Lacking muscle, Europe tries to avoid all conflict

By JONATHAN V. LAST
PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER
One of Munich's most interesting buildings is the Hochschule fur Musik und Theater -- the college of music. Founded in 1846, the school was originally housed elsewhere, but in the late 1940s it moved to its current home on Arcisstrasse. Its new building was once the Fuhrerbau -- home of Adolf Hitler's Nazi party.
The building has been, on purpose, left mostly unchanged. The grand stairways where high-ranking Nazis held lavish parties are still there. Cells once used for the torture of dissidents are still in the basement. Go through a set of doors off the north entryway, and you'll find, sitting in the hallway, Hitler's personal table. On Sept. 29, 1938, he, Mussolini and Chamberlain signed the Munich Pact on it, dooming Europe to a Second World War.
Today, it is just another piece of old furniture. You can touch it, sit on it, leave an empty soda bottle on it. It is an emblem of how Germany deals with its ever-present past.
Historical ghost
When you meet with German politicians and officials, it's clear the old Germany is, at least for now, nothing but a historical ghost. The martial spirit that dominated Europe for 1,200 years has disappeared. Germany's past is part of the reason for this change, but equally important is its present strategic reality. Germany has taken on the aspect of new Europe -- namely, the urge to retreat into a world of soft power.
Asked about the potential of Russia's young democracy devolving into a regional threat, for instance, Bernd Pfaffenbach, secretary of state at the Federal Ministry for Economics and Technology, told me that, "from the German and European view, there can be only one way" of dealing with Russia, and that is "through incentives." Member of Parliament Stephan Mayer claimed that, with regard to Iran, "the cooperation between Britain, France, Germany and the United States ... is a model for success."
These views are characteristically European, emphasizing process over results. To Europe, the primary mission is not persuading Russia to change, but avoiding conflict by relying on carrots instead of sticks -- questionable, considering the lessons of history.
Of course, it is impossible to judge the efficacy of the current stance toward Iran. Whether multilateralism succeeds or fails will be determined by outcomes. But in the European mind, success lies not in defanging the Iranian regime, but achieving consensus about the desire to do so. Again, process, not results.
As Steven Everts of the Centre for European Reform wrote in 2001: "When Europeans debate foreign policy, they tend to focus on 'challenges,' whereas Americans look at 'threats.' European concerns are challenges such as ethnic conflict, migration, organized crime, poverty and environmental degradation." Talking to European elites, you sense they view global warming as a more pressing problem than Islamist terrorism.
This fundamentally unserious European worldview is born of a basic fact: For the first time in more than 500 years, not a single European country has the ability to project military force significant enough to be decisive in a major conflict. They have abandoned the realm of Machtpolitik.
Robert Kagan makes this point in his exceptional book "Of Paradise and Power." The reason Europeans have such a dim view of the exercise of power these days is that they no longer possess the capacity to exercise it themselves.
Modest defense budgets
At the end of the Cold War, Western European countries eviscerated their already modest defense budgets. As a result, when the Bosnian crisis erupted, Europeans discovered they could not intervene even in their own region without the help of the United States. Instead of showing the potential of a united Europe, the conflict, Christoph Bertram and Francois Heisbourg wrote, only "highlighted the impotence of Europe's armed forces." After Kosovo, there was a push for a modest (that word again) European security force Today, even that aspiration has been abandoned.
Every worldview has its blind spots. A hyper-power such as America has the potential to be like the man with the hammer, who views every problem as a nail. But as Kagan notes, Europe faces the opposite danger: "When you don't have a hammer, you don't want anything to look like a nail."
Jonathan V. Last is a columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.