World Policy Journal
Volume XX, No 3, Fall 2003

Transatlantic Folly: NATO vs. the EU
David P. Calleo ^*

 

Recent months have seen an explosion of commentary about the transatlantic relationship. Much of its content is familiar. Indeed, the same basic issues run through five decades of discourse about Western interdependence: Is the transatlantic relationship properly balanced? Are the West European allies treated as genuine partners? Do they carry their proper share? Do European and American basic interests diverge? Who, in fact, is exploiting whom?

Significantly, throughout the Cold War there was no lack of loud complaints about transatlantic imbalance from the Americans. From one postwar decade to the next, successive administrations accused their European allies of free riding on American military power. The complaints were not merely financial—about relative military spending—but also diplomatic and political. The real American grievance was not so much that Europeans were militarily dependent. In many ways, American policy struggled to preserve that dependency— through the Non-Proliferation Treaty, for example. More often, the grievance was that America’s Western allies, despite their military dependency, remained remarkably independent politically and diplomatically. They disagreed with successive American administrations not only over such matters as the appropriate level of military contributions, or how to organize nuclear and conventional deterrence, but also over how to deal with the Russians, or manage the dollar’s international role and the global economy in general.

America’s allies, moreover, were often able to impose their views—or at least to force the United States into compromises that its various administrations would have preferred to avoid. Such complaints suggested that, despite Europe’s dependency, the NATO alliance was remarkably balanced during the Cold War. For better or worse, it was a real alliance, rather more a Western concert than an American-run empire.

If contentious disagreements were normal throughout the Cold War, why do so many analysts believe the present quarrels indicate a genuine break with the past? Why is the alliance now widely thought to be in an existential crisis? The most obvious answer is that today’s U.S. government is much less willing to defer to its Western allies. But what has made preserving the Western alliance so much lower a priority for the United States? It is not self-evident why Europe should weigh less than formerly. Europe, after all, is richer and more integrated than in 1970 or 1980, and now has the euro. To be sure, Europe’s hard military power is not equal to that of the United States. But this has been the case since the end of World War II. Why now, when the common enemy has disappeared, should Europe’s relative military weakness be so important?

Numerous answers are currently fashionable. Confrontation with terrorism is widely said to have changed America’s perspectives radically. Well before 9/11, however, various studies were predicting transatlantic trouble, thanks to fundamental shifts in the global economy, or demographic and cultural changes in America itself. America’s trade has been growing more rapidly with fast-growing Asia than with Europe.¹ Demographically, the United States is said to have grown greatly “de-Europeanized.” A larger and larger proportion of the population is Hispanic and Asian. “Successor generations” of leaders lack the old affinity and residual reverence for European culture.

No doubt, explanations of this sort call attention to real changes that may well play a significant role.² There is, however, an obvious, immediate, and compelling geopolitical explanation for what has caused Europe to lose its geopolitical weight on American scales. That is the end of the Cold War itself.

The disappearance of the Soviet Union was, of course, a major geopolitical shock— a mutation of the global system. Naturally, it affected the transatlantic relationship. Since the end of World War II, two such geopolitical mutations have greatly shaped Western relations. One was the beginning of the Cold War. The other was its end.

The start of the Cold War in the late 1940s gave rise to an environment favorable not only to the Atlantic Alliance, but also to Western Europe’s rapid recovery and integration. It is worth remembering how, in the postwar years before the Cold War, relations between the United States and Europe went through a very rocky time. Even before Franklin Roosevelt’s death in April 1945, shortly after the Yalta Conference, there were numerous signs of a coming chill in transatlantic relations. These were prefigured in Roosevelt’s troubled relations with Winston Churchill, not to mention his stunningly acerbic relations with General de Gaulle. Indeed, the president harbored many ideas about Europe that suddenly seem rather familiar. As he saw things, “Old Europe” was the place where most of the world’s troubles regularly originated.³ He was determined to remove American troops from Europe as rapidly as possible. His imagination was not preoccupied with Europe’s reconstruction. He strongly opposed Europe’s states returning to their prewar global status, most especially by retaining their old empires. In Roosevelt’s vision, the United States was to be the unique global power, whose future lay in the world at large—with new powers, like Russia and maybe China, and in the vast opportunities that would open for global trade and development. In many respects, the wartime Franklin Roosevelt was the heir of his imperialist cousin Theodore. Placed in a position of what seemed supreme power, Franklin resurrected those dreams of global dominance that had flourished at the turn of the century.⁴ By contrast, the vision of a close transatlantic “partnership” was much more a British than an American idea. It was more a product of Churchill’s imagination than of Roosevelt’s design. And relations with Churchill’s Labour Party successors were remarkably bad in the postwar years. Lend-lease to Britain was brutally cut off at the war’s end. When the desperate British sought a loan in 1946, and sent the dying John Maynard Keynes to negotiate it, the American response was niggardly in the extreme.⁵

America’s views changed rapidly with the onset of the Cold War. The new reality was the Soviet threat—with a huge Soviet army in the middle of Europe and Western Europe the grand prize at stake. It would be naïve to suppose that geopolitical fear of the Soviets played no role in unlocking the rich flow of resources embodied in the Marshall Plan, and subsequently in NATO. The fear of “losing Europe” rapidly disciplined earlier American tendencies toward anti-European globalist daydreaming. Had the Soviets succeeded in dominating Europe, the whole balance of world power would have turned against the United States. Not only did the Cold War lock the United States into the defense of Western Europe, it also limited American political power over its West European protectorates. Given the Soviet threat, and its resonance among large elements of the population in the several major West European countries, the United States could not afford to antagonize European governments severely, nor European publics either. Thus the Cold War made West European states “free riders,” not only off the American military power that contained the Soviets, but also off the Soviet military power that balanced and limited the Americans. In effect, the real geopolitical balance of the Cold War was not bipolar, but tripolar.

This is not to suggest a moral equivalency between American leadership in the West and Soviet domination of the East. Nor is it necessarily to condemn “free riding”—the intelligent use of geopolitical leverage. It is merely to acknowledge that the Soviet threat created a tripolar balance. And it was that tripolar balance, encouraging American solicitude and forbearance, that made it easy for European states to achieve the role of allies rather than be reduced to the role of protectorates, despite their relatively low military spending. In other words, it was within that tripolar balance that postwar West European countries were able to pursue their welfare states so successfully, as well as construct their lopsided form of European Community. Europe, leaving much of its defense to the Americans, concentrated instead on its own social stability and economic prowess. It thereby made itself able to compete successfully with America. As a result, the close economic relations that went with American military protection strengthened and stimulated Europe’s economies, rather than reducing them to American satellites.

With the Soviet collapse, the transatlantic alliance lost its former geopolitical balance, so favorable to Western Europe. The current upsurge of conflicting polemics reflects the continuing struggle over the consequences, one where assertions of American hegemony alternate with bouts of American indifference, now that the United States has no global rival that threatens Europe.

It is not only America that has grown more assertive since the Soviet demise: so have the European states themselves. Taken together, the Maastricht, Amsterdam, and Nice treaties, the euro, the recent Constitutional Convention and prospective Intergovernmental Conference (ICG), plans for the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) and the European Security and Defense Policy (ESDP), together with the European Union’s massive enlargement now underway, constitute nothing less than a major restructuring of the European state system, an extraordinary burst of creative political action. Thus, while the United States has been pursuing its familiar but now relatively unrestrained globalist and transatlantic agendas, Europe has been following a radical agenda of its own. This agenda reflects less a general enthusiasm for integration per se, than a determined and sustained attempt to exorcise the inner instability that characterized the European state system throughout the twentieth century—the “German Problem” that caused two world wars and, arguably, the Cold War as well.

Hegemony vs. Autonomy
Between the fall of Napoleon and the unification of Germany (in 1871), the autonomous European state system was reasonably stable. Thereafter, it grew murderously unstable. Otto von Bismarck’s new German empire was too big and dynamic to fit comfortably within the old continental balance of power. It automatically aroused fear and hostility among its neighbors. Bismarck’s nightmares of encircling coalitions proved prophetic, as the France he had defeated in due course put together an anti-German coalition, needed, the French believed, to ensure their own survival as a great power. Surrounded by hostile great powers, an economically dynamic Germany lusted for more geopolitical space—if not in Mitteleuropa, then in the global order that had long been the preserve of the world’s older and more established great powers. But Imperial Germany proved not big enough to leapfrog the European system to become a global power. She was too late at the imperial feast. Her global ambitions implied the creative destruction of older empires, most notably the British. In the end, Germany’s global ambitions also pointed to conflict with the United States, already, by the turn of the century, waiting to inherit the earth.⁶

After World War I, followed by the Nazi regime and World War II, the victors of 1945 could hardly ignore the German Problem. After two world wars, it was not easy to imagine a European state system that was both autonomous and stable. The “bipolar” Cold War system that followed was, among other things, a way of dealing with the German Problem. It offered three solutions simultaneously: hegemony, dismemberment, and regional integration. Hegemony was imposed by the two external superpowers, as they partitioned Europe between them. Their instruments, NATO and the Warsaw Pact, not only balanced each other but also dismembered and occupied Germany. Hence Lord Ismay’s famous agenda for NATO: keep “the Americans in, the Germans down, and the Russians out.”⁷

Hegemony and dismemberment were old-fashioned remedies that Bismarck would have understood all too well. Regional integration was the new “European” solution to the German Problem. In practice, it reflected Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi’s interwar vision of Paneuropa—a French-German partnership to lead Europe together, and to solve the German Problem without calling in external superpowers.⁸

Hegemony, dismemberment, and regional integration, contradictory in the abstract, proved mutually reinforcing in practice. The competing superpower hegemonies not only stabilized Europe militarily, but also served to justify Germany’s occupation. West Germans, so long as they were threatened by the Soviets, could count American troops as protectors rather than conquerors. But perhaps it was regional integration that the Soviet presence benefited most of all. Dividing Germany made the Federal Republic a manageable partner for France. With NATO and the Warsaw Pact in place, Western Europe’s economic and political integration could proceed unencumbered by fear over Germany’s military revival. The Soviet empire, terrible for those trapped within it, nevertheless benefited Western Europe’s integration by limiting the European Community to manageable dimensions and, at the same time, preempting competition over Mitteleuropa.

To some analysts, Europe’s postwar situation seemed so ideal that change was difficult to imagine. As we know, finally it was the Russians themselves who directly brought down the tripolar postwar system. Liberating the Soviet empire in Central and Eastern Europe ended up disintegrating the Soviet Union itself. A key moment in this collapse came when Mikhail Gorbachev decided not to intervene militarily to save the tottering East German regime.

East Germany’s disintegration quickly outran the imaginations of political leaders. The Berlin Wall having fallen, the Federal Republic soon swallowed the German Democratic Republic. To consolidate so radical a change in the European system the Germans needed American support in dealing with the Soviets and French support in dealing with the rest of Europe. The American and French governments, however, had quite different views about the future. The Bush administration wanted to preserve the hegemonic system, but also to convert it from a bipolar system to a unipolar model. French president François Mitterrand wanted an autonomous European confederacy led by France and Germany.

For the American negotiators, the principal issue of Germany’s reunification was whether it preserved NATO, seen as the instrument for a continuing American protectorate over a now wider, more open Europe. Unification was considered an arrangement to be settled among the victors of World War II. The result was the “two-plus-four” talks of 1990, which included the two German states and the four victors of World War II. The two Germanies were permitted to settle the details of their own relations, while the Americans, British, French, and Soviets held their long-delayed peace conference. The Bush administration succeeded brilliantly. The Soviets withdrew peacefully, and the Warsaw Pact disappeared. All of united Germany remained in NATO, which soon began enlarging deep into the old Soviet sphere.⁹

This was not a solution that satisfied all Europeans, the French in particular. Accelerating Soviet disintegration, they realized, pointed toward the end of the Cold War arrangements that had kept the peace in Europe since the end of World War II. At the close of the twentieth century, European history was coming full circle. Once more Europe faced a Big Germany. What new geopolitical framework would prevent a return to the old German Problem? The Americans proposed NATO: in other words, continuing their own Cold War hegemony, with Germany as their “special partner” in leadership. But the French were not sanguine about the consequences of relying on the United States to provide stability for an otherwise unbalanced European system. And they were ill at ease with the prospect of a superpower grown “unipolar.” Accordingly, they demanded that a united Germany join them in a major strengthening of the European confederacy.¹⁰ Chancellor Helmut Kohl, the heir not only of Bismarck’s German ambitions, but of Konrad Adenauer’s European visions, was well disposed to accede. The European Community’s Maastricht Treaty, negotiated in 1991, was the result. It included European monetary union and a European foreign and security policy, and pointed toward common defense. The Copenhagen Agreement of 1993 added the EU’s blueprint for widening.

Two broad solutions thus emerged for post–Cold War Europe. The first was American hegemony, organized through NATO. The second was European confederacy, built around the European Community, soon to become the European Union. American hegemony reasserted its claim in the two-plus-four agreements of 1990. Europe’s upgraded confederacy sprang forth with the Maastricht Treaty, signed in early 1992. Each agreement marked a dynamic solution-in-progress. Two-plus-four was followed, in due course, by the various enlargements and redefinitions of NATO. Maastricht prefigured the European Union’s own progressive widening and deepening.¹¹

The two solutions were very different. One meant a prolonged American hegemony, the other pointed toward an autonomous Europe. While hegemonic and confederal solutions had coexisted peaceably over the several decades of the Cold War, it remained to be seen whether they could remain complementary without the Soviet threat. In recent years, their inherent conflict has grown difficult to ignore. But even in the early 1990s, when the rival solutions were taking form, their fundamentally different world-views were dividing Europeans and Americans, with increasing transatlantic misunderstandings and conflicts.¹²

With the Iraq War, the differences have finally exploded into the open. Deep conflicts have appeared within both NATO and the EU. For the moment, the United States, playing on the divisions between “Old and New Europe,” seems to have turned openly against the EU and its longstanding aspirations for a common foreign and security policy. Meanwhile, the French and the Germans remain faithful to their European agenda, and make clear that a strong Europe will have a mind of its own. The two solutions—NATO and the EU—thus stand at daggers drawn. The danger is that each will end up defeating the other. A NATO opposed by the continent’s two leading powers seems an unpromising project. At the same time, an EU opposed by America seems unlikely to progress rapidly toward closer union. Indeed, it may well grow less cohesive, particularly as it plunges into the uncertain adventure of enlargement. With NATO and the EU enfeebling each other, Europe’s old demons may well return.

A Partnership of Equals
What are the practical lessons that follow? The false lesson, in my view, is that the transatlantic and European solutions can no longer coexist. That lesson is false for two reasons. To begin with, the EU still needs a benevolent United States to ensure its own internal balance. Progress in European integration, including the critical Franco-German axis, has greatly depended on America’s silent presence as a guarantor of Europe’s internal stability. With enlargement toward Russia, the need for importing America’s benevolent reassurance is perhaps greater than ever. And certainly, determined American hostility can easily make the problems of the EU’s cohesion insoluble.

Not only does the EU’s internal balance still require a friendly United States, but American stability increasingly requires a strong and friendly EU. America’s military power risks growing too great to be controlled purely by America’s own constitutional structure. A vigorous Europe—America’s intimate ally and friend, but with a strong mind of its own and the capacity to act effectively—has become a critical element in preserving America’s own constitutional balance, indeed America’s sanity. If the truth be told, probably no major European country is today governable without the EU. For its members, the EU provides an external constitutional superstructure, a referent that sets a national framework for disciplining domestic politics. Like Europe, America, too, is a sprawling federal structure. In civil affairs, the balance between central and regional governments continues to guard liberty and function well enough. But America’s huge military power, combined with a growing predisposition for global dominance among American elites, forms a concentrated element of central power that is alarmingly asymmetrical within America’s traditional federal checks and balances. To balance it requires something more, something roughly analogous to the EU in Europe’s civil sphere. NATO and the U.N. Security Council are the institutionson hand. But to play such a constitutional role, NATO must be something more than a “toolbox” for American projects. It must be an alliance with a genuinely equal partner, although equality need not be achieved with identical assets on each side. Europe should not run away from this role, for America’s sake as well as its own. To play such a role, however, Europe’s lopsided confederacy can no longer remain in its Cold War form. It cannot hope to continue as a merely “civilian” force, heavily dependent on American military protection. The states of the EU are unlikely to remain comfortable as military dependencies of post–Cold War America. And they cannot hope to find a satisfactory relationship with their big ally merely by signing up, from time to time, for adventures elsewhere.

To survive the Soviet collapse, the whole transatlantic relationship must be rebalanced. That means that Europe, deprived of its Soviet crutch, must itself become a much more complete power—able to stand on its own. This is not to say that Europe should itself try to replace the Soviets as America’s global rival. Global capitalism is not supposed to be a zero-sum game. There is no reason for Europe to grow infatuated with military power for gunboat diplomacy throughout the world. But Europe must be able, at the very least, to ensure its own military security. Certainly, it needs the capacity to maintain order in its own space. It is Europe’s inability to maintain order in its own “near abroad”—so painfully illustrated in Yugoslavia—that provokes America’s contempt. The longer the alliance remains unbalanced in this respect, the greater the risk of an uncontrollable resentment—on both sides—that will lead to a real break.

Neither side can afford that break. For there is a further compelling reason to preserve the transatlantic relationship. Just as the postwar era has not allowed France and Germany the geopolitical leisure to quarrel with one another, so the world of the future will not allow the United States and Europe the leisure for mutual estrangement. The current unipolar vision fashionable in Washington should not be taken too seriously. With a uniting Europe, probably a resurgent Russia, a troubled but still formidable Japan, and a rapidly developing China, and with perhaps India, Brazil, and Indonesia in the wings, our world will not long remain unipolar—if indeed it makes sense to call it unipolar now. No one can be certain how this new plural world will evolve. But one thing is certain: it will be a world with tremendous problems—problems of income distribution, environmental degradation, and catastophic terrorism. Moreover, these problems will exist not merely with feeble rogue states but among major powers with serious nuclear deterrents, states that cannot be suppressed by some contemporary version of gunboat diplomacy. Tomorrow’s huge problems will be managed—if at all— by a genuine concert of great powers, habituated to negotiating regularly and ceaselessly to find a community of interest. Such a global concert seems unlikely to evolve except on the foundation of an already deep transatlantic friendship. But that friendship is unlikely to endure except as a friendship among equals, a friendship based on balance.

Europe, with its vast postwar experience in anticipating and conciliating conflicts among states, ought to have a great role to play in shaping the world’s future structure. Europe should be the catalytic great power for building a world order based on reasonableness and mutual appeasement. And America, having done so much to bring this Europe into being, must now have the wisdom to stick fast to its own generous vision, to embrace the partnership of equals that has consistently been that vision’s logical conclusion.

Notes