The Franco-German relationship has always been a menage a trois with Britain. But who will make Europe work?
France and Germany celebrated their wedding anniversary last Wednesday. But the truth is that there are three in this marriage, which, as the late Diane, Princess of Wales, once observed, makes it a bit crowded.
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Britain has always been the third party in Europe's eternal triangle. Like Julia Roberts in the film My Best Friend's Wedding, Britain delivers saccharine speeches of congratulation to the happy couple, although only yesterday she was trying to steal the bridegroom. Except that this is not the wedding but the 40th anniversary. At every point in the history of the Europe since World War II you can only understand what any two of France, Germany and Britain are doing if you know what the third has been up to -- and how they all stand towards America, that brooding Ben Affleck hunk in the background.
This was true in the early 1950s, when then German chancellor Konrad Adenauer first asked Winston Churchill to assume the leadership of Europe, before turning to France. It was true in 1963, when the Elysee Treaty between Adenauer and Charles de Gaulle coincided, not at all accidentally, with de Gaulle's "Non" to Britain's first application for membership of the European community. It's true today, when the reaffirmation of Franco-German leadership in the EU is closely connected to the popularity of Blairite positions in other parts of Europe and Britain's re-warmed special relationship with the US.
One can, with all sincerity, raise a glass to what the Franco-German couple has done for Europe over the last half-century and wish them many more years of happiness. One can, with equal sincerity, say that this is no longer enough.
When France and Germany first got together, they were the two largest countries in a European community of six states. A deal was cut between the interests of German industry and French agriculture. And Germany -- a divided and occupied country, the shame of Nazism still fresh in everyone's mind -- was prepared to subordinate its superior economic strength to French political leadership in Europe. "One should always bow twice to the tricoleur," former German chancellor Helmut Kohl used to say. Until the end of the Cold War and German unification, the marriage worked on these terms -- and it was, on the whole, good for Europe. Franco-German initiatives repeatedly drove forward European integration.
Can they do so again? Even if France and Germany, having renewed their vows in Versailles, were to work in the most exquisite harmony, it seems unlikely. Soon they will only be two among 25 member states. Perhaps they are still the two most important, but their relative power to set the agenda is much diminished. Britain, under British Prime Minister Tony Blair, is a very active European player. Italy, Spain and Poland are all heavy middleweight powers that increasingly want to have their own say. The smaller countries, a clear majority of EU member states, increasingly resent being told what to do by the big ones.
Anyway, France and Germany are not working in harmony. The terms of the marriage were redrawn with German unification and -- as sometimes happens when one partner in a relationship suddenly gets a bigger job or becomes much richer than the other -- it has been uneasy ever since. Germany no longer concedes to France the prerogative of political leadership. Thus, for example, Germany wants a stronger president of the European Commission and France a stronger president of the inter-governmental European Council. So what do they now jointly propose? To have both.
Sipping her champagne in a damp corner of the marquee, their old friend Britain muses on the state of the marriage -- and how she can cut into the dance. The most obvious proposal is that France, Germany and Britain should work together to give strategic direction to the larger EU. This idea has been around for ever and a day. De Gaulle records in his memoirs how the then British prime minister Harold Macmillan said to him: "Let us bring Europe together, my dear friend! There are three men who can do it -- you, Adenauer and I."
More recently, the ever inventive Lord Weidenfeld constituted a "Club of Three" to discuss how Europe's big three might best cooperate. In his first term, Blair pursued exactly this agenda, cutting into the Franco-German dance with some success -- the European defense initiative with Jacques, the Third Way with Gerd. But now it looks as if we've reverted to form -- France and Germany waltzing on the dance-floor, while Britain seeks solace in the muscular arms of America. (The gender typecasting is sometimes confused, but France and Britain generally seem to be the women and Germany and America the men.)
There comes a point in some articles when you begin to feel "this metaphor has been with us too long; it's so tired that it actually died two paragraphs ago." You may feel that about this marriage metaphor -- especially since it was used in a hundred speeches yesterday. But the fact that it persists so obstinately also tells us something.
Of course, relations between states are not the same as relationships between people. Palmerston underscored the difference when he said that England has no eternal allies, only eternal interests. German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and French President Jacques Chirac, we are told, personally get on better with Blair than with each other. Yet the relations between these three old European powers do have a lot of the qualities of a long-running menage a trois. The jealousies, the one-upmanship, the mixture of competition and companionship, shared jokes shading into veiled barbs, and those long memories of past slights and favors.
In diplomacy, as in life, tripartite alliances are more difficult to sustain than bilateral ones. Unless, that is, you have a clear and common enemy -- as France was for Bismarck's "Three Emperors Alliance," or Nazi Germany for the wartime Grand Alliance of Britain, the US and the Soviet Union. And even those didn't last long.
The trouble with the internal diplomacy of the EU is this. Every practitioner will tell you that progress is only made on major issues when a number of key member states push together in the same direction. If that doesn't happen, all the work of commission and parliament is generally in vain. This is likely to happen more often if there are longer-lasting alliances between states for that purpose. That is the argument for the Franco-German marriage.
But throughout European history, alliances, if they lasted, have tended to produce counter-alliances. The bigger and more complicated the EU becomes, the greater is the need for larger intra-European alliances to make things happen. Yet larger alliances are not only more difficult to sustain; they are also more likely to provoke counter-alliances. A Europe of ever-shifting alliances, from issue to issue, is liable to lack any strategic direction. A Europe of permanent alliances will be divided against itself.
The NATO solution -- Mormon-style polygamy, with one American husband and 18 European wives -- is not available to Europe, and no longer works very well for the Atlantic alliance either. Leadership from a Franco-German marriage is no longer enough. A menage a trois with Britain has not worked well in the past; eternal triangles rarely do. But free love is no solution either. Answers anyone?
Timothy Garton Ash is director of the European Studies Center at St Antony's College, Oxford, and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford.
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