PESKY KID BROTHERS

From America's heartland: Europe drops out of the picture (Wayne Merry, International Herald Tribune, December 28th, 2004)

Beyond economics, however, Europe pretty much drops off the radar screen. The European popular obsession with American power and influence has no counterpart in America, even among people with strong interest in international issues. Europe simply stopped being an issue when the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Union imploded. Europe as the locus of American attention and anxiety during the cold war is entirely a thing of the past. Among students, interest in the cold war ranks with Vietnam and well below the American Civil War.

I suspect most Europeans - with their daily diet of news, views and theories about America - would be surprised how utterly asymmetric is the interest. Americans care very much about the external world, but about the trouble spots (the Middle East, North Korea, Africa), transnational issues (terrorism, nuclear proliferation, AIDS, environment), and countries seen to be of the future (China and India). Europe is not a problem, not global, and of the past. A nice place to visit, but pricey.

Politically, beyond the lonely figure of Britain's prime minister, Tony Blair, no European looms large in American eyes. Even President Jacques Chirac of France is seen as a nuisance rather than a force to be reckoned with. There is a realistic understanding - albeit accompanied by annoyance - that Europe will do the minimum in Iraq. There is also a strong sense that it is time for Europe to look after its own defense and to pay its own security bills.

While Americans would prefer a more active European partner in dealing with the challenges of tomorrow, they don't expect it. In part, this reflects a different view of what those challenges may be. Americans share European concerns about global ecology, health and poverty, but worry more about terrorism, the spread of nuclear weapons and "rogue states." They would like multilateral solutions, but doubt there will be any real substitute for traditional power.

Americans perceive a Europe that values comfort and safety, but that is also in long-term demographic decline and disengagement from unpleasant realities. War may no longer be part of European life (for which Americans think they merit some of the credit), but in American eyes it is a fantasy to project this reality on the wider world.

One of the psychological fallouts of multilateral trans-nationalism is how it provides a chimera of importance and influence to smaller nations and especially to their politicians and diplomats. Countries like Canada and the Nordics are notorious for dreaming up grand initiatives to cure the world’s ills and setting out to market them at never-ending multilateral meetings. They aren’t all useless or ill-founded, but domestic politics and the conceit that they flow from a more virtuous wellspring than anything the powerful can come up with quickly corrupts them and results in a single-minded focus on process and rhetoric. Their sponsors often end up looking like desperate itinerant salesmen trying to push goods past their stale date.

The traditional European powers now seem to be in the game. One of regular news items of 2004 was Jacques Chirac in some remote and savage land flogging something called “multipolarity” to the point of making a complete ass of himself, as when he described the spread of French as an environmental issue before an undoubtedly puzzled Vietnamese audience. The Germans have rediscovered the joys of wandering the globe to preach for peace, and all of them, including Britain, seemed bound and determined to play a role in the Middle East for what reason nobody knows. That they are being played for useful fools by Iran seems to have escaped them completely.

Europe still has economic clout, and may well for a long time, but trade is trade and it is easy to wildly overestimate its role in geopolitics, as Europe itself found out in 1914. (It is ironic that a continent that has always disdained Americans for their commercial pre-occupations now measures its worth and influence almost entirely by the quality of its gadgets.) Americans would be wise to try and put the sense of betrayal over Iraq behind them and accept that European impotence will continue to spawn chest-thumping, meddlesome behaviours and increasingly defiant assertions of importance. It is a function of decline and is part of both human nature and that famous European modesty we all know and love. Given the challenges that lie ahead with Russia, China, India, Korea, Japan, the Middle East and Latin America, (not to mention the pathologies of Africa), they simply aren’t worth the sweat. They are not really allies anymore, at least not in any substantive sense. Better to see them as a lion sees his cubs–a member of some atavistically-defined family who one can’t stop worrying about but who merits a fearsome swat from time to time.