WE'RE GAULLISTS, NOT RESPONSIBLE:

Europe's fading anti-Americans (Martin Walker, July 5, 2004, UPI)

Romano Prodi, the former Italian premier who has been president of the European Commission for the past five years is being replaced by Portugal's center-right and pro-American premier Jose Manuel Barroso.

Prodi was a center-left critic of the Iraq war, always ready to give discreet backing to the French sniping at President George W. Bush. His departure, and the dramatic failure of the French and Germans to replace him with the even more outspokenly anti-American Belgian premier Guy Verhofstadt, is good news for all friends of the Atlantic alliance.

Verhofstadt was vetoed by Tony Blair, with the steady support of the Poles, Italians, Danes and others. This was a decisive rebuff to the Franco-German axis that has for so long dominated EU affairs. Verhofstadt's call for the EU to be "emancipated" from American influence sank his candidacy.

There was absolutely no support for Chirac's fallback offering, the only French candidate, the new Foreign Minister Michel Barnier, who informed a recent high-level Transatlantic seminar: "What our American friends must understand is that we are going to build Europe not only as a market but as a power."

That raising of the old Gaullist flag of a Europe as "a counterweight" to the United States, which has been a feature of French diplomacy since the days of President Charles De Gaulle from 1958-1969, wins few salutes in the new Europe.

The EU's eight new member states from Central and Eastern Europe, who still feel the heavy legacy and the enduring shadow of 40 years under Soviet dominance, have no intention of playing the French game. They understand clearly that their national security in the future will be far more secure with NATO and a continuing American military presence in Europe than with some French-devised security system that will be long on rhetoric and woefully short on performance.

In his first interviews since becoming the agreed candidate to run the EU Commission, Portugal's Barroso has been crystal clear in his rejection of this French "counterweight" theory, even when Paris dresses it up as simply an inevitable process of an emerging multi-polar world in which American dominance will be eroded by the coming new great powers of China and India.

"It is stupid to see Europe as a counterweight," Barroso insists. "In some European countries, there is the idea we'll be independent if we are a counterweight. This is silly. It is a counterpart, not a counterweight."

"What is strategically intelligent in building an identity against the United States?" Barroso asks. Or responsible."

If nothing else, did anyone ever really think the leaders of Europe would go to their electorates and say social services were going to have to be cut to pay for a real military?

Posted by Orrin Judd at July 5, 2004 6:00 PM