Thu, Feb 22, 2001 page9

• Dining out on the European Commission

  Europe has pretensions of grandeur without any substance; the continent's trouble is that it is not happy with its present greatness

  • By Timothy Garton Ash
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  The president of the European Commission is a little late for dinner. He enters the restaurant alone, unattended by aides or burly secret servicemen with plastic coils going into their ears. Neither the waiters nor most of the other diners seem to recognize the president. We sit at a high, circular table in this informal Brussels bistro, and have a freewheeling, intellectual conversation. The president apologizes for leaving his mobile phone on, in case an important call comes through. Late in the evening, our conversation is startlingly interrupted by the Ode to Joy melody from Beethoven's Ninth, the official European anthem. This -- I realize after a moment -- is the ringing tone of president Prodi's mobile. But no, it's not president Bush on the line. It's someone from Italy.

  There are two ways of reading this little scene, unimaginable in the life of a president of the US. Those who hope to see a European superpower will sigh that it shows how far we still have to go. Some personal criticism of the relaxed leadership style of Professor Romano Prodi, the president of the European Commission -- president Prodi, as his office insists on calling him -- may be mixed with much more fundamental reflections about the need for reform of EU institutions to ensure that a bloc of 375 million people, with a combined GDP larger than the US' can "speak with one voice" and "punch its proper weight" in the counsels of the world. Alternatively, you can -- as I do -- find it not just molto simpatico but also a charming illustration of how very different the EU is from any conventional notion of great power, world power or superpower, as currently embodied by the US.

  

  Illustration: Mountain People

  The trouble is, the EU itself is not happy with the great thing that it already is. So it sometimes claims or aspires to be something it can not be. That is a definition of unhappiness. The EU is like the mermaid who wanted to be a girl, in Hans Andersen's fairy tale. Her feet always hurt when she walks, because really they should be a tail in the water. And it irritates others, too. When I ask the former foreign minister of a major power in Asia about his dealings in Brussels, he says he is annoyed by Europe having the pretensions of grandeur without the substance.

  To be sure, the EU is already a world power when it comes to trade and aid. If the eurozone is consolidated and grows (including Britain), the euro will be a world currency to rival the dollar. In Javier Solana, the EU has a "Mr Foreign Policy" and when his mobile phone rings during our lunchtime conversation, the caller is Kofi Annan, the UN Secretary-General. But Solana himself insists that for the foreseeable future there cannot be a single European foreign policy, only a "common" one, closely coordinated between the governments of member states. The answer to Henry Kissinger's (apocryphal?) question "You say Europe -- but which number should I call?" will continue to be several numbers, in Berlin, London and Paris, as well as Brussels, and probably two or three others as well (the subsidiary numbers varying according to the issue.

  As for this planned European Rapid Reaction Force: yes, there is a significant question as to whether its military planning will take place under Nato auspices. It's significant both in symbolic terms and because planning will just be much more effective (and cheaper) done with Nato. But either way, the idea that the EU is building up a "European army" which will in any sense be a military counterpart to its economic strength is simply for the birds.

  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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