EU and Whose Army?

On matters of military force, Europe needs to realize that it actually has conflicting principles. In late January, I met in Brussels with some leading members of the European Parliament, who explained why the notion of preemptive war was particularly repugnant to them. (As if anyone representing a continent that had experienced the preemptive wars of 1914 and 1939 needed to explain that.) "All our experience leads us to say, 'Never again' to war and holocaust," one legislator said. But holocausts are seldom averted absent the use of force, and Europe's inability to block the massacres of Bosnia and the ethnic cleansing of Kosovo reveal the shortcomings of its nonmilitary preferences when faced with a challenge to its own moral imperatives.

The policy of saying "no" to America's unilateral use of preemptive force may be morally satisfying and strategically sound. But it has failed to deter the United States or to weaken Saddam Hussein's resistance to inspections, which has eroded only under threat of imminent war. The alternative to this war is inspection and containment, in the manner laid out by former Clinton State Department official Morton H. Halperin in these pages last year [see "Deter and Contain," tap, Nov. 4, 2002]: an aggressive inspection regime, in control of all the skies over Iraq and with a mandate to destroy from the air all buildings from which inspectors are denied entry by Hussein's government.

But both these kinds of interventions (Bosnia and Iraq), as well as more conventional conflicts, would require of Europe some things it does not have: a rapid reaction force and a will to use it. In the late 1990s, Tony Blair and French President Jacques Chirac called for establishing such a force, but Europe's attention has been directed inward, and no such force as yet exists. What's more telling is that the United States, for all its claims that it would like more allies, is dead set against such a force. Indeed, as the Cato Institute's Christopher Layne has noted, the United States is arguing that each European nation should develop some niche military capability rather than have Europe develop an autonomous force. By the same token, the United States encouraged the European Union to expand eastward in hopes that the new nations would bring perspectives widely variant from those of the western states. It has also voiced concerns that in the preliminary plans for a European Constitution, individual nations will not be able to veto a foreign policy agreed upon by a majority vote. The White House's ability to pick off a Blair here, a Berlusconi there, would be totally undermined.

In short, the United States has been conducting a preemptive war against a unified Europe for some time now.

And yet the Bush and neocon model of an America First century is either undesirable or unsustainable -- or both. Even if we accept the wholly implausible thesis that a U.S. overthrow of Hussein and subsequent occupation and reconstruction of Iraq would democratize the Middle East, for instance, the willingness of the American people to support such a project would run counter to the vision of a privatized America that the conservatives commend here at home. The generation of Americans who supported the Marshall Plan had themselves benefited from an activist government; they were accustomed to a government that undertook major public works and that put millions of Americans on public payrolls. Today, state and local governments are slashing basic services while the Bush administration is throwing money at the rich. Why, under these conditions, conservatives expect Americans to pay for the reconstruction of Iraq is anyone's guess. The kind of solidaristic values and confidence in the public sphere needed to support such an ambitious, enlightened project can be found today, ironically, only in Europe.

Americans must hope that, in this era of global integration, we are not at the brink of the American century. If anything, the Europeans should take some time out from perfecting Europe to project their values more forcefully on the wider world. We need Europe to save us from ourselves.