviet occupation demonstrates that "liberation" by the Soviet Union would have been followed by the imposition of repressive regimes eager and able to extirpate all vestiges of democracy. Liberation or occupation by Britain or France would certainly have been more benign, but it is unlikely that either country would have amended its long record of indifference in such matters. Both had always worked quite comfortably with autocracies and saw little to be gained in attempts to reform them. In occupied Germany, both of these powers were interested only in installing a compliant regime, whereas the U.S.--bent on reforming Germans as well as Japanese--insisted on imposing a democratic system. A second effect of the American presence was assembling the disparate countries of Western Europe into a coherent whole. Despite its contemporary familiarity, "Western Europe" had had no historical identity before the end of World War II. It originally was little more than a collection of those countries that had escaped Soviet occupation. Nor did any of its members feel any particular kinship with one another. Although the wartime collaboration among Britain, France, and the Benelux countries did revive in the face of the Soviet threat, this group remained quite exclusive and separate. The U.S. role was to enlarge this core group to embrace almost all of non-Soviet Europe and in so doing bring together an assemblage of countries that had hitherto had little sense of commonality or of community. Not only were the Marshall Plan and other U.S. programs applied on an all-European basis, the U.S. was the agent of the inclusion of Portugal, Greece, Italy, and Turkey as full members in organizations such as NATO, against strong resistance from its allies who wanted a more circumscribed membership. Most important, the U.S. insisted on the membership of Germany, and on terms roughly equal to those of its wartime allies, again in the face of vociferous opposition from France and others. A third effect was the establishment and entrenchment of cooperation. This proceeded along many routes, pushed by various U.S. policies. The Marshall Plan and other postwar aid programs required the European states to cooperate among themselves and provided powerful incentives for them to do so. Broader multilateral economic organizations such as the GATT and IMF extended this cooperation. From its inception, NATO rested on extensive political and military cooperation. Even minor powers were accorded equal stature and participated in the entire range of decision making, many for the first time assuming responsibilities for the Europe beyond their own borders. The creation of an integrated peacetime military command brought with it an intrusive cooperation virtually unknown in European history. Now accepted as natural, this routinization of a once unthinkable extent of cooperation was an accomplishment of the first order. Beyond mere cooperation, the U.S. also helped to promote European unity. Several European institutions were created or strongly supported by the United States. The Organization for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC), a predecessor of the EC, was established by the U.S. to administer Marshall Plan funds. The U.S. was also the principal agent in the establishment of NATO. The U.S. encouraged the creation of the European defense Community (EDC) and, after that was rejected by France in 1954, Washington promoted the concept of a "European pillar" within NATO. The EC itself has enjoyed official American support since its establishment in 1958. Most recently, President Bush sought to give added stature to the EC by regularizing high-level political contacts between Brussels and Washington, and in 1989 succeeded in giving the EC responsibility for coordinating western assistance to the East. Although the EC is often depicted as a future rival of the U.S. by supporters and opponents alike, the U.S. government has always encouraged efforts for increased political cooperation among its members. Taken together, the impact of these and other innovations was not just to change Europe but to transform it. The American presence did not merely modify the existing order in Europe but replaced it with an environment, albeit artificial, unlike anything Europe had known before. Among the many aspects of this new order of things, the most important was the guarantee of security. Not only was the Soviet threat held at bay, allowing Western Europe to concentrate on development; the European states were also protected from old and recent enemies, many now reborn as allies. Virtually all traditional dangers were put on hold. The very symbol of the new Europe--the French-German rapprochement--arose not from a recognition of the folly of past hostility or from a newly discovered affection. Instead, the U.S. presence eliminated any plausible threat of one against the other. When combined with Washington's insistence on cooperation and its provision of considerable incentives to do so, the purely selfish gains from cooperation became too great to ignore. To attribute most of the fundamental changes in Europe to the American presence is not to imply the existence of a master plan in Washington to this end. To the contrary, American leaders rarely demonstrated much understanding of the direct consequences of their policies, much less secondary or tertiary effects. But neither were these changes the result of conscious design on the part of the Europeans. Europe's leaders did not will this environment into existence; their role was primarily a reactive one of accommodating themselves to conditions beyond their ability to seriously affect. The transformed environment altered the rules, the risks, and the requirements under which they existed and within which they calculated their interests, but they continued to pursue those interests with unflagging attentiveness. Europe's postwar transformation was the product, not the cause, of the changed environment. War between the West European states had not been put aside or renounced; it had become impossible and, even more significant, unnecessary. While there certainly were European leaders of great vision, such as Churchill and Monnet and Adenauer, devoted to remaking Europe, at best it can be said of them that they were responding to opportunities that they could not themselves have brought about. One of the most important characteristics of this environment was that the European states' sovereignty was diminished even as they preserved their freedom of action. Decisions affecting vital issues such as their security were largely beyond their control. In a sense, they were guaranteed protection from the consequences of their own actions, and thus were able to pursue their narrow interests without concern for the effect on the system as a whole. De Gaulle's actions provide the best illustration of this. Constantly inveighing against American domination and demanding greater control over France's destiny, he remained largely free of any American-imposed restraints. What he could not do, and perhaps really did not wish to do, was fundamentally to alter the conditions within which France followed its own agenda. When in 1966 he finally withdrew France from NATO's integrated command and expelled the Alliance's facilities, he did so in confidence that France's security would continue to be guaranteed by the very organization he had just weakened. But for most countries, membership in the Atlantic Alliance was not a burden but rather a desirable condition. Cooperation arose not from coercion but from the fact that there was little substantively to be gained from not doing so, a reality that Paris never accepted. Given its enormous power relative to Europe and its lack of hegemonic ambition, the United States was able to perform the task of systemic actor at little cost and virtually no risk to itself. Order was not forcibly imposed, nor was Europe bent to its will. Instead, the pervasive U.S. presence created a wholly new environment that vastly altered the European state system. In effect, the U.S. acted as a benign central authority, providing defense, subsidizing economic development, and establishing consensual rules, even as it guaranteed the system that made all this possible. Unlike the Pax Romana imposed by conquest, the American environment in Europe emerged so haphazardly and became so comfortable and seemingly natural that few now realize how artificial it truly is, and how much at odds with Europe's underlying order--or lack of order. Now that this Pax Americana is coming to an end, it would be prudent to consider to what degree its predecessor has been permanently suppressed. On the surface, Western Europe continues in its patterns of the last four decades. But the revolutions in the East have had a hollowing effect on the structures of the West, with consequences that are difficult to foretell. The Emerging Order The storms of change have produced any number of proposals for reshaping Europe's institutions. The EC occupies center attention in most plans for Europe's future. The EC has gained considerable stature in the past few years, much of it simply by remaining standing when so much else has been swept away or weakened. But it also benefits from increasing popularity in the West and a rush to its gates from the East. There are few who would have predicted such a role only a few years ago. Long the preserve of colorless academics and bureaucrats, and enervated by a lack of contact with the populace, the EC languished along with the idea of European unity which accompanied it. By the mid-1980s, after nearly three decades of existence, the EC's accomplishments were truly modest--restricted largely to agricultural protectionism and disguising large-scale income transfers to interests with the right political connections. The member governments' perfunctory rhetoric in support of European unity only partially hid the reality that their primary loyalty to the EC was as a facilitator of their own separate political interests. Now, however, the EC is experiencing a tide of new support. In the West, increasing recognition of the benefits to be derived from the EC's promotion of trade liberalization has prompted its usually apathetic member governments to contemplate granting it even greater powers in the area of economic integration. And in the East, the emerging new democracies dream of membership not just to obtain the economic benefits they believe will be forthcoming but also because membership would put the seal on their rejoining of Europe and the world. Despite considerable build-up to the conference at Maastricht, its accomplishments regarding political union were decidedly less than its enthusiasts had hoped for. Economic and monetary union (EMU) was significantly advanced, and the mechanics and scope of economic integration now have been largely agreed upon, down to timetables and the divisions of bureaucratic power. But the parallel process of political integration advanced only a very little way. From its inception, the EC has always possessed a full complement of political institutions, and its founding Treaty of Rome commits its members to eventual political union. For the most part, however, these institutions have had too pale an existence to serve even a symbolic purpose. For many, the hope had been that Maastricht would produce not just another incremental enhancement of bureaucratic powers but instead would lay the foundation for the creation of a genuine European Union. But even though those opposed to greater powers for the EC were alarmed by the proceedings, the effective increase in political responsibilities was far below what many had believed would be the minimal accomplishments. No Agreement--Except to Disagree. Despite endless discussion of European unity, there is little agreement even among supporters on desirable goals. Britain is often depicted as the lone holdout to further integration, with its determined resistance to transferring power to Brussels. But London's reservations are often quietly shared by other states, even those that generally are found among the most vocally pro-Europe. The discomforts of surrendering power are a major reason why political integration has fared so poorly, even among governments that support the concept in principle. But an equally important reason is that there exists little agreement on basic issues. Even those governments that support greater integration tend to concur only on generalities. At Maastricht, much was agreed simply for the sake of agreement, and pressures for effective measures were shunted off into general proclamations. The disagreement is not just conceptual, but political. For all their public concern for Europe's interests, most governments--unsurprisingly--are more attentive to their own, and their motivation to advance Europe's interests dramatically increases when those coincide with their own. Understandably, the national governments fashion their European policies based not on an abstract notion of what would be best for Europe but rather on what would be best for them. The outstanding issues include the most basic definitions. Is Europe to be a federation, a confederation, a Commonwealth of Independent States, a free-trade zone, or, in Charles DeGaulle's phrase (a vision since reaffirmed by Margaret Thatcher), a "Europe of the Fatherlands"? And what do each of these mean in terms of the sovereignty of the states of Europe and the transfer of political power to the center? From these questions alone, endless dissension emerges. Among the most important unresolved issues is that of defense. To some extent, defense is included in foreign policy where reluctantly, and with decidedly meager results, the EC countries have established regular channels of consultation. The agreements in Maastricht pledged greater cooperation on defense as well, but to "the eventual framing of a common defense policy, which might in time lead to a common defense." This passing mention, however, is not a reflection of the issue's unimportance. To the contrary, silence only underlines its crucial significance and the fact that substantive agreement on any aspect of it was not yet possible. Defense is so important because of its correlation to sovereignty and political power. To decide who and what controls the military, both operationally and in terms of policy, is also to decide the distribution of political power and the shape of Europe's institutions. The Return of the Past Even as this debate has gone on, the postwar order is passing. So long and so stably has this environment lasted in Western Europe that it is difficult to imagine any other. The demise of the dictatorships of the East and the immediate erection of western models in their place have only added to the appearance of solidity. A Europe returned to the warring past of strutting conquerors is not just an improbable image but a ludicrous one. Yet the end of the Soviet threat has undermined the structures of Western Europe's postwar environment, just as it had originally brought them into being. Because U.S. protection is no longer needed against a threat which no longer exists, American influence can only diminish rapidly, and indeed it has already done so. Taken together, these two developments mean the recovery of sovereignty by the European states. The Revival of Sovereignty. The return of untrammeled sovereignty may be a source of celebration for many, but its effects on the system inherited from the postwar world are likely to be deleterious. The revival of sovereignty by the European states may be impossible to stop; few who exercise power would argue in favor of limiting that of their own countries. They do, however, recognize its dangers in others and would very much like to reduce that of their once and possibly future enemies. This was evidenced by the worried reaction among many European leaders to the reunification of Germany. The panicked conferences and openly-expressed fears were evoked not by German plans to resume a career of military conquest but rather from the simple prospect of Germany's acquiring a degree of sovereignty equivalent to that which Britain and France had heretofore reserved for themselves. This is a troubling sign, for as sovereignty returns, elements and attitudes of the old system inevitably will return with it. And policy makers will feel compelled to respond to the new pressures, even if reluctantly and only for purposes of insurance. But other motives, more ambitious and fearful, likely will be present as well. The Revival of Alliances. Already there has been a revival of informal alliances along old patterns. France's courting of the newly freed states in Eastern Europe and its long flirtation with the Soviet Union have at their core both the extension of French influence and the promotion of an alliance of common interests vis-a-vis Germany. Paris has been frustrated in this effort by the collapse of the Soviet regime and by the East Europeans' need for German economic and political support, but there is no evidence that French officials have discontinued their own efforts at gaining leverage over Germany. Yugoslavia provides an example of the renewed jockeying. The crisis there was supposed to have been a demonstration of the power of the EC's collective foreign policy; instead, it has more clearly demonstrated the strains in the relations among its members, especially France and Germany. In the aftermath of reunification, Germany has been flexing its diplomatic muscle, departing from its EC partners to support independence by the breakaway Yugoslav republics of Croatia and Slovenia, thereby forcing the EC reluctantly to do the same. French officials in turn have openly characterized Germany's policy in Yugoslavia as part of a conscious effort to establish a "Fourth Reich" in Central Europe. Unbending French support for a unified Yugoslavia may have less to do with concern for that country's integrity than with remembrance of its role in the French- inspired, anti-German "Little Entente" of the prewar period. The impact of the revival of these old patterns on the postwar system is difficult to predict and easy to exaggerate. Despite the outbreak of hostilities in peripheral and volatile areas, there is no real danger of general war. This peacefulness stems less from the supposed lessons of the futility of conflict than from the fact that virtually all of the continent is democratic. For this reason alone, war has become almost unthinkable, limited to areas such as vantage by fomenting conflict. But the absence of major conflict does not translate into permanent peace. To view Europe's present-day stability as a permanent feature, rather than as the fragile product of a unique and passing order, is to profoundly misunderstand the political dynamics of its underlying political structure. Any vision of Europe which assumes that the stability and cooperation of the postwar period is guaranteed to continue through inertia alone almost certainly is flawed. The legacy and active memory of the past half-century of cooperation is a precious resource--and one, once lost, that will not be easily recovered. The Defense Debate The gradual return of the old order has occurred largely unnoticed in the debates over Europe's future, especially those in the area of defense. Substantive debate regarding European defense is a new phenomenon. Despite decades of attention and libraries of books and monographs, Europe's geopolitical realities confined serious discussions of defense matters within very narrow parameters. Most responsible officials accepted that the West European countries could not themselves sufficiently counter the Soviet threat, that U.S. participation was essential for their defense, and that NATO was the only effective means of securing it. Such disagreement as existed--over burden-sharing, nuclear strategy, etc.--was at most of secondary importance. What debate there was tended to focus on incremental innovations. All this has changed. This is true not only with respect to identifying and ranking new dangers--the potential revival of a military threat from Moscow, the dangers of nuclear weapons in unstable areas, the prospects for continuing instability in countries such as Yugoslavia, etc.--but also the mechanisms to deal with them. There are any number of proposals to reinvent or junk NATO, rebuild existing European organizations, or create entirely new ones. The core of the debate, of necessity, centers on NATO and its future. Some countries, such as Britain and the Netherlands, remain strongly committed to the organization. Others, such as Germany and Italy, continue to support NATO while at the same time recognizing that it is in transition--but to what there is no agreement. French officials continue their guerrilla war against NATO, hoping to replace it with a Europeans-only organization. A number of new organizations have been proposed for Europe, along with new functions for old institutions. None has yet garnered a critical mass of support. The Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), a holdover from the days of detente, remains a perennial favorite for many. CSCE's major advantage is that it embraces all of the states of Europe, including the newly sovereign former Soviet republics (plus the transatlantic powers). But whatever its merits as a forum for formal discussions, its requirement of unanimity is alone sufficient to disqualify it from any effective role as keeper of the peace, dependent as it must be on the cooperation of all its members. If cooperation already exists, there is no need for CSCE; if it does not, CSCE can play no substantive role. The Western European Union (WEU) is more promising, if only because it actually is involved in military matters. Created in 1948 to coordinate defense cooperation among Britain, France, and the Benelux countries, the WEU fell into limbo after NATO was established the following year. The WEU was revived in 1984 on a French initiative in order to provide a forum outside of NATO for discussion of defense issues. From the time of its revival, the WEU's members have differed over its purpose. France has regarded it as a potential replacement for NATO, its major attraction being the absence of the United States. In contrast, the WEU's other members have seen it as a vehicle for reincorporating France into deliberations about West European security and easing Paris back into cooperation with NATO. These different visions of the WEU were evident in the wrangling before Maastricht regarding proposals for linking it to other organizations. France was pushing for a formal connection of the WEU to the EC, while others wanted it tied to NATO. At issue was whether the WEU was to be an adjunct to NATO or a vehicle for its replacement, as the French clearly intended. The resulting compromise of linking it to both satisfied no one but also seriously offended no one. However, it did little to advance European security. The WEU continues to have its supporters. It was given substantive responsibility for the first time in a minor coordinating role in the Persian Gulf war last year, and more recently, another such role regarding a new NATO force earmarked for use in areas outside of NATO's traditional theater of responsibility. But the WEU remains a paper organization, without its own dedicated forces and with no real military mission in Europe. The WEU's attractiveness to member countries begins and ends with its utility in advancing their quite separate foreign policy goals and as such it is not especially useful in addressing Europe's security requirements. France is responsible for yet another innovation in the area of security. In addition to pressing for the WEU to become an arm of the EC, France was able to prevail on Germany to expand an existing joint French-German brigade into a combined French- German corps, envisioned as the nucleus of a European army. French officials once again were motivated by the effort to develop an alternative to NATO in which Paris would have a leading role. German acquiescence derived not from the corps' ostensible military utility but rather from its use as one of a number of political trade-offs for French acceptance of stringent German conditions for the EC's new economic institutions. German foreign policy has always labored to keep Paris generally satisfied and thereby avoid unnecessary friction. French-German cooperation on security matters blunts Paris' ability to focus on some hypothetical threat from Germany. German officials also were reassured by the knowledge that they could pull the plug on this corps at any time. It is possible that this force could grow with the participation of other countries. But it is hampered by its entirely political agenda, by French hostility to NATO, by its separate existence from the WEU, and by its lack of any real mission. Conclusion Ultimately, the decisions taken on defense will determine the shape and content of Europe's new political structures as well, because defense goes to the very heart of sovereignty and political power. But the European countries remain unprepared to make binding commitments in this area. The agreements produced at the EC summit at Maastricht represented great progress in the area of economic integration, but postponement of real decisions in that of political sovereignty. But drift is itself a form of choice and of policy--and a dangerous one. Even as the new Europe is being designed, it is in danger of being overtaken by events. In the absence of any imminent threat, there may seem to be no need for haste. With Europe only recently liberated by the collapse of its last organized enemy, taking stock of change and calmly reflecting on a future course may seem to be entirely appropriate. But Europe's current summer could prove fleeting. Delay brings with it the prospect that Europe's present malleability will quickly harden; many things that now are possible may soon become impossible. Europe is at a turning point in its history, with a unique opporutnity to remake itself and to design a future that will protect it from a return of its tragic past. In the words of French President Mitterrand, failure to remake Europe would lead to "a new and dangerous epoch of disorder, the end of grand hopes, and the rebirth of competing alliances between nations." To assume an indefinite continuation of Europe's current stability is to ignore a millennium of European history. Those who have known nothing other than the seemingly effortless stability of postwar Europe may be unaware that their world is more fragile and far less deeply anchored than they may wish to contemplate. But Europe has experienced two world wars in this century, plus a long cold one. That alone should be sobering evidence of the folly of leaving Europe's security to fate. </body> </article> </text>