A Continent Made Up of Nations
TERZIAN, PHILIP
A Continent Made Up of Nations In Europe, e pluribus pluribus. BY PHILIP TERZIAN THE G8 SUMMIT in Gleneagles, Scotland, which begins July 6, should be a slightly excruciating affair. While the...
...And European unity is one of those instances where diplomacy—general agreement on compatible principles—was taken much too seriously for its own good...
...So what began as an effort in joint economic recovery— the Coal and Steel Community, the Common Market—was, in due course, transformed into a utopian, all-encompassing ideal...
...No doubt, the assembled heads of state and government will pull it off, crowning their discussions with genial photo ops, solemn initiatives, and soothing phrases...
...Best of all, the meeting will take place in Europe's most Euroskeptical country (Britain) in a nation (Scotland) that is increasingly restive within its state (United Kingdom...
...For its part, the United States had every reason to pay lip service to European unity...
...The European Union works in certain ways: It has kept the peace among traditional enemies, rewarded German democracy, generated wealth, and given states on its periphery an ideal to emulate...
...No one, surveying the wreckage of the British Empire, the weakness of France's Fourth Republic, and the armies of refugees and displaced persons—not to say the gas chambers of Auschwitz or the rubble of German cities—would have argued that the cure for Europe's incessant civil wars was the exaltation of individual nation-states...
...The Marshall Plan was never intended to be a permanent subsidy to postwar Europe, and the Soviet Union was a common adversary...
...consumption should seldom be mistaken for private conviction...
...Russia's Vladimir Putin will be aware that his autocratic style of government in Moscow disturbs his fellow statesmen...
...The little white lie, in effect, was believed...
...bureaucratically...
...It is not difficult to understand why, in the late 1940s and early '50s, Europe's wise men should have put their faith in some kind of European political league...
...One irony, of course, is that the fierce American advocacy of Turkish membership in the E.U...
...but once we move beyond the corridors in Brussels, or the language of transatlantic diplomacy, or examine it apart from French and German realpolitik, it is plain to see how deeply estranged European political unity is from reality...
...As the Marxists discovered in 1914, the national identities of Europeans mean more to individuals than any economic dogma or synthetic alliance, let alone one tied together in the bundle of a 485-page constitution...
...The unification of Germany had so destabilized the balance of power in Europe that, three times in the previous 80 years, the continent had been ripped apart by war...
...For France, however, the E.U...
...The Europeans will be thinking, first and foremost, about their Union—or what's left of it, after the French and Dutch ballots—and George W. Bush may sense that he has stumbled into the aftermath of a family squabble...
...An Englishman may acknowledge that he is a "European" in the planetary sense—as opposed to, say, an "American"—^but sees little resemblance between himself and a European citizen of, say, Spain or Hungary...
...Sixty years after the end of World War II, Europe has reason to be worried about the impulses that lurk within nations...
...Still, the French, in their way, have been admirably candid...
...The European idea has always been a nice proposition, and a pleasant nostrum for the State Department...
...While the American economy is chugging along, Europe's growth is largely confined to its unemployment figures...
...So long as the nations of Western Europe were rebuilding their economies and threatened by nuclear war, European unity made strategic sense...
...But there are limits to Europe's unity, and history means more than any regulation...
...might well have tipped the balance and upset the edifice of Europe's little white lie...
...So nationalism lives...
...The United States of America was a federation of ex-English colonies united by common language, religion, law, and customs— and, lest we forget, divided on principle between 1861 and 1865...
...This makes sense from a French point of view, but is not necessarily in the interests of Europe...
...has been more problematic: Since it does not bestride Europe in the way Germany does, France has chosen to attach itself to Germany diplomatically while dominating the E.U...
...But no statesman should misunderstand the equation: Whatever is said for public Philip Terzian is Books & Arts editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...Given the size and economic dominance of Germany on the continent, it has been said that belief in the European Union allows Germans, for the first time in their modern history, to be both good Germans and good Europeans...
...Well, up to a point...
...but such impulses are not invariably destructive, nor can they be willed away by consensus...
...A great deal of what makes life congenial is a sequence of little white lies—I think it looks fine, no one will notice, I respect your position—and diplomatic language is the expression of hard truths in soft phraseology...
...The end of the Cold War was not the end of history, but the resumption of history, and the disintegration of any empire is chaotic...
...He knew how difficult it was to maintain harmony within a democratic, English-speaking alliance, much less across ancient borders and customs...
...Europe is a continent divided by language, religion, law, nationality, customs, cuisine, and a thousand other obvious historic distinctions and differences...
...Moreover, France, especially under General de Gaulle, conceived of the Union not so much as a European initiative, but a French, or perhaps Franco-German, project to isolate Britain and challenge its fellow "Anglo-Saxon" power, the United States...
...Which, in the end, has led to the recent votes in France and the Netherlands on the E.U...
...President Bush will welcome the opportunity to discuss areas of common concern with our allies, and President Chirac will tell journalists that the journey to European unity has hit a pothole, but that the path remains open...
...Writing in the late 1950s about Robert Schu-man, the French premier and foreign minister, Dean Acheson noticed that "as one studies all the French-inspired postwar proposals looking toward the unification of Western Europe . . . one sees that the power—and very possibly the right—to secede remains in the various states...
...Even short of that, it is not always apparent how decisions of the organizations could be enforced against strong and determined dissidents...
...No doubt, President Eisenhower wished that a "United States of Europe" might prevent a recurrence of the tragic conflict that had both tested him and made him famous, but there is no evidence to suggest he believed it would really happen...
...Yet even at the dawn of the European movement, the elements of subsequent discord were evident...
...constitution...
...The average French shopkeeper, or Dutch mechanic, might have had misgivings about making common cause with Britons or Greeks, but the prospect of Turkey—gigantic, Muslim, impoverished, oriental—was absurd beyond Brussels's capacity to see...
...For him, as for all subsequent presidents until 1991, NATO was the European union that mattered...
Vol. 10 • June 2005 • No. 38
