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Will the united states of Europe be a friend?
The United States is about to confront a fierce new competitor, unlike any the nation has faced in its history.
The vote in Ireland this month to approve the Lisbon Treaty, intended to streamline and strengthen the European Union, may have seemed like an interesting, parochial European development. But think about what it portends.
Today, Europe is a largely ineffectual player in world affairs. European states rotate the E.U. presidency, and for most non-European nations, the tenure of each new president is largely invisible. But what happens when the E.U. elects a full-time president with a five-year term, as the treaty stipulates. (Tony Blair, the former British prime minister, is the front runner now.)
The European Union would then seem almost like the United States, a collection of states forming a cohesive union with a common foreign policy — and a single, prominent president who will immediately become an important player in the world. The European Union’s 27 nations have a population of about 500 million, 40 percent more than the United States. Its gross domestic product is almost 20 percent higher than the United States’. How could it not be taken seriously?
Of course, the E.U. has a fractious membership. The big states, particularly England, France and Germany, want to establish the E.U. as a major world party, while the smaller states, like Luxembourg and the Czech Republic, are less eager, afraid they will be marginalized. But don’t we have similar arguments in this country, between the South, the Northeast and other parts of the nation?
Soviet Union
The United States had a fierce competitor as recently as 1990 — the Soviet Union. But that was the enemy, and it was easy, almost expected, that Washington would reject its concerns. Two hundred years ago, when this nation was young, weak and small, Britain, an absolute monarchy then, was our fierce competitor. Of course, the British army sacked Washington in 1812.
Now, for the first time, our great new competitor is a collection of like-minded democracies — our friends and allies. It certainly won’t be easy to ignore Europe’s concerns. Former President George W. Bush did just that, and the United States paid a price. Europe often opposed the Bush administration’s initiatives on a variety of fronts.
But Europeans want to be friendly with America. A poll of E.U. residents last summer by the German Marshall Fund showed that 77 percent of the respondents support President Obama’s handling of international affairs compared to just 19 percent for President Bush’s last year. Never in the history of this poll had there ever been so remarkable a turnaround. And that was before Obama won a Nobel Peace Prize. How easy will it be for Obama, or any other president, to stiff arm Europe?
Potential areas of disagreement might be policies toward Russia and Iran. Many European nation’s have important commercial relations with both countries that color their views. Another is how to handle Afghanistan. Through NATO, several European states have troops there.
Hold out
The treaty and all that comes from it are still not wholly ratified. Poland and the Czech Republic still have not signed. Poland says it will sign, soon, but the Czech president, Vaclav Klaus, is a hold out. Will he be able to remain the last man standing when every other nation has signed? After all, the Czech parliament has already ratified the agreement.
The treaty authorizes the E.U. to open embassies around the world — in addition to the embassies each European state already has. The central government could sign treaties and other international agreements on behalf of its members. In other words, it would begin to look like a large and powerful nation unto itself rather than a loose collection of states, as it is now. It would have its own foreign service and, perhaps, the authority to act decisively in each country where it holds representation.
Smaller nations
“I don’t think we know yet how all of this will work out in the end,” said Karen Donfried, executive vice president of the German Marshall Fund, said. The many smaller nations that make up the union are likely to object to elements of these proposals. All the while, though, the E.U. will continue to admit more members, grow more powerful.
“The attractive force of the E.U. as a political, societal and economic model remains immensely powerful,” the German Marshall Fund said last week. “Numerous countries are standing in line to join.”
Much remains to be decided, but whatever happens the United States will soon have a powerful ally — or a fearsome rival.
X Joel Brinkley is a former Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent for The New York Times and now a professor of journalism at Stanford University. McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.