Wed, Oct 10, 2001 page9

• The map of Europe is being redrafted

  The war against terrorism has this in common with the Cold War: that it touches every part of the world, and reshapes its politics

  • By Timothy Garton Ash
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  How will the war reshape Europe?

  I have been in eight European countries over the last three weeks, trying to answer that question through conversations with political leaders, intellectuals, guerilla chiefs in the mountains of Macedonia, and ordinary people in the streets of Madrid, Paris, Warsaw and other capitals. Here are a few things it may change.

  

  ILLUSTRATION: MOUNTAIN PEOPLE

  The position of Britain: Tony Blair plays Churchill to Bush's Roosevelt. The war again confirms the very special relationship that the British have to the English-speaking peoples "across the pond," as we revealingly say, reducing the Atlantic Ocean to something narrower than the English Channel. What's more, the feeling is currently reciprocated by many Americans, which was by no means always the case. (The former German chancellor Helmut Schmidt once quipped that the Special Relationship was so special that only one side knew it existed.) Will this put more distance between Britain and continental Europe, confirming all the old Gaullist suspicions about the British always putting the US before Europe?

  I think not. I encountered remarkably few such suspicions, even in Paris. On the contrary, it will probably increase the British prime minister's diplomatic weight in Europe, and his ability to act as a "bridge" between Europe and the US. Moreover, he himself clearly intends to follow the left hook with a right. After fully engaging with the US in this war, he hopes to use his enhanced prestige to lead Britain more fully into Europe, and especially into the European monetary union.

  The position of Russia: Vladimir Putin is the other European politician who has seized the coat-tails of history. Many expected him to demand Western approval for Russia's "anti-terrorist" war in Chechnya, and a slowdown on NATO enlargement to include the Baltic states, as the price for his support for the campaign against Osama bin Laden and his kind. Instead, he has used that support as a launch-pad for a strategic campaign to have Russia accepted as a full member of the West, and of Europe. The NATO Secretary-General, Lord Robertson, confirms that at his recent meeting with Putin, the Russian president made it plain that, while he still did not like the idea of the Baltic states joining NATO, he was certainly not going to attempt to stop it. President Putin seems almost to be rhetorically exaggerating the threat of terrorism as a new common enemy, in order to place Russia more firmly in the West. There are many thorny questions for the West along this path. Above all, how far should we compromise our own standards in order to encourage Russia to proceed in the right direction? But the right direction it surely is.

  Will it slow down the enlargement of NATO? At a meeting of the heads of state of all the NATO applicant countries in Sofia last Friday, Lord Robertson emphatically assured them that it would not. So did a message from President Bush. This seems to me credible. This war has shown what NATO is, and what it is not. On the one hand, Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty has been invoked for the first time. The attack on one member states is formally considered as an attack on all. On the other hand, we see that Article 5 does not mean all member states throwing closely coordinated military forces into the front line: it simply means member states doing what they are ready and able to do, if and when the directly affected country asks them. If international terrorism is the big new threat, a broader but slightly looser transatlantic alliance makes even more sense than it did before.

  Will it speed up the enlargement of the EU? Alas, probably not. Perhaps even the reverse. The Sept. 11 attacks have caused the topic of internal security, including European policing, border controls, arrangements for extradition between member countries and so forth, to shoot up the European agenda, propelled especially by countries like Spain, which faces its own terrorist threat in the Basque ETA movement. As the French foreign minister, Hubert Vedrine, pointed out to me, this may in effect add yet another set of requirements to the already daunting list of things central and east European countries have to do before they can join the EU. And this will be a very difficult set of requirements for countries with weak and often corrupt police forces, judiciaries, frontier guards and customs services to fulfil. One glimpses the depressing prospect of the second eastward NATO enlargement coming before even the first enlargement of the EU.

  Who will take care of the Balkans? I cannot count the number of times that people have said to me in the Balkans, "the international community means the US'. But now the US has other priorities.

  Moreover, the task in a country like Macedonia is a complex one, which does not fit easily under the rubric of "war against terrorism." For it involves brokering and sustaining a peace settlement with Albanian guerilla forces who in other contexts might be described as terrorists. And, indeed, are so described by ethnic Macedonians. Explaining the arrangements made for amnesty for the Albanian guerilla leaders, the Macedonian president, Boris Trajkovski, told me: "I signed an agreement with the secretary-general [of NATO] and the secretary-general's representative signed an agreement with the terrorists." So will Europe now take up the burden of this complex, messy and morally ambiguous task? Currently, a small contingent of German troops is supporting the monitors, and the EU's foreign policy chief Javier Solana is there almost every week. I still doubt if the EU is really ready and able to look after its own backyard. One thing, however, is clear: the US is most unlikely to keep pulling Europe's irons out of the fire, as it did for most of the twentieth century.

  These are just a few of the patterns in the European kaleidoscope that the war against terrorism has changed, and may change still more. Asked for his view of Africa, Bismarck famously observed: "Here lies Russia and here lies France, and we are in the middle. That is my map of Africa." The world has changed since he said that, and Europe is no longer at the centre of it. Today, the map of Europe is being redrawn in Afghanistan.

  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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