Coalition of the Democracies: A New Foundation for the Transatlantic Alliance
Fuecks, Ralf
THE TRANSATLANTIC conflict over the Iraq War marked a turning point in Europe's relationship to the United States. Whether one greets the rift between "Old Europe" and the global hyperpower as...
...It is a somewhat different case with Germany...
...34 n DISSENT / Fall 2003...
...One prerequisite for resuscitating the transatlantic alliance is therefore a serious dialogue about security, one in which both sides come to an understanding about trouble spots and potential threats in the coming decades and about an appropriate civil and military strategy to contain these risks...
...This means that the EU should not leave it to the United Statets alone to occupy itself with the conflict-laden themes of global politics: international terrorism, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and the promotion of democratic regime-change in despotic states...
...Retreating to Fortress America is no longer an option...
...It is on this basis that a new transatlantic partnership might be built...
...Second, it was the Russian and French oil industries that concluded lucrative contracts with Saddam Hussein's regime, a fact that presumably was not without influence on the attitudes of their governments and that also plays a role today as Russia and France seek to secure their influence on postwar Iraq through the Security Council...
...Was the intervention in Kosovo that put an end to large-scale "ethnic cleansing" contrary to international law because it took place without an explicit UN mandate...
...It was not demagogic window dressing when Bush told a group of veterans at the White House, "America has no territorial ambitions...
...In actual fact, however, their democratic legitimacy and devotion to the rule of law are extremely varied— and so is their readiness to oppose tyranny and massacre...
...In Europe, many people see all this as mere trumped-up fears, behind which is hidden the "real" driving force of America's show of strength...
...True as it is that there is no alternative to the Security Council as an organ of global crisis management, it is surely wrong to make it the sole source of legitimacy for military intervention...
...A second prerequisite is an effort to sort out the future role of the United Nations...
...In the United States, on the other hand, September 11 spurred the perception that "the world out there," now as before, is a dangerous place, where violent conflict is endemic and can only be kept in check by superior military might: Hobbes rather than Kant...
...And indeed, there have always been two lines in American foreign policy: the conviction that ultimately the spread of pluralist democracy best corresponds to America's global interests and the realpolitik assessment of governments solely on the basis of their usefulness to the economic and military interests of the western hegemon...
...Although it is certainly true that the answer to this threat does not lie in a series of "disarmament" wars, it is urgent that Europe and the United States set in motion an effective arms control policy in the Middle East...
...It's obvious that France's and Russia's newfound love for the Security Council is motivated by power politics...
...The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon altered this attitude immediately, and the fall 2002 policy statement on national security strategy codified the turnaround...
...Great Britain will never be persuaded to pursue such a policy, and neither will the easternand central-European states, which are already suspicious of French-German-Russian hegemonic aspirations...
...It didn't upset our prevailing worldview, according to which we are, ever since the implosion of the Soviet Empire, "surrounded by friends," and the world we live in is ripe for a period of peaceful cooperation that might, at worst, be disturbed by anachronistic and localized outbreaks of violence...
...In Germany, we have a tendency to idealize the role of the Security Council...
...Here one believes much more than in Paris and Moscow in the "supremacy of law" and in the prospect of a supranational regime that, following the example of the European Union, increasingly constrains and replaces the sovereignty of nation-states...
...Instead, the doctrine of forward defense reigns—worldwide and with shifting alliances...
...But the connections are somewhat more complex than the slogan "No blood for oil" suggests...
...Finally, the days are long gone when individual nations, with the help of their militaries, ensure their exclusive grip on the raw materials and markets of other countries...
...It wasn't just the United States that supported authoritarian governments in the interest of putative stability...
...I N THE PAST, "democracy" and "stability" in the foreign policy of the United States as well as of the European states have proved again and again to be contradictory terms...
...It doesn't help much, however, to demand an equal partnership if Europe does not carry a correspondingly equal political— although not necessarily military—weight...
...By a decade's delay, the estrangement follows the political eruption of 1989-1990 that collapsed the old, bipolar world system and left the United States as the sole world power...
...When it comes to conflicts of interest among states holding veto power, the Security Council is incapacitated...
...We don't want to become an empire...
...But one must add to that, "not an old-style empire anyway...
...Aside from that, they remember the dangers of totalitarianism far too well to succumb to the illusion that they can do without the transatlantic alliance...
...Now, for perhaps the first time, a transatlantic consensus is possible that global stability can best be achieved through the globalization of democracy...
...An earlier version of this article appeared in German in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagzeitung of April 27, 2003...
...The key concept for the strategists in the administration and the conservative think tanks is "national security"—with a very broadly defined concept of security...
...In Western Europe, the shock over the attacks on New York and Washington was quickly supplanted by other concerns...
...Here too there is a need for compromise on both sides...
...What Role for the UN...
...the Russian campaign in Chechnya—which defies all legal norms—is not even a topic for the Council because under international law, it is a "domestic situation within a sovereign state," and a state that in any case commands a veto...
...Whether one greets the rift between "Old Europe" and the global hyperpower as the birth of an emancipated Europe or deplores it as having endangered the basic coordinates of German and European policy, there is no returning to the status quo ante...
...Up until September 11, 2001, it was far from certain how the United States would interpret her new role...
...Europe must not only be in a position to ensure peace and security at home...
...To what extent, then, is it about oil...
...Both sides should at least have learned this lesson from the diplomatic disaster of the Iraq War...
...Iraqi oil will not be monopolized by Exxon and Texaco, nor will it be reserved to feed the energy appetite of American air conditioners and sports utility vehicles...
...It would be naïve to claim that this natural resource has nothing to do with the intervention in Iraq...
...With its realization of global responsibility comes the danger of hubris: failing to recognize that even the United States is taking on too much with this task...
...It encompasses se32 n DISSENT / Fall 2003 curity in the supply of raw materials—on which not just the American economy depends—as well as "war" against terrorist networks and an aggressive policy to prevent despotic regimes from gaining access to weapons of mass destruction...
...The prospect that despotic, radical anti-Israeli regimes such as the Iraq of Saddam Hussein or the Iran of the fundamentalist mullahs would be equipped with medium-range missiles with nuclear or biological warheads should make others besides the United States uneasy...
...They can thus upgrade their own global political status and rein in the United States...
...George W. Bush began his presidency professing skepticism about the United States as global policeman and about the policy of "nation building" in crisis regions on the periphery of the world market...
...It appeared that first day and has been defining security policy thinking ever since...
...The United States has de facto bound itself to a policy of maintaining worldwide stability and order...
...But it won't work for the "Paris-Berlin-Moscow Axis" to attempt through the Security Council to tie the giant by its hands and feet...
...The consequence of any such containment strategy vis-a-vis the United States would be to paralyze the UN, not to mention the collateral damage it would inflict on the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the EU itself...
...A repeat of the 9/11 attacks, only this time with weapons of mass destruction, is a vivid American nightmare...
...From the prominent news magazine Spiegel to European MTV, there is a consensus that "it's about one thing and one thing COALITION OF THE DEMOCRACIES only: oil...
...This was the case for long stretches of the Balkans War as well as during the Soviet war in Afghanistan...
...September 11 deepened the latent but already existing psychological discrepancy between the United States and Western Europe...
...RALF FUECKS is co-president of the Heinrich Boell Foundation, a German-based body for political education and international cooperation affiliated with the Green Party...
...Reliance on the UN does not therefore replace an autonomous political and legal determination of right and wrong, legitimate and illegitimate...
...imperialism has been superseded by globalization, which is based on the principle of open markets...
...At the same time, American policy makers are also concerned with the legitimate danger that income from oil exports will be used to develop weapons of mass destruction...
...For one thing, Japanese and European dependence on oil imports from the Middle East is clearly greater than that of the United States...
...It already does so economically, and the EU, to the extent that it is united, is today given great weight in trade policy questions...
...It must turn its gaze more fixedly on the world—and not just on the world market...
...It is not, in fact, an impartial advocate of international law and humanitarian interests but rather a body in which the self-interests of great and regional powers define the course of decision making...
...The current strains in the transatlantic relationship reflect a deep-seated political and cultural estrangement between the societies on the two sides...
...Without similar progress in the field of foreign and security policy, the transatlantic alliance has no future...
...DISSENT / Fall 2003 n 33 COALITION OF THE DEMOCRACIES It is crucial, nonetheless, to convince the United States to pursue its interests within the confines of the Security Council and not to pull back into a "selective" multilateralism (as in "the coalition of the willing...
...In the UN, all states count equally...
...Preventing the oil states of the Persian Gulf from being taken over by anti-western movements that could turn oil into a weapon is at the core of the American security doctrine...
...As it makes its interests into the standard of world order, it is mobilizing opposing forces that might be stronger than it is...
...One of the central lessons of the Iraq War is that any attempt to transform Europe into America's geopolitical opposite number leads directly to the division of Europe...
...Anyone who wants to keep Europe together politically cannot advocate a strategic decoupling from the United States...
...At the same time, the transatlantic alliance cannot be a relationship where Europeans are just followers...
Vol. 50 • September 2003 • No. 4
