DON'T LET THE DOOR HIT YOU ON THE WAY OUT:

Farewell to the old world: Iraq is the catalyst for the draining of power from the UN, EU and Nato (Gwyn Prins, March 15, 2003, The Guardian)

The pathway to post-Saddam Iraq becomes daily less misty. Before the fighting starts, we should examine how Iraq links to a series of other, more structurally momentous changes, in Britain, in Europe especially and within the global political order. Large as the military action looms, Iraq may not be the most important game afoot.

It wasn't during the scratchy Commons debate but at the prime minister's February 18 press conference when we saw that the die was cast. The body language was eloquent. Broadcast snippets showed a prime minister pushing forward, boats burning behind him, choices made. Assisted by President Chirac's swansong Gaullism, Blair has made the decision that every prime minister since the second world war has sought to avoid; and his decision to stand with America is for positive reasons. Since then, he has hit his stride for the first time since the Iraq crisis burst, moving to the human rights argument, which matters to him most. Can he now seize - does he yet see - the greatest opportunities of his prime ministership opening before him? [...]

If one interpretation of the French stand on the unprecedented Turkish article IV request for help was that it was intended to kill off Nato so that military functions transfer to the EU - the consistent aim, openly at and since Nice in 2000 - it was unnecessary and too late. This was death by many knives: a murder on the Orient Express.

But the biggest miscalculations of the past few weeks have been about the EU. The EU constitutional convention, as now drafted, is straightforwardly federal. Not a word of what the British and other sceptics said was entertained. When Giscard d'Estaing presented the clauses, he did so with a brutal frankness: this is the future and those who do not like it are free to leave. The assumption is that this is a deadly threat - to be cast out into the cold. But is it? For decades there have been two visions of Europe, but only one to the fore.

The publication of the "letter of eight" in support of US action in Iraq and the statement of the eastern European "Vilnius 10" have together suddenly precipitated the colours of that other European vision. It is inclined to free-market philosophy, is English-speaking and not hostile to America. At the sour EU special summit, Chirac's apparently imprudent castigation of the eastern European applicants, with the thinly veiled threat of punishment for their support of the US, served only to precipitate "new Europe" further. Or was it imprudent? There are those who think that Chirac had a devious purpose: to sink enlargement, the British foil to the federal imperative.

Put now to Giscard's choice, for the first time in decades it becomes realistic to think that the British, the Dutch, Iberians, Scandinavians, current applicants - and who else? - may decline the federal invitation and prefer to become Europeans marching to a different drum. This other Europe contains the more dynamic European economies, would go with the grain of expressed public desires, and it is Blair's to lead.

If nothing else comes of this whole diplomatic train wreck except for a triumph of Euroskepticism and a change of Tony Blair's heart on the wisdom of chaining Britain's future to the EU it will all still have been worthwhile. Posted by Orrin Judd at March 15, 2003 8:40 AM