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European Affairs
Special Report: The Rift in Transatlantic Relations
There Is No Clear Line Between "Old" and "New" Europe
By Barry D. Wood
On January 22, U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld put the cat among the canaries. It was at the height of the bitter feuding among allies at the United Nations Security Council over military action against Iraq. The United States, Britain and Spain were in favor, France and Germany opposed.
Asked by a Dutch reporter at a Washington press conference about European opposition to war with Iraq, Mr. Rumsfeld replied: "You're thinking of Europe as Germany and France. I don't. That's old Europe. If you look at the entire NATO Europe today, the center of gravity is shifting to the East. Germany has been a problem, and France has been a problem. But you look at vast numbers of other countries in Europe. They're not with France and Germany on this, they're with the United States."
With those off-the-cuff remarks, Mr. Rumsfeld launched the debate over the "New" versus the "Old" Europe that has enraged many of those assigned to the "Old" Europe, especially in France and Germany. His comments have exacerbated the rift between Atlanticist and Europe-first governments that the war in Iraq has brought into sharper focus, and raised big questions over whether an enlarged European Union will ever be able to adopt a single policy toward the United States.
A week after Mr. Rumsfeld spoke, eight European leaders signed a statement of solidarity with the tough U.S. position on Iraq. The statement, published in the Wall Street Journal Europe, read in part, "The Transatlantic bond is a guarantee of our freedom." The declaration was signed by the prime ministers of Spain, Portugal, Italy, the United Kingdom and Denmark. Also signing were leaders of three countries in line to join the European Union in May 2004 – the prime ministers of Hungary and Poland and the president of the Czech Republic.
The following week, ten more post-communist countries, the Vilnius 10 (so called because they had launched their coordinated campaign to join NATO at a meeting in the Lithuanian capital) issued an even stronger declaration of support for the United States. It was signed by the foreign ministers of Albania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia.
Outwardly, the two statements had nothing to do with the European Union. Mr. Rumsfeld's "New Europe" concerned NATO, the institutional embodiment of Transatlantic cooperation. But on February 17, French President Jacques Chirac brought the New Europe debate to the European Union. Stung by the anti-French, anti-German thrust of the pro-U.S. statements, at the EU summit meeting on Iraq in Brussels Mr. Chirac blasted the EU applicants who signed the declarations. "They had," he told reporters, "missed an opportunity to keep quiet."
By flocking to support the aggressive U.S. stance on Iraq, he thundered in a post-summit press conference, the Central and Eastern European candidate countries had behaved like "badly brought up children." Romania and Bulgaria – EU applicants who will not be joining until at least 2007 – had displayed "dangerous" and "childish behavior." The French president continued, "if they (Romania and Bulgaria) had tried to diminish their chances of getting into Europe, they couldn't have done a better job."
To the Central and Eastern Europeans, the message was clear. Are you with the Americans or with us? From Tallinn to Budapest, stunned politicians found themselves asking: What kind of Europe are we joining?
The response was quick and critical. Romanian Prime Minister Adrian Nastase wryly observed that the French president's remarks were really directed at Washington. "Every time I have a dispute with my wife," he said, "I shout at my sons." Romanian President Ion Iliescu went further. Mr. Chirac's remark was "unfortunate" because "it separates the East European states into being pro-American or anti-American. It would be unwise at a tense moment like this," he continued, "to create a divide between the European Union and the Transatlantic community."
Polish President Alexander Kwasnieski said that Central and Eastern Europe should not have to choose between the United States and Europe. "Neither," he said, "is there an old or a new Europe. It's a false debate." Vaclav Klaus, who in mid-March succeeded Vaclav Havel as President of the Czech Republic, urged caution, saying destabilization in Transatlantic relations must be avoided. Later, the combative Czech politician went further. He rejected the idea of a common EU foreign policy and warned against building up the Union as a counterweight to the United States. "We must," he said, "strengthen the Transatlantic axis and not seek confrontation."
Other reaction stressed the need for equal treatment of member states and recoiled from a perceived diktat from Berlin and Paris. It was too much like taking orders from Moscow during the half century of communism. Latvian foreign minister Sandra Kalniete said she understood the European Union to be a grouping of equal states where everyone's opinions were respected. "It is precisely that kind of union," she said, "that Latvia seeks to join."
Few analysts believe the dispute will derail the planned May 2004 accession of the ten new members – including eight that signed the pro-U.S. statements. Neither is the dispute likely to cause any of the applicant states to vote against accession in the referendums that are being held between now and September in all eight Central and Eastern European applicant states.
There is little doubt, however, that the Iraq debate revealed a deep split within Europe. Former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger wrote in The Washington Post: "The upheaval (over Iraq) has split the European Union between states that seek European identity through confrontation with America and those, led by Britain and Spain, that seek in it an instrument of cooperation."
For Harvard University historian and EU specialist Charles Maier, the division is not so much between a new and old Europe. Rather, he says, "I would call the East Europeans not new Europeans but 'new West' Europeans'." The post-communist states, he says, need the European Union to pay their bills but they will remain pro-American, because they credit a strong and decisive America with bringing down the Soviet Union. "Europe," he says, "is in flux" with new arrangements and affiliations being developed.
Radek Sikorski, the former Polish foreign and defense ministry official now affiliated with the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, believes the declarations of support for the United States are decisively significant. They have, he says, "prevented Germany and France from creating an anti-American EU foreign policy." East Europe, he argues, is a New Europe and its leader is Britain's Prime Minister Tony Blair.
Professor Maier of Harvard agrees, arguing that the New Europe dispute has more to do with French opposition to Britain's pro-American policies than with Central and Eastern Europe. "Britain," he says, "is still seen by the French as the stalking horse for the Americans in Europe." Similarly, Mr. Kissinger sees the tectonic shift in Transatlantic relations being driven by a resurgence of Gaullism, "which insisted on a Europe with an identity defined in distinction from the United States."
Mart Laar, the articulate Estonian who in the mid-1990s was Europe's youngest prime minister, writes that the events of January and February have changed Europe. The New Europeans, he says, will not shut up and will not choose between the Americans and the Old Europe. Instead, through becoming EU members they will invigorate the Union and "force through reforms that will make a united Europe more competitive."
In virtually all Central and Eastern European countries the twin pillars of post-communist policy have been integration into European and Transatlantic structures. EU membership represents economic integration, NATO the security component. But even Mr. Laar wonders about NATO, after the bitter argument in the Alliance in February over sending defensive missiles to Turkey. After this debacle, he asks, "Is NATO still the great defense institution we all dreamed of joining?"
Other new members worry about the close relationship their former enemy, Russia, has developed with NATO, as well as about the presence of Moscow in the three-nation alliance between France, Germany and Russia which has seemed to take shape largely to promote alternatives to U.S. policies. NATO has been faster than the European Union to incorporate countries previously on the other side of the Iron Curtain. The Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland joined the Alliance in 1999. In November 2002, in Prague, NATO leaders extended invitations to seven more post-communist countries, the three Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania), Slovakia, Slovenia, Romania and Bulgaria, which are due to join the Alliance next year.
But what will the expanding NATO look like in future? Ted Galen Carpenter at Washington's Cato Institute believes Washington's failure to enlist full NATO support for its Iraq policy will prompt the Americans to pay less attention to it. "NATO," he says, "a decade from now is likely to be a hollow shell of its former self." Even before the Transatlantic rift, Romania and Bulgaria, which now fear their 2007 date with the European Union is in jeopardy, were actively marketing their territories as permanent U.S. bases should the Americans decide to move facilities East from Germany.
As U.S. forces moved to the Gulf in advance of the Iraq operation, dozens of U.S. troops were stationed at a Bulgarian air base near the Black Sea port of Burgas with a similar contingent in place at a Romanian airbase near the port of Constanta. This was at the very time that the European Union's long-planned defense component was finally launched with a small EU force taking over NATO's peacekeeping operation in neighboring Macedonia on April 1.
It may be that in an evolving European Union the Franco-German stand against America over Iraq was the final decisive action of the Franco-German axis that has been at the center of European affairs for 40 years. Assuming an EU membership of 25 countries in 2004, a majority of 13 countries (the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain and the United Kingdom) broke with Germany and France over Iraq. This was despite the fact that in Central and Eastern Europe, as in Western Europe, public opinion was solidly against the war.
Inevitably, it would seem, the pro-American stance of the new Europe will affect the development of a common EU foreign policy. All eight of the "New Europe" EU members will almost certainly oppose attempts to mold the Union into a bloc that is a counterweight to the United States. Similarly, the new members can be expected to oppose actions that will enhance the power of Brussels at what they see as the expense of member states. The weight of recent history – during which Moscow (or Belgrade in the case of Slovenia) gave orders that had to be unquestionably obeyed – is simply too fresh and too powerful for countries still savoring their newfound independence to submit easily to control by new centralized institutions.
Over time, however, the economic weight of Paris and particularly Berlin could be as decisive as post-Cold War loyalties to the United States. Mr. Galen Carpenter is convinced that the post-communist states will increasingly align themselves with their West European neighbors. "They know," he says, "that if they want to be constructive members of the European Union, France and Germany hold the keys – financial and otherwise."
This is likely to be particularly true for the Czech Republic, where German investments are large and the social democratic government refused to endorse the pro-American statement signed by President Havel. Hungarian policy is also becoming more closely aligned to that of Austria, its former partner in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
The new Central and Eastern European members are also unlikely to line up in the same way on every issue once they join the Union, where the political traditions favor shifting alliances according to the interests at stake. On some issues, such as a future constitution for Europe, it is already clear that some of the arguments will be between big and small states, with Poland counting as a "big" state, alongside France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom, and all the other Central and European countries counting as "small" states. On issues ranging from the Common Agricultural Policy to regional expenditure, governments in the 25-nation Union are unlikely to divide on strictly "New" versus "Old" Europe lines.
The center of gravity in Europe may indeed be shifting. But, says Professor Maier, it is not moving East as Mr. Rumsfeld asserts. Instead, he argues, it is diffusing. "There is at the present time," he says, "a dominant Rhenish Europe that is not happy with the United States," and then there are other countries – Italy to the south, Britain to the Northwest, and post-communist states to the East – that to greater or lesser degrees favor a continuing American presence in Europe."
Barry D. Wood is Voice of America's international economics correspondent. He broadcasts on VOA radio and television on U.S. and global economic developments including financial markets, technology and corporate performance. During a three-year assignment in Prague, he focused on the transformation to free markets under way in two dozen post-communist countries.