Stardate 20040123.1350

(On Screen): The International Herald Tribune posted a pair of articles analyzing American attitudes toward Europe and European attitudes toward the US, and they are refreshingly frank and even more refreshingly not consumed with attempts to blame the US for it all. In fact, the point of the two articles is to analyze anti-Americanism in Europe.

From the American side, the key point is that in American eyes, Europe is becoming less and less important, relatively speaking.

The idea that something awful, fateful, has happened to the community of Western nations gets next to no attention here, if only because the complaint comes essentially from a fragmented Europe. In this view, Europe, officially designated by the Bush administration as "whole, peaceful and free," has devolved into an area of marginal strategic interest for the United States.

It's also commercially less important than it used to be. Though there continues to be a very large trading relationship between the US and Europe, it is a declining percentage of American trade especially as the Pacific Rim has increased in prosperity and importance.

And the ongoing failure of Europe to be competitive with the US in science and engineering doesn't help.

The American people don't value European opinion very highly:

Francis Fukuyama, the Johns Hopkins historian and author of the famous essay "The End of History," explains: "Generally, the American people just don't care, whatever the ritualistic mention of America's alienation from the rest of the world. I even doubt this gets much traction even with the base of the Democratic Party."

One of the reasons that European opposition to war was not persuasive was because it was widely viewed here as demonstrating a loss of nerve by them.

In reality, the great change on the U.S. side of European-American relations since the September 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington may be in the ready acceptance here of the neoconservative Robert Kagan's characterization of two similar cultures with markedly different views on the use of power and military force.

Many Europeans would want to caricature Kagan's views as simplistic, even though he clearly refuses to qualify Europe as a crabby has-been. All the same, the Kagan vision is largely mainstream in Washington's widest view of the world. Europe-as-ogre or rising danger to American pre-eminence - or, conversely, Europe-as-potential-returnee to an Atlanticist Garden of Eden - are convictions that appear, on the basis of a series of interviews here, to get much less palpable support.

And when it comes to the transatlantic relationship, Europe needs America more than America needs Europe.

What Europeans resist understanding, perhaps because they've been treated with disdain, [Ivo Daalder] said, is that "the United States has the choice not to cooperate."

"Atlanticists say everything will be fine. No, in the end it may be that things are not fine. Europe has to actively work this issue. That involves offering things the U.S. wants."

From the European side, what the second article makes clear is that a lot of European expression of anti-Americanism is actually motivated by an increasing recognition of European decline.

But there is something close to startling when Hubert Vedrine, the former French Socialist foreign minister, who in 1998 called the United States under President Bill Clinton a unilateralist hyperpower that needed restraint by a multilateral network of nations, also suggests these days that a serious element of Europe's so-called alienation from America is really a Europe-on- Europe question. ... In one of a series of interviews for this article, Vedrine spoke of France's lack of ease with the United States. "There's jealousy," he said. "The United States became what France wanted to be, the universal country. When I criticize the French, I recognize the neurosis here."

And it also indicates an increasing confusion over Europe's place in the world.

Egon Bahr, the German geopolitical gadfly who was the architect of Ostpolitik under Willy Brandt, insists these days that Europe's chasing after the United States in an attempt to appear respectable militarily is a pathetic and futile waste of time that actually perpetuates trans-Atlantic tensions and Europe's inferiority complex in relation to the Americans.

He called for a redefinition of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization: let America serve as the armed torque in what he called "forcing" peace, and Europe as the mutually recognized central element in "the maintenance of peace."

"That would be a partnership," Bahr said in an article. "It takes in a European independence that is not defined as opposed to but alongside America."

Europe would be the diplomats, America would be the soldiers. Europe would make all the decisions, America would enforce them. It's a wonderful dream, I suppose, and it does at least identify a job Europe could do. And it would clearly make Europe a major player in the world.

Absent from Bahr's dream is any consideration of why America would want to have anything to do with this. Given palpable demonstrations of how European and American interests and policies are diverging, would the Americans really be willing to let Europe wave the diplomatic baton? And given a longstanding pattern of American diplomatic success compared to European diplomatic failure, why exactly would the Americans even feel they needed any European help in this way?

In fact, this is another repackaging of the old demands that America not do anything unless it gets approval from its "allies".

Bahr at least accepts that Europe is militarily weak and likely will stay that way, but he hasn't yet acknowledged that Europe may never return to center stage.

Much of the politics in Europe now is driven by nostalgia for past greatness and influence and a feeling that somehow Europe is entitled to be the center of the world. And they are seizing on increasingly bizarre plans to regain that status.

At their theoretical extreme, to counteract America's course there is a call for a literal union of France and Germany. This alliance, a French advocate wrote, "ipso facto, would be the second power in the world. Economic power, nuclear power, armed with a Security Council seat, it would be an incontrovertible force even for the United States."

There was a period in the US a couple of decades back when there was a hell of a lot of activity involving mergers and corporate acquisitions, and the buzzword at the time was "synergy", which more or less meant "2+2=5", at least in business terms. The idea was that two smaller companies who were both failing could merge into a big company which somehow or other would suddenly become successful.

It's not impossible, and such things have happened, but more often than not what you get instead is a bigger company which is still a failure, or which had to become small again in order to succeed.

If there were a true union of France and Germany, it would have a larger economy, but there's no reason to believe it would be any more healthy than those of France and Germany now. On the contrary, I think it would get worse. Tax money would flow out of Germany into France, debilitating economic activity in Germany even more and decreasing any incentive for reform in France.

And it is not at all obvious why America would be any more interested in its opinion than we are now, unless they seriously expected to threat us with a nuclear strike to get our attention.

European resentment is especially being fueled by seeing America do what Europe cannot, and seeing America be what Europe thinks Europe should be. Again and again, even in diplomacy, Europe fails at something and then America comes in and takes care of it. Again and again, other nations in the world looking for outside diplomatic mediation turn to the Americans, not to Europeans. Even Europeans have looked to America for mediation.

Bernard Kouchner, the French Socialist who polls show remains the most popular opposition figure in his country in spite of his criticism of the government's position on Iraq, said of the French, "We've turned Bush into the great enemy as if that could cement together a scared and hesitant country."

"Yes, the French are anti-American, and something new, anti-Semitic and racist," Kouchner told a French reporter. "Something's gone wrong in France's head." Denis MacShane, Britain's minister for Europe, said at the end of the 1990's, "We awakened with an enfeebled Europe in every sphere. Maybe not socially or culturally, but our general attractiveness was zilch. We had also lived through the humiliation of Bosnia and Kosovo."

European-American alienation in terms of this reality, he said, "is all about Europe's sense of growing inferiority."

A lot of this is an indirect result of American economic power, and of the way that the US has outpaced Europe in economic terms.

So in 2000, at a meeting in Lisbon, the Europeans set the goal of changing Europe into the most competitive economic power in the world. It was an example of a plan which included "and then a miracle occurs" as a step, or what Megan McCardle refers to as "the miracle mile".

In my previous life as a technology consultant, I was often handed plans in which the critical step seemed to entail the use of expensive equipment that the client didn't have, and had no intention of installing. It was not unheard of, in fact, for plans to require equipment that hadn't actually been invented. The first time it happened, I naively went to my project manager to inquire about it.

"What happens here?" I asked him, pointing to the space between the two steps that I couldn't quite figure out how to bridge.

His eyes crinkled with a sort of world-weary sympathy as he nodded towards that pregnant space. "That," he intoned solemnly, "is where the magic happens."

In Europe, the magic was going to be the way that all the nations would encourage business growth, reduce bureaucratic strangulation, lower taxes to increase business incentives, change labor laws more to the benefit of business, and all without actually dismantling the welfare state.

Four years on, the European Commission finds that much of the reform didn't take place. The EU Observer notes the ways in which Europe has fallen short:

The report outlines the main problems facing the EU in its effort to catch up with the US, saying "in certain domains there are significant problems which hold back the entire strategy and which hinder the return of strong growth".

The main areas where the EU lags behind the US are jobs, productivity and investment.

"Jobs, productivity and investment" pretty well covers it economically, don't you think? Of course, there's also the brain drain, and since the Europeans had pinned their hopes of this economic miracle on high-tech, they have come to realize that they can't ignore it any longer. Derek Lowe writes about how the Germans have suddenly noticed that most of the world's pharmaceutical research is done in the US, that most of Europe's best researchers in that field go to the US to work, and that even Europe's pharmaceutical companies do most of their research here. The grand plan is to lure them back by making Germany a more appealing place for that kind of thing.

Of course, it may be rather difficult to do that. And the broader plan to deal with the brain drain also looks as if it will come up short. (Worse, they're fighting against basic tendencies of competitive systems to magnify inequality.)

The headline on the second IHT article is Criticism of the US obscures growing disunity on the Continent. Much other press coverage, especially in the wake of the collapse of the EU constitutional process, has discussed a growing disunity.

I don't think disunity is growing; I think rather that the pretense of unity is evaporating. That disunity was always there, but everyone tried to pretend otherwise.

There's an odd phrase you see sometimes associated with diplomatic proposals: confidence-building measures. It means that you creep up on big agreements and big cooperations by starting small. The hope is that cooperation on small things initially will help the opposing sides come to like and trust the other side better, and that the process will gain momentum, and that as each side invests more in it that they will value it more and thus be willing to make greater concessions down the road in order to keep it going.

This is actually a staple of big international diplomacy. I read one time that during the negotiation of various nuclear arms reduction treaties, the process begins with each side making a proposal which includes a list of (minor) concessions they're willing to make and of (major) concessions they want from the other side, and each will always include one or two demands that they are certain the other side would never grant.

They don't really want them; it's a way of making sure they can kill the process at any time if they feel they need to. Negotiations will concentrate on other areas where compromise is possible, and if an overall agreement is reached except for those deliberately-unacceptable demands, then each side will drop them and a treaty will be signed. But if one side is unhappy with how things are turning out on lesser points, they can publicly use their big blocking demands as a justification for not signing the treaty.

On the other hand, there have been too many places where "confidence building" has been a notable failure. And in some cases it permits some participants to take advantage of others.

Why does anyone actually want to unify Europe in the first place? Certainly there's good reason to try to make Europe a single trading bloc, but why mess around with political unification?

The reasoning for why this is a good thing varies depending on who you ask, and on how frank they're being. And participants from different nations have had fairly significant differences of opinions about the point of it all.

But there is a particular group of people who have been especially active in the entire process who have a definite agenda, which I wrote about a year ago:

Europe has little influence in the world, and is as a practical matter largely unable to challenge the US. Its leftist ruling elite are fearful of our power and extremely fearful of the European masses. They resent American protection and generosity, and are chagrined at our blasphemous capitalist success and the way we've forced Europe to also be capitalist while resisting their attempts to force us to implement socialist and leftist and internationalist reforms. The European Union is seen as the solution to all of these problems.

By combining all the nations of Europe into a single political entity with strong central control, it is hoped that sufficient mass and strength can be combined to create something big enough to challenge America. With 280 million people who are truly united politically and culturally and economically, the US is formidable, and no nation in Europe now, acting alone, has even a quarter of our population or wealth or influence. The combined European Union will have a larger population and a GDP approaching that of the US, and it is hoped that this will give it the weight to be able to dictate to Washington the way Washington is viewed as having dictated to the divided and quarreling nations of Europe.

And by implementing a system which insulates decision makers from the voters as much as possible, Europe's ruling elite will be able to roll back the post-WWII European experiment with democracy.

There are many in Europe who don't agree with this, but also many who do. Both are present in many nations, but it is particularly the French who have been pushing this view of a united Europe, which held show elections but was not fundamentally democratic, which had a unified foreign policy, and which united to oppose the US and to represent a "counterweight" in the world. And the French ruling elite really don't like the way that America actually listens to its plebes, as the IHT article points out:

"What they basically don't like is that it's more democratic here than in Europe," Fukuyama said. "If you look at both sides' public opinion polling on the death penalty and gay marriage, there just isn't that much difference. But in Europe, it's the elites that set social standards that don't necessarily reflect mass opinion. People are more deferential to the elites in Europe. What people in Europe have no patience with is that America is a democracy that doesn't reflect its elites' desires. It will come back to bite them."

Part of their process of slipping this all through has been to take advantage of "confidence building". Everyone in Europe pretended that they were unified and agreed with one another, as they worked through smaller issues. They maintained a public pretense of agreement even though strong divisions and deep disagreements continued to exist. When some raised objections, they would be told that the bigger issues would be settled later, and "you don't want to be the first to start dissenting and to make the process fail, do you? Just go along with it; we'll deal with your objections later."

Only somehow "later" never came. Meanwhile, some of those who had been successful in this con-job became a bit intoxicated by it. In part, they may have started believing their own press clippings, and in part they may have begun to be contemptuous of those who were being conned.

And in part, history caught up with them. The US was attacked, and mobilized for war, and suddenly, from their point of view, a "counterweight" was needed before it was actually ready. French President Chirac "self-appointed" himself the voice of European foreign policy, and made opposition to the US the foundation of that foreign policy. Other nations who disagreed were shushed by the ongoing play-acting at unity.

But finally they'd had enough, and in January of 2003 the so-called "Gang of 8" (the leaders of Britain, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Denmark, Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic) signed a letter published in the Wall Street Journal disagreeing with Chirac and repudiating his position and his claim to have been speaking on behalf of all of Europe. Shortly thereafter, the "Vilnius Group" of eastern European nations publicly supported the Gang of 8 and also repudiated Chirac. Which led to Chirac's now-famous gaffe that "they missed a good occasion to keep silent".

The French and Germans (and Belgians) have been increasingly isolated in Europe as it became more and more clear that they had intended to dominate the EU and had viewed it as a way to convince the rest of the nations to peacefully submit themselves to Franco-German rule. They have also betrayed themselves and shown a clear double-standard, by ignoring rules about budget deficits (which they themselves had insisted on, and which other nations previously had been forced to comply with). And in response, some in those nations started talking about two tracks, about creation of a Franco-German union and about a kind of "core" EU which other nations would join later. They also decided to create an EU military command including only themselves.

Since the break over foreign policy, there has been less and less willingness in Europe to keep silent about major disagreements just for the sake of pretending to unity which never really existed. Other nations there finally realized that the French had been using their unwillingness to disagree publicly against them. And when, finally, an attempt was made to ram through a constitution which was profoundly flawed, it was rejected.

It is interesting that what many news reports are claiming as the proximate cause of failure to agree on the EU constitution was also one of the major stumbling blocks facing the American Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787: the problem of big states and small states, where the majority of the population is concentrated in a small number of states.

If there is a legislative body, how should seats in that body be allocated? If they're purely allocated by population, then low-population states would be at the mercy of the high-population ones. But if seats are allocated equally among states, then the majority of the population in the small number of high-population states would be at the mercy of the smaller states.

That nearly wrecked the process in 1787, and they solved it by doing both and creating two legislative bodies. The House of Representatives allocates seats evenly by population, but each state gets two Senators no matter what size they are. Legislation has to pass both chambers to be approved, and that means that neither has the upper hand, since large states dominate the House and small states dominate the Senate.

It's been very interesting to compare and contrast the American constitutional process and the European one. The American proposal fit on four pieces of paper; the European one runs to hundreds of pages. The American proposal concentrated almost exclusively on the structure and powers of the proposed government, but the EU constitution is much different.

In my opinion, the single deepest flaw in the proposed EU constitution is that it attempts to prescribe not just the structure of the resulting government, but also what its policies must be on a wide variety of subjects. Many questions which the Americans assumed would be dealt with by the Legislative and Executive branches of the United States are hard-wired in the now-failed EU constitution, and thus placed beyond the reach of Europe's citizens or their elected representatives.

Article III of the proposed EU constitution terminates all future political discussion on a wide variety of subjects by prescribing the answers ahead of time. For instance, Section 4 freezes farm policy. (Compliance with III-123 pretty much mandates farm subsidies.)

Section 5 hardwires European environmental policy. Section 9 forces the EU to have a space program. Section 10 enshrines "renewable" energy and makes environmentalism the focus of European energy policy.

Article III goes on and on; it talks about public health policy, industrial policy, education policy, and foreign policy.

Title V of Article III mandates the following EU foreign policy goals:

2. The Union shall define and pursue common policies and actions, and shall work for a high degree of cooperation in all fields of international relations, in order to:

(a) safeguard the common values, fundamental interests, security, independence and integrity of the Union;

(b) consolidate and support democracy, the rule of law, human rights and international law;

(c) preserve peace, prevent conflicts and strengthen international security, in conformity with the principles of the United Nations Charter;

(d) foster the sustainable economic, social and environmental development of developing countries, with the primary aim of eradicating poverty;

(e) encourage the integration of all countries into the world economy, including through the progressive abolition of restrictions on international trade;

(f) help develop international measures to preserve and improve the quality of the environment and the sustainable management of global natural resources, in order to ensure sustainable development;

(g) assist populations, countries and regions confronting natural or man-made disasters;

(h) promote an international system based on stronger multilateral cooperation and good global governance.

If you thought the demands for "multilateralism" were emphatic last year, just wait until it becomes an obligatory part of EU foreign policy. And let's not even talk about the implications of the word "sustainable", OK?

Fully 115 pages of Article III prescribe EU policy on almost every subject you can imagine. It's hard to see just what kind of political policy debate might take place in the EU had it been ratified; little is left to chance or to voter preference.

Which, from the point of view of those behind this mess, are the same thing. The voters are idiots and can't be trusted with important policy decisions, because there's no telling what they'll decide. So the constitution would establish elections and a parliament, but put all of the most important political questions beyond their reach.

Starting last fall, I began to feel better about this whole thing as it became increasingly clear that it had no chance of approval. That's because Europe was never unified. The differences among the nations of Europe are too great; their experiences as nations, and their cultures, and their politics, are all too divergent. Even if they figure out a way to solve the big-nation/small-nation dispute, they'll still have to face a myriad of other issues.

And the EU constitution contains the seeds of its own destruction in another way. The US Constitution stated that it would go into force if it was ratified by nine of the thirteen states. But the EU Constitution requires every single member to ratify it, and now it appears that it won't even be sent to the states until after enlargement. Does anyone actually believe that every one of the member states will approve it?

Not a chance, especially if it's submitted to public referendum. And as time has gone on and some of the early experiments at unification have been less-than-successful, more and more are wondering if there's really a good reason to go forward. Just why is unification even worthwhile?

And now it's emerging that the process by which the constitution itself was written were not quite as "multilateral" as it was pretended to be.

One of those "furious" people was Gisela Stuart, member of the Presidium and author of a 60-page pamphlet on the wheeler-dealing behind the Constitution.

Much more passionate than Mr Norman's account, this polemic by the German-born British Labour MP - published by Fabian - gives an interesting slant on the talks.

Ms Stuart argues that a self-selected European political elite drew up the Constitution.

"Not once in the 16 months I spent on the Convention did representatives question whether deeper integration is what the people of Europe want", she writes.

Ms Stuart also credits Mr Kerr with having huge sway over what went into the Constitution.

"The process in the Convention was itself riddled with imperfections and moulded by a largely unaccountable political elite, set on a particular outcome from the very start", she argues.

"Just precisely who drafted the skeleton, and when, is still unclear to me, but I gather much of the work was done by Válery Giscard d’Estaing and Sir Kerr over the summer".

Stories of fraud, contention about the budget, and French "Trust me!" rhetoric aren't helping matters.

I don't see this failure as being bad. In the long run, I think Europe will be better off disunited. Lowering trade barriers amongst the nations there is unquestionably a good idea, but I see no benefit in political unification.

As to the notorious "growing transatlantic rift", it is again more a case of the rift being exposed than of it being widened, not to mention the fact that it demonstrates yet another way in which Europe is not truly united. Some nations in Europe have extremely wide rifts with the US; some have little or no rift at all.

The entire concept of a "European foreign policy" is a fiction created by some there which they attempted to foist on the others; there is no such thing. Each nation has its own. And there is no single "tran