So, here we go again. A new American President arrives and Europe gets jittery. Does he know his Arles from his Elba? Will his proposed "Son of Star Wars" National Missile Defense system mean a "decoupling" of European and North American defense? Will he, as hinted, pull US troops out of the Balkans, leaving us to hold that beautiful baby alone? Will he be isolationist, unilateralist or plain uninterested?
How often we have been here before. Remember the chorus of alarm greeting Ronald Reagan? And before that, Jimmy Carter. The only new President whom Europe does not get jittery about is one they know already, preferably as a current President (Clinton, second term), or, failing that, as a current Vice-President (George Bush, senior). This, as well as some specific concerns about international competence, is why most European governments would probably have preferred Al Gore. Better the devil you know....
Many of Europe's pre-Bush worries are old favorites -- ignorance, decoupling, disengagement -- and their articulation seems like one of the seasonal rituals of the transatlantic tribe. Yet it is reasonable to ask whether this occasion is different. Different not because of any particular characteristics of President-elect George W. Bush, and his key appointees and advisers, but because of the historical situation.
Illustration: Mountain People
One of the most remarkable things about the last decade was the fact that the US was as closely involved in Europe's affairs at the end of it as at the beginning. Indeed, in 1999 the North Atlantic Alliance expanded to take in three new European states and fought the first war in its history over a remote corner of Europe. Why is this remarkable? Because most alliances in history have collapsed after the common enemy was vanquished.
The US departed from Europe promptly after the first common enemy was defeated in 1918, returned in World War II only because that common enemy reemerged in a more threatening guise, and was kept in the old continent (after trying to get out) for the duration of the Cold War by a new common enemy: Soviet communism and its allies. When that dog died, some foresaw the demise not just of NATO but of "the West" altogether. "The political `West' was not a natural construct but a highly artificial one," wrote Owen Harries, veteran editor of The National Interest, in 1993. "It took the presence of a life-threatening, overtly hostile `East' to bring it into existence. It is extremely doubtful whether it can survive the disappearance of that enemy."
Well somehow, strangely, the West has survived -- until now. But you could argue that such deep changes in the structure of geopolitics simply take time to work through into consciousness. After all, only at the Nice summit of the EU last December did the EU really begin to see how the balance of power between France and Germany has shifted towards a larger, reunited Germany.
So now, you might argue, we have on one side of the Atlantic a Europe that seems to be going its own way, with a core group of states already having a common currency and a larger group apparently wanting to establish its own joint army. On the other side we have a new US President with no deep personal interest in Europe, a Secretary of State who -- if he adhered to the military doctrine named after him -- might well not have fought the Kosovo war, and a National Security Adviser who has written in Foreign Affairs of the US need to be guided by its own national interests. Two different trajectories, and a recipe for discord?
Well, it is true to say that there will be arguments running on both sides of the Atlantic. On the European side, the argument will be between the old Gaullist, etatist conception of Europe as a superpower rival to the US, and a more liberal, Atlanticist vision. On the American side, it will, if I understand it all right, be between a more unilateralist and a more multilateralist view of the US' role in the world. The meeting point of these two debates can itself be a tense debate. We have seen a hint of it already in quite unnecessarily tetchy exchanges about the planned European Rapid Reaction Force. One can imagine a choppy first year -- which would itself be nothing new in the history of transatlantic relations.
But I would take a fairly large bet on where it will come down in the end: with the continuation of partnership. Why? First, there is the deep substratum of shared history, culture and values. In a world at once more globalized and more consciously multicultural such commonalties are accentuated. Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilizations has major flaws, but in this he is surely right: that there are not separate European and North American "civilizations."
Second, there are the habits and institutions of cooperation built up over more than fifty years -- and sixty in the case of Britain and America. Asked on the Oprah Winfrey Show to name his favorite historical figure, George W. Bush said "Churchill". One thing his key foreign policy appointees certainly have is alliance experience.
Third, and very importantly, there is the way the argument is going in Europe, which in my view is clearly towards rather than away from the liberal, Atlanticist vision. That is helped by the fuller engagement in Europe of Blair's Britain, by the larger weight of Schroeder's Germany, and by the enthusiasm of new applicants such as Poland for all things "Euratlantic."
Even the Gaullist President of France does not now seriously pretend that one could have a European army independent of NATO. Fourth, there are still common enemies in the wider world, albeit of a much less monolithic kind: terrorists, international drug traders, poverty (producing immigration and refugee pressures on the rich world), AIDS and rogue states.
Finally, there are common challenges and competitors, of which the most notable in the longer term is surely China. If the new Bush administration inclines to see China as "strategic competitor" rather than "strategic partner" then it needs strategic allies all the more.
So the geopolitical context of this transition to a new US Presidency is, indeed, very different from previous ones. But for transatlantic relations, at least, the result may not be so very different after all. As they used to say in the old Eastern Europe: "the new comes back."
Timothy Garton Ash is Kurt A. 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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