THERE'S NO SUCH THING AS EUROPE:

'Gang of Eight' Iraq Letter Rubs Salt in EU Wounds (Paul Taylor, January 30, 2003, Reuters)

A joint letter by eight European leaders backing the United States on the crisis with Iraq highlighted the European Union's divisions on Thursday, rubbing salt into the wounds of its stumbling foreign policy.

EU president Greece, in charge of trying to coordinate European foreign policy, criticized the signatories for undermining a common approach to the Iraq problem.

The European Parliament deepened the disarray by declaring that Iraq's response to U.N. weapons inspectors did not justify military action and warning against a unilateral U.S.-led war.

In an article published in a dozen newspapers, the leaders of EU members Britain, Italy, Spain, Portugal and Denmark, plus future members Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic, called time on Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and appealed for unity.

The move appeared aimed at isolating France and Germany, which had publicly argued against a rush to war, and building a pro-American caucus within the 15-nation EU.

"This looks like Rumsfeld's Europe," one EU diplomat said, referring to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's dismissal of France and Germany last week as "old Europe."

The eight failed to consult most of their EU partners and candidates about their initiative, launched just two days after the bloc's foreign ministers had tried to paper over the cracks with a statement backing the U.N. disarmament effort in Iraq.

We mentioned the benefits of instability below and we're fond here of saying that war forces the contradictions. Considering that the EU is a threat to both the future of Europe itself and to American interests in the world and that a Union of such disparate states is self-contradictory, these growing divisions may be inevitable and are certainly welcome. If you're British you have to ask yourself a fairly simple question: as a citizen of one of cradles of liberty, what do you really have in common with the statist/egalitarian French and Germans? There's a reason that Britain has fought those countries repeatedly over the centuries and, unless you have no respect for the power and endurance of cultural differences, you have to wonder if they've really become so much like you that there's no more reason for conflict, or whether, instead, Union represents an ultimate victory for what you've long fought against--totalitarianism.

Why not let the Germans and French have their own Union? Bring the New Europe (and the Commonwealth nations, Amnerica's NAFTA partners, Turkey, Israel, India, Taiwan, etc.) into the Anglo-American special relationship and tie all together with the gentle binding of free trade, mutual defense, and the like, without the kind of bureaucratic dictatorship and common economic system that the EU envisions.

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 30, 2003 1:16 PM