Solana, the former Nato secretary-general, is very clear that any major effort of power projection -- another Kosovo -- even in the EU's own near abroad can only be done together with the US. At the moment, a much more real concern is whether European countries can and will actually deliver the troops and hardware they have promised. When I ask a senior Nato insider where this European rapid reaction force is actually likely to be used, he says "perhaps somewhere in Africa, as an extraction force to get European citizens out of a crisis area." A modest enough horizon. The EU was not a superpower with the original six like-minded member states; it is not a superpower with today's 15 much more diverse members; and it will not be a superpower with the 27 that it is now committed to having.
Each new member adds to the notional weight, but also to the practical difficulty of throwing that weight around. Twenty-seven member states may, if we are lucky, manage to agree how the EU should do less but do it better. They cannot, in any foreseeable future, make a single political actor capable of projecting power as the US does.
But why should they? Isn't what the EU already is something remarkable enough? Here is a quite diverse group of countries, many of which fought each other bitterly in the past. These countries have now created institutions in which all their differences are resolved by peaceful negotiation. The EU is what has been called a "security community" -- that is, a group of states contractually and habitually committed to peaceful conflict resolution between them. The true motto of this community is Churchill's "make jaw-jaw, not war-war." It is a model that seeks its parallel on any other continent. Imagine a world which had, beside the EU, an African Union, an Asian Union, a Latin American Union, and so on.
There are serious criticisms to be made of this Union's role in the world. They concern not its lack of grand power projection, but its passive, protectionist selfishness, when it comes, for example, to the impact of our Common Agricultural Policy on agricultural producers in the developing world.
In that respect, however, we are sadly not different from but all too like the US.
In short, why not celebrate what is rather than bemoaning what is not? I like being part of something where the president can pop in for dinner in a nice bistro, without anyone much noticing. It shows a healthy attitude to power, in a continent where power is now much more divided than in the past.
Timothy Garton Ash is the Kurt Kurber senior research fellow in contemporary European history, and a member of the European Studies Center at St Antony's College, Oxford University, England.
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