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Variable Geography: America's Mental Maps of a Greater Europe

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Variable Geography: America's Mental Maps of a Greater Europe Variable geography: America’s mental maps of a Greater Europe MARTIN WALKER The speech by President Kennedy which Europeans tend to remember was his pledge of solidarity at the Berlin Wall: ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’. By contrast, his Paulskirche speech, in which he envisaged an eventual political union between the US and the young European Community, is now almost entirely forgotten. But, coming a year after the President’s ‘Declaration of Interdependence’ between Europe and the United States, it deserves recalling as the high point of American idealized vision for ‘our European friends to go forward in creating the more perfect union which will someday make this concrete Atlantic partnership possible’.1 The Paulskirche speech of 1963, with Ludwig Erhard and the Presidents of both the Bundestag and Bundesrat in the audience, and given in the hall where the Frankfurt assembly of 1848 convened to establish a united and democratic German confederation, was intended to be the formal high point of the President’s voyage. It was certainly visionary enough for the occasion: The Atlantic Community will not soon become a single overarching superstate. But practical steps towards stronger common purpose are well within our means. As we widen our common effort in defense, and our threefold cooperation in economics (in trade, development and monetary policies), we shall inevitably strengthen our politial ties as well. Just as your current efforts for unity in Europe will produce a stronger voice in the dialog between us, so in America our current battle for the liberty and prosperity of all our citizens can only deepen the meaning of our common historic purposes. In the far future, there may be a great new union for us all.2 Diminished echoes of both the rhetoric and the underlying policy core of Kennedy’s vehement espousal of European and Atlantic integration have survived to the present day, despite repeated strains over the dollar, trade, Israel, sanctions, the Balkans, and US strategic policies. The 1990s, in particular, were a critical decade because the Soviet collapse removed the glue which had bound 1 Public Papers of the Presidents, J. F. Kennedy, vol. III, p. 537ff, 4 July 1962, Independence Hall, Philadelphia. 2 Op. cit., vol. IV, p. 517ff, 25 June 1963, Paulskirche, Frankfurt. International Affairs 76, () ‒ 76_3_03_Walker 459 9/6/00, 1:33 pm Martin Walker the NATO alliance together. The decade opened amid recurrent American concerns that the new single market would create a ‘Fortress Europe’, and that the US would face serious commercial challenges from both Japan and Europe.3 Moreover, the 1990s saw the EU nations agree to establish a common currency which would inevitably challenge the traditional primacy of the US dollar, and to develop common foreign and security policies which carried the obvious risk of institutional disagreement with the American ally. In the United States, the 1990s saw the election of a candidate who explicitly promised not to be ‘a foreign policy President’ and of a Republican Congress with a strong uni- lateralist, if not isolationist, bent. Over one hundred members of the House of Representatives elected in 1994 did not have a passport, and more of them had visited China than had visited Europe. Neither Russia, nor Europe, nor the Atlantic alliance in general, commanded their automatic priority of the Cold War years as US trade across the Pacific exceeded throughout the 1990s its trade across the Atlantic. Indeed, the Clinton presidency opened with the new Secretary of State Warren Christopher warning that US foreign policy had been ‘too Eurocentric for too long’. The 1990s also saw clear signs of a creeping divergence of strategic interest between Europe and the United States. As the Balkan wars erupted in 1991, Secretary of State James Baker famously declared, ‘We don’t have a dog in this fight’, while the Luxemburg Foreign Minister Jacques Poos, taking advantage of his tiny country’s occupation of the EU’s rotating presidency, equally famously declared, ‘the hour of Europe is at hand’. Critical for Europe, the wars of the Yugoslav succession were of marginal interest to the United States, until Britain and France demanded US military support to cover the threatened withdrawal of their battered peacekeeping troops. Europe’s inability to end or even contain the conflict twice forced a return to the traditional reliance on the United States, both to stabilize the Bosnian war in 1995 and to lead the Kosovo air campaign of 1999. The dependence of rich European countries such as Germany, which spends only 1.5 per cent of its GDP on defence, upon the readiness of Americans to spend 3.5 per cent of their GDP on the only military machine capable of imposing ‘peace’ on the Balkans, has provoked highly critical reactions from both Congress and Clinton administration officials.4 Some of the salient transatlantic rows of the 1990s were not really about trade or even differences over foreign policy choices. They were about power and legal sovereignty, and which of the two entities, the EU or the US, had the authority to assert where its writ should run. The European Commission maintained successfully that its competition rules applied to US companies like 3 See e.g. Lester Thurow, Head to head: the coming economic battle among Japan, Europe and America (New York: Norrow, 1992). See also the brisk wave of best-selling fictional accounts of future wars between the US and Europe: H. W. Coyle, The ten thousand: a novel (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993); Larry Bond, Cauldron (New York: Warner Books, 1994). 4 See e.g. the testimony of Assistant Secretary for Defense Franklin Kramer to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, 9 March 2000: ‘Deficiencies in mobility, communications and sustainment can become unacceptable impediments to mission success’. 460 76_3_03_Walker 460 9/6/00, 1:33 pm Variable geography Boeing, even when they simply sought to buy another US company like Macdonell-Douglas. The US legislated under the Helms-Burton Act that Euro- pean business executives could be penalized under American law for breaching unilateral US rules on trade with Cuba. These clashes were eventually resolved, or rather fudged. Similar arguments over European imports of American foodstuffs containing genetically modified organisms still fester. In retrospect, it may be reckoned both something of a surprise and some- thing of an achievement that the broad US support for NATO and for European integration survived the 1990s as well as it has. The US welcomed and supported the launch of the single European currency, even as the euro’s 25 per cent decline against the dollar triggered a European export boom which added to the record US trade deficit. The US, while urging more speed, has strongly backed the process of EU enlargement into central and eastern Europe. Moreover, NATO itself has been given a new impetus, through enlargement and a new strategic doctrine which acknowledges the principle of collective action outside the traditional place d’armes of the central European front. After the renewed lesson of American military predominance in the skies over Serbia, the 1990s ended with NATO, American influence in Europe, American support for Europe’s continued integration, and the hopeful American rhetoric of partnership all intact. The European summit at Helsinki in December 1999 saw a striking double success for American diplomacy. First, assiduous lobbying from the Clinton administration combined with strong congressional pressure to ensure that the Common European Security and Defence Policy neither duplicated NATO nor threatened to undermine it. The earlier EU summit at Cologne in June 1999, held under the distractions of the final phase of the air war against Serbia, had resulted in a European agreement which troubled Washington as being inadequately Atlanticist, too Eurocentric, and wholly inadequate in defence budgets. The brisk air campaign against Serbia had illuminated in an embarrass- ing way the degree to which the European NATO allies were falling a technological generation behind the United States. More than two-thirds of the NATO sorties were flown by US planes, and the European aircraft which did fly depended utterly on US satellites, communications and anti-aircraft suppression systems. In terms of military capabilities, the alliance had become grotesquely imbalanced. As General Henry Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, noted in his ‘Kosovo After-Action Review’ in October 1999: ‘Such disparities in capabilities will seriously affect our ability to operate as an effective alliance over the long-term.’5 Resolutions were passed in both House and Senate stressing the degree of US concern that the new EU policy should be explicitly Atlanticist, rooted in 5 ‘Kosovo After Action Review’, presented to the US Senate Armed Services Committee, 14 Oct. 1999. For the main thrust of US criticism, see Senate Resolution 208, 1999 (the Roth Resolution): ‘The EU’s implementation of the Cologne summit decisions should not promote a strategic perspective on transatlantic security issues that conflicts with that promoted by the NATO.’ 461 76_3_03_Walker 461 9/6/00, 1:33 pm Martin Walker NATO’s primacy and adequately funded, and should take full account of the interests of NATO members that were not also within the EU. This US pressure had its effect. The Helsinki summit agreed that ‘NATO remains the foundation of the collective defence of its members, and will continue to have an important role in crisis management.’
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