Alphen,
Netherlands. 15 November. There is an
old Brussels joke about European heaven and hell. Heaven is a place where the cooks are French,
the lovers Italian, the police British and it is all organised by the
Germans. Hell is a place where the cooks
are British, the lovers are German, the police are French and it is all
organised by the Italians. This week at
a Brussels event organised by the Egmont Institute visions of transatlantic heaven
and hell competed.
The subject
of the discussion was the US ‘pivot’ to Asia and by implication away from
Europe. The trouble with this kind of event
is that too often we get the wrong type of senior Americans. Now, the Americans in question are good friends
of mine for whom I have great respect. However,
they are simply far too damned reasonable to
Europeans.
I knew the
day was going to be rough when my American friends described EU foreign and
security efforts as a “glass half full” and “work in progress”. Sometimes I think I could be Dutch EU Ambassador
Rip van Winkle who dozes off for a century only to awake in 2113 to nice, senior
Americans telling the Brussels elite that European ‘external engagement’ is a
“glass half full” and “work in progress”.
How long is it going to take to fill this bloody glass?
What
Europeans need to see is more of those nasty, growling, utterly unreasonable
Americans that I meet in DC and who permit me to growl back. I do a good growl. They are the Americans who think we Europeans
are a complete waste of strategic space and that even if late they won all and
every war that was ever worth fighting even if they were not actually in
it.
A bit like “Pearl Harbor”, that awful and badly spelt film a few years back in which some farm boy from Ohio looking awfully like Ben Affleck single-handedly won the Battle of Britain from an airfield in front of a stately home complete with its own thatched pub called “Ye Olde Bullshit”. It was utterly wrong – the Poles did that.
A bit like “Pearl Harbor”, that awful and badly spelt film a few years back in which some farm boy from Ohio looking awfully like Ben Affleck single-handedly won the Battle of Britain from an airfield in front of a stately home complete with its own thatched pub called “Ye Olde Bullshit”. It was utterly wrong – the Poles did that.
Sadly, these
house-trained Americans allow EU officials to bang on endlessly about Europe’s ‘successful’
approach to soft security and talk ‘strategic’, Europe’s most over-used and utterly
meaningless word (except that is for ‘solidarity’). Take the European External Action Service (the
EU’s foreign and security policy executive and not an office cleaning company). It is still designed more to manage crises in
Brussels over which member-state is represented where and by whom than to actually
manage real crises. Add never-ending
attempts by the European Commission, European Parliament and other assorted super-statists
to encroach and the result is a Europe that punches below not above its weight.
To paraphrase
a certain American president, “It is about power, stupid”. Europe must generate real power – soft and
hard - if Europeans (however organised) are to generate that most precious of
‘strategic’ (that word again) commodities; influence. That will mean a Europe prepared to compete
and properly engage in the real world rather than talking endlessly about almost
empty glasses in the Brussels virtual world.
Sadly, the
Americans are their own worst enemies because they are still not at all clear about
what Europe they want; strong, weak or simply irrelevant. Washington seems to veer between the ‘Europe
is a waste of space’ school of thought, the ‘USE is a putative USA’ school of thought
and the current fashion for a ‘German empire is a good thing’ school of thought’. The latter view is killing Britain, leavened by a
healthy dose of strategic incompetence from Britain’s useless leaders. Indeed, as far as the Americans are concerned
the British now rank somewhere between Luxembourg which has money and Iceland which
has volcanoes. Britain has neither.
The trouble
is that the American world view and the German world view are just about as far
apart as two democracies can be and still call themselves allies. Trade apart whilst Americans and the rest of
the world play global poker the Germans (and ‘friends’) want to play a quiet game
of strategic chess…with themselves and forever.
By encouraging Germany to lead the US is contributing to European pacifism.
So, transatlantic
heaven and hell. Transatlantic heaven would
be a place where Americans and Europeans together look at the world in a
largely similar fashion, invest in largely similar diplomatic efforts with roughly
but by no means completely similar armed forces prepared to share the same
risks in crises confident in the strength of their mutual support.
Transatlantic
hell would a place where Americans take a very hard-nosed politically realist
world view whilst Europeans retreat onto an isolationist/pacifist ‘moral’
upland in which process rather than strategy reigns supreme occasionally launching
hysterical tirades accusing the Americans (and British) of dastardly doings
whilst demanding self-same Americans (and British) defend them.
Ho hum…
Julian
Lindley-French
