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.

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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’.

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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.’

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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.’ The final Presidency conclusions stressed that the new European defence structure ‘will avoid unnecessary duplication and does not imply the creation of a European army’, while pledging that ‘modalities will be developed for full consultation, cooperation and transparency between the EU and NATO, taking into account the needs of all EU member states’.6 In a second success for US diplomacy, the summit agreed that ‘Turkey is a candidate State destined to join the Union on the basis of the same criteria as applied to the other candidate States.’ This reversed the deliberately cool verdict of the December 1997 European summit, which had excluded Turkey from the list of candidates, after the summit host, Luxembourg’s Prime Minister Jean- Claude Juncker, stated that he did not ‘wish to sit at the European table with a bunch of torturers’. This in turn had followed a remark by German Chancellor Helmut Kohl to the centre-right coalition in the European Parliament, which noted that the EU was ‘a Christian club’. These rebuffs to a country seen by the United States as a loyal and strategically placed NATO ally irritated the US government, which worked hard to reverse the verdict. Indeed, President Clinton intervented personally during the May 1998 Cardiff summit, telephoning the Greek Prime Minister in a vain attempt to persuade him to soften his objections to Turkish membership. These two features of the Helsinki summit testified to the continuing influence which the United States can apply to European affairs, while also illuminating the nature and extent of the kind of Europe the United States wishes to see. Beyond a general and consistent support for the broad concept of an integrated Europe, the United States has never formally sketched out its own mental map of the Europe it hopes will eventually emerge. The classic statement, deliberate in its vagueness, remains President George Bush’s evocation, at a speech in Mainz six months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, of ‘a Germany whole and free in a Europe whole and free’. ‘A Europe whole and free’ can mean everything, and nothing. It is a ringing phrase, which exemplifies the way in which the current American political discourse can combine the soundbite with the grandiose, and slither out of the apparently firm pledge through the escape clause of vacuity. Former Secretary of State James Baker’s expression of a new security concept ‘stretching from Vancouver to Vladivostok’ was similarly as inspiring as it was hollow. And the end of the Cold War offered a beguiling sense of opportunity for grand conceptions to an American foreign policy establishment that had grown up reading Present at the creation, Dean Acheson’s account of the formulation of America’s post-1945 grand strategy of Marshall Plan and NATO. In 1997, the

6 Presidency Conclusions, Helsinki European Council, Council of Ministers’ document, 10–11 Dec. 1999.

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new Secretary of State Madeleine Albright told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee: ‘We must be more than audience, more even than actors, we must be the authors of the history of our age.’ Her entire budget for foreign aid, diplomacy, the United Nations and all other international organizations amounted to barely 1 per cent of the federal budget, ‘but that will be used to write fifty per cent of the history and legacy of our times’.7 Almost by accident, the Clinton administration found itself equipped with a series of tools and institutions that allowed it to meet some of these goals, without ever having to define precisely what Europe was, or might become, where it stopped, or what the limits might be of ‘the new transatlantic community’ which President Clinton hailed in a January 1994 speech in Brussels. The United States was a member of two of these organizations: the tightly defined military alliance of NATO, and the much broader and looser Organi- zation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), and was able to exert the direct influence of a member upon both. The United States was not a member of the EU, the tightly defined economic and political community bound ever more closely together by a body of European law, nor of the much wider Council of Europe, which now includes forty-one European and formerly Soviet states. Nor was the United States a member of the Western European Union, that often disparaged heir of the 1947 Treaty of Brussels, which was nevertheless to become an important institutional foundation of ESDI. To these, the Clinton administration in its first term added a sixth, Partnership for Peace (PfP), which began as an alternative to, and then became an ante-room and in some cases a conveyor belt leading into NATO member- ship. It became, in the words of US Ambassador to NATO Robert Hunter, ‘the magic bullet—reassuring any partner country that it could form a deep, permanent association with NATO, more or less of its own choosing, short of membership itself ’.8 This array of institutions allowed US and EU policy-makers to juggle the various hopes of central and eastern European countries for membership or association. They could plausibly claim that no country was entirely excluded, that all options remained open, and that even exclusion from one or more bodies did not mean exclusion from the wider concept of a transatlantic community. Russia, for example, became in 1997 a member of the Council of Europe (which the United States could not). Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic were invited to join the first wave of enlargement of both NATO and the EU, which meant that they were more fully included than even the United States, which was not a member of the EU. Everybody was entitled to join the OSCE, while only a privileged and qualifying few were invited to join the most important (and most demanding) clubs of NATO and the EU.

7 Madeleine Albright, before US Senate Foreign Relations Committee, 8 Jan. 1997. 8 Robert Hunter, ‘Maximising NATO,’ Foreign Affairs 78: 3, May–June 1999.

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At the same time, the two crucial states of Russia and Ukraine were each granted a special status. In May 1997 Russia and NATO signed a Founding Act to establish a Permanent Joint Council, designed to give Russia ‘a voice, but not a veto’ in NATO decision-making. This also helped mollify Russians concerns about the breach of the pledge made by the Bush administration at the time of German unification that NATO would not expand to the east. The symbolism of Russian troops serving alongside US and NATO forces in the Bosnian peacekeeping operation helped buttress the Western claim that the complex new security architecture was designed to include, rather than isolate it. As President Clinton noted in May 1997, ‘the traditional military alliance of NATO which was aimed against Russia is now being transformed into a transatlantic security system which includes it’. Ukraine was given its own partnership agreement with NATO, through a joint Charter and Commission, which was designed to be vague and flexible enough to reassure Ukraine’s leaders that they were now within the NATO security space, without arousing Russian concerns that a traditional part of the Slavic heartland was slipping outside their sphere of influence. These overlapping and intertwining structures proved to be extremely flexible: variable geography as much as variable geometry. They were, moreover, well suited to the classically open and pragmatic way in which the United States arrives at and carries out its foreign policies. The system of checks and balances built into the US Constitution makes it misleading to see the United States as a traditional nation-state, in the sense of a monolithic body which has taken a single decision and pursues it on the global stage. The House and Senate can have decisive impact on foreign policy, as much through their hold on the purse-strings as through the Senate Foreign Relations and House International Relations Committees. For example, the demand in May 2000 for a congressional vote whether or not to continue keeping US troops in Kosovo after June 2001 came from the Appropriations Committee which would have to approve the funds. Through their systems of public hearings, the congressional committees are strikingly open to argument, and the think-tanks, lobby groups, academics and officials from the past as well as the present administration who make up the US foreign policy establishment are eager to offer their views. This meant that all the different American concepts of Europe which are listed below got an airing. Moreover, the Clinton administration quickly developed a reasonably collegial style of developing policy, in part because President Clinton came into office directly from the governorship of a small southern state and vowing not to be ‘a foreign policy President’ like his predecessor. He thus had relatively few firm foreign policy commitments, and was eager to hear a swathe of different views from his advisers and willing to be persuaded by them. An open mind met a relatively open canvas. The State Department, the National Security Council, the Permanent Representative to the UN (and future Secretary of State) Madeleine Albright, the Department of Defense (which on occasion

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spoke with forked tongue as a civilian and political voice, and as ‘the military’), often had different concepts of Europe’s future and the strategies and pace required to fulfil them. During the first term, the Department of Commerce under Ron Brown was another important institutional voice in this mix, and so in the second term was the US Trade Representative, Charlene Barshevsky. On occasion, the arguments within the Clinton administration were almost as important as the President’s eventual decision. As the rows over Bosnia were reaching their sharpest point, the National Security Advisor Tony Lake persuaded President Clinton to open a new rift with the British government by granting a visa to the Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams, despite the vehement opposition of the State Department, the London Embassy, the CIA, the FBI and the Pentagon. Mr Lake’s decision was subsequently justified by progress in the Northern Ireland peace talks and President Clinton’s personal commitment to the process.9 The President was dissuaded from his initial inclination in 1993 to enlarge NATO on the advice of the Department of Defense, which feared that enlargement would dilute the alliance as a military force. The appointment of a new Secretary of Defense, William Perry, after the resignation of Les Aspin, was therefore important in changing policy. So were events. The embarrassment of the British and French forces in Bosnia in 1993–5, under a complex UN mandate and ponderous command structure, plunged transatlantic relations into serious difficulty. The decision to move ahead with NATO enlargement had some characteristics of a fuite en avant, the rush to a new role and concept for the alliance when the old ones were looking sorely troubled. Similarly, the Kosovo crisis required NATO to cobble together an explanation for the important new precedent that gross violations of human rights could justify military inter- vention in the ‘internal’ affairs of a sovereign state. For the outside analyst, and for the subsequent historian, this policy-making procedure, which was highly congenial to the restless, eclectic intelligence of Mr Clinton, is not easy to disentangle. All the institutions had at least one view (and, in the case of the State Department, often two or three, with the Ambassadors at the UN, at NATO, in London and in Bonn playing particularly influential roles), and all had a voice. Moreover, while never as assiduous in the personal diplomacy by telephone as his predecessor George Bush, Clinton was particularly receptive to the views of some European leaders, notably Helmut Kohl and Tony Blair. Madeleine Albright was always eager to consult Czech President Vaclav Havel. So all of the different concepts of Europe set out below had at least some support within the US policy mix, whether in the administration, the Congress or the wider foreign policy establishment. The flexibility of the range of institutions offering many roads to Europe proved useful to such a collegial, and occasionally chaotic, policy-making system. By emphasizing at different times the NATO route, the EU route, the OSCE or the PfP or the ‘special relationships’ with Russia and Ukraine, or the G7 or

9 M. Walker, The President we deserve (New York: Vintage, 1996), p. 228.

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IMF route for Russian relations, different institutions in the Clinton administra- tion could promote ‘their’ solution, without feeling that their advice had been frozen out. If the range of European institutions offered something for everyone among the hopeful states, it also offered something for everyone among the institutions inside the Clinton administration. Nobody, with brief exceptions for the ‘Russia-firsters’, felt excluded, even if some, after the decisions to enlarge NATO and to commit US troops to the Balkans, felt discomfited. The fortuitous blending of the many voices in Washington with the various routes to Europe offered by NATO, the EU, the OSCE and Council of Europe, guided US (and also European) leaders into a series of mental maps which offered different definitions of what ‘Europe’ might be. • There is a security map, rooted in the NATO core, but reaching out through PfP to eastern Europe, the Baltic states, Ukraine, Russia and the former Soviet states of the Caucasus and Central Asia. Some US officials who focused on the security map explicitly envisaged the prospect of Russia one day joining the EU and NATO. As Madeleine Albright told NATO’s North Atlantic Council in February 1997, ‘Our goal is an undivided Europe. We must ensure that every European democracy, whether it joins NATO sooner, later or not at all, has a role. This includes Russia…this is not a zero-sum game. On the contrary, NATO has recognized that we cannot build a Europe that is whole and free until a democratic Russia is wholly part of Europe.’ Charles Kupchan, a White House official in the first term and then senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, argued in The National Interest in 1999 that ‘Committing to enlargement is to commit to establishing NATO as the central vehicle for building a stable Europe. To halt its expansion at Poland’s eastern border therefore makes no strategic sense. Instead, NATO must set its sights on drawing Russia itself into the alliance.’10 In policy-making, this security map took precedence over all others. This was partly because NATO remained the most useful and powerful tool for the application of US pressure. The United States could control directly the extent and pace of Europe’s transformation through NATO, while it had far less influence over the painfully slow EU accession process. But another factor came into play after 1995 as it became ever more clear that the NATO enlargement model was a highly efficent mechanism. The combination of PfP as a halfway house for membership, the special relationships with Russia and Ukraine, the Membership Action Plans and the encouragement to take increasing part in NATO exercises and peace- keeping operations proved to be a far more realistic and flexible way of managing change than the EU’s necessarily more cumbersome procedure. NATO enlargement was visibly working, while EU enlargement had much to prove.

10 M. Albright to North Atlantic Council, Brussels, 11 Feb. 1997. See also Charles Kupchan, ‘Rethinking Europe’, The National Interest, Summer 1999.

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76_3_03_Walker 466 9/6/00, 1:33 pm Variable geography • There is an economic map, which is rooted in the EU, but reaches out to the east in a series of waves. In March 1998 the EU formally welcomed eleven states into the accession process. Six were deemed ready on economic and socio-political grounds for a fast-track procedure: Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovenia and Estonia—and Cyprus, with a proviso over the the political and security complications of the island’s division. Five more countries were on a slower track: Lithuania and Latvia, Romania and Bulgaria, and Slovakia, the last of these largely out of concern that the authoritarian Meciar government did not meet the EU’s standards on human and civic rights. But this economic map was troubled by the persistent trade disputes between the United States and the EU, which spasmodically irritated Clinton administration officials to the point at which serious warnings were issued. In April 1999 the Under-Secretary of State for economic affairs, Stuart Eizen- stadt (considered in Brussels to be a leading Europhile), launched the proposal for a new integration of the Balkan countries of south-eastern Europe. But he also used the occasion to emphasize American concerns: ‘Today, the emphasis in American thinking is slowly shifting from what the US can do for Europe, to what the US can do with Europe to promote our common interests. America looks to Europe for a partner. In the eyes of some Americans, European eyes remain so focused upon the process of creating a more united Europe that they miss the dangers and opportunities growing around them…Squabbles in the huge US–EU economic relationship are inevitable—since we are both economic partners and competitors. However, in the absence of a shared vision of our global role in preserving prosperity, special interests are likely to drive us into a series of confrontations that will erode the basis of economic security for all our citizens.’11 • There is a cultural map, most clearly expressed through the Council of Europe, which requires a minimum standard of human rights and democratic free- doms from its members, and an acceptance of the rule of law, and in parti- cular the acceptance of the verdicts of its associated European Court of Human Rights. Curiously, the United States would not qualify for member- ship, even aside from matters of geography, because it uses capital punish- ment. Of the Council’s forty-one members, thirty-nine have signed the codicil against the death penalty; the other two, Russia and Turkey, are observing a moratorium on its use. For the United States, the cultural map embodied some assumptions about democracy and human rights which had dramatic operational effects for NATO, in effect asserting that their affront could be a causus belli. US Ambassador to NATO Alexander Vershbow argued in Brussels during the Kosovo campaign: ‘NATO is now in the business of defending common values and interests as well as the territory of its members. Our shared values—freedom, democracy, the rule of law, respect for human rights—are themselves every bit as much worth defending as is our territory.’12

11 S. Eizenstat, address to the Secretary’s Open Forum, 6 April 1999. 12 Cited in S. Kay, ‘NATO’s credibility dilemma’, Security Dialogue 31: 1, March 2000, p. 78.

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76_3_03_Walker 467 9/6/00, 1:33 pm Martin Walker • There is a religious map, which some influential leaders like Helmut Kohl and commentators like Zbigniew Bzrezinski take very seriously. On occasion, as noted above, Chancellor Kohl referred to Europe as ‘a Christian club’, and Mr Bzrezinski told the BBC in April 1998: ‘I would say that in the next twenty years or so Europe is going to stop with the outer boundaries of what might be called the Petrine Europe, the Europe of Rome, in effect, on the Polish–Russian border.’13 The old NATO and EU core were part of traditional Christian Europe, which included both the Protestant and Roman Catholic persuasions. Under this concept, a number of east Europan states automatically qualified for inclusion in the West’s cultural map: Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, and the Baltic states. So did the two former Yugoslav states of Slovenia and Croatia; so also did Romania and the eastern part of Ukraine, where many belonged to the Uniate church, accepting the primacy of the Pope. There was further an Orthodox Europe, which was clearly no bar to either EU or NATO membership since both organizations included Greece. The further-flung Christian churches of Armenia and Georgia may equally claim inclusion in this religious space. Finally, there is an Islamic Europe, which includes Turkey, as a NATO member and important part of the security map, and also part of the economic map after signing the 1995 Customs Agreement with the EU. Islamic Europe also includes Albania and Bosnia-Herzegovina. For the Clinton administration, and pace Bzrezinski, the priority was to ensure that religions did not get in the way. Warren Christopher, Secretary of State in the first Clinton term, stressed: ‘Our strategy of integration must not recognize any fundamental divide among the Catholic, Orthodox, and Islamic parts of Europe. That kind of thinking fuelled the war in the former Yugoslavia and it must have no place in the Europe we are building.’14 • There is also a geographic map, whose lack of precision has been plain in de Gaulle’s grand statement about ‘a Europe stretching from the Atlantic to the Urals’. Not only did de Gaulle’s formulation seem to leave open the question of British membership, it also drew a line between European and Asian Russia. But the geography of the north German plain meant that there were very few natural boundaries other than rivers between Moscow and the English Channel. The fact that Turkey had a long coast along the Black Sea, and a sliver of territory on the European side of the Bosphorus, pointed to the way these various mental maps carried serious implications in the real world. As a member of the security map of Europe through NATO, Turkey brought the Black Sea, the Middle East, Central Asia and the Caucasus into the loose border zones of Europe. That, of course, was one reason why some Europeans were reluctant to grant Turkey candidate

13 Z. Brzezinski, interview on BBC World Service, ‘The new Europe: what is Europe?’, broadcast April 1998. 14 W. Christopher, speech in Prague, ‘A democratic and undivided Europe in our time’, 20 March 1996.

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membership status, and why successive US governments were so keen in arguing the Turkish cause. The geographic map made for some curious bedfellows, with Finland and Sweden, which were not NATO members, discreetly urging in every possible forum the rights of the Baltic states. • Finally, and perhaps decisively, there is a political map, defined by the choices made by the various governments of eastern Europe, and the amounts of political energy and capital they are prepared to devote to turning their choices into reality. Most of them are keen to stamp their claims upon every possible map, overhauling their legal codes and property rights, settling border disputes, improving treatment of national minorities and reforming their armed forces to be able to contribute to peacekeeping operations. Others suggest by their political choices a certain equivocation. Turkey, perhaps understandably after the 1997 rebuff in Luxembourg, briefly froze its contacts with the EU. Slovakia slipped back in the line for EU accession as it slipped into less than democratic ways, to be restored to its former place when an election brought a new government. Belarus and Serbia found themselves excluded from almost every map by their govern- ments’ own actions. Ukraine, while exerting great energy and skill to include itself on the security map of Europe in a relatively privileged place, was relegated to a shadowy position on the economic map by its own failures to privatize, to control corruption, or to provide acceptable condi- tions for Western investors. (By the end of 1998, almost half of the $2 billion in foreign investment it had attracted had been withdrawn in disgust.) There was a striking change in emphasis between Warren Christopher’s statement in 1995 that ‘a critical goal of the New Atlantic Community is to achieve Ukraine’s integration with Europe’ and the much cooler joint statement from the EU–US summit in Bonn in June 1999, which warned: ‘A free and fair election will be an important step in the transition to democracy and demonstrate that it is taking firm root in Ukraine. We express our continued support for efforts to develop the rule of law and institute an effective presidential electoral process. In this context, we emphasize the need to protect the freedom of the media. These are funda- mental underpinnings to democracy in Ukraine.’ Ukraine’s future, both the United States and the EU made clear, was in the hands of Ukrainians and the democratic reforms only they could achieve. Similarly, Tom Pickering, Under-Secretary of State for political affairs, chose the newly redemocratized state of Slovakia, back on track to join the EU and NATO after the defeat of the Meciar regime, to make the same point about Russia: ‘Ultimately, it is Russians who must choose their own path and shape their own future. Obviously we cannot turn a blind eye to that which we find dangerous and wrong.’15

15 W. Christopher, quoted in The Ukrainian Weekly, 20 Oct. 1996. The EU–US joint summit statement on Ukraine was issued in Bonn, 21 June 1999; T. Pickering, ‘A transatlantic community for the 21st century’, address to the Slovak Foreign Policy Association, Bratislava, 4 Feb. 2000.

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It is an open question whether these various mental maps of the new and future Europe can be combined into a clear and coherent policy. The task is the more complex in that the broader American concept of Europe is itself changing. As Ron Asmus, the Deputy Assistant Secretary for European Affairs, noted in Stockholm in November 1999: ‘For decades, the US has concentrated on the task of what we can do for Europe, in essence to “fix” Europe through, for example, the Marshall Plan, deterring Soviet power through NATO, and sup- porting Europan integration. Today, we don’t really see ourselves as being in Europe to “fix” Europe. The US sees itself as being in Europe as part of a partner- ship and the question is, What can we do with Europe?…Though the US is the sole remaining superpower in the world, we don’t want to go it alone.’16 The clearest statement of the Clinton administration’s vision for Europe has come from Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott, the leading intellectual and theorist of a more generally pragmatic foreign policy team, whose personal conversion to the cause of NATO enlargement proved crucial to its promotion as a central initiative of the Clinton years. Mr Talbott’s clearest statement of US policies towards Europe was delivered in a speech in Washington in May 1997:

When our Administration says we support European integration, we mean both deepening and broadening; we mean both the consolidation of international institutions and the expansion, or enlargement, of those institutions. That means we encourage our friends in Europe to embrace the broadest, most expansive, most outward-looking, most inclusive possible version of integration…We have done so for reasons of our own self-interest. A politically united Europe will be a stronger partner to advance common goals. An economically united Europe creates a much more attractive environment for American investment…But I will be quite frank: We have an ulterior motive as well. We hope that the enlargement of NATO, of which we are a member, will contribute to the conditions for the enlargement of the EU, of which we are not a member, but in which we have such a profound—I’d even say vital—interest…From our vantage point, NATO enlargement and EU expansion are separate but parallel processes in support of the same overall cause, which is a broader, deeper transatlantic community.17

In January 2000, speaking in Estonia, Mr Talbott went beyond that general statement into the specific case of the Baltic states, which Russian officials had warned lay behind the ‘red line’ of former Soviet republics, and whose inclusion in NATO would consequently be firmly opposed. ‘For Americans, the fate of the Baltic states is nothing less than a litmus test for the fate of this entire continent where the US has such deep and abiding interests. It is not just a test for you to pass but for us to pass together. We will do so when three distinctive and deserving nations—Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania—are secure, stable, prosperous democracies integrated into all the broader structures of the Euro-Atlantic community.’18

16 R. Asmus, address to Baltic Sea Security Conference, Stockholm, 4 Nov. 1999. 17 S. Talbott, ‘The US, EU and our common challenges’, address to the EU–US conference ‘Bridging the Atlantic’, 6 May 1997. 18 S. Talbott, ‘A Baltic homecoming’, the Frasure memorial lecture, Tallin, Estonia, 24 Jan. 2000.

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The inclusion of the Baltic states into NATO now has strong bipartisan support. The campaign of Governor George W. Bush has stressed that ‘NATO enlargement is important and it is going to happen.’ Governor Bush’s chief foreign policy adviser, Condoleeza Rice, said in April this year: ‘I don’t believe in any red lines, especially in the Baltics. After fifty years of occupying the neighbours, the Russians should not be surprised if they are not trusted.’19 There is something of a contradiction here. On the one hand, some US officials see Russia as a current ‘strategic partner’ and putative member of NATO, while others see it as the continuing threat which justifies bringing the Baltic states under the NATO security umbrella. Indeed, beyond the general US support in principle for European integration, US attitudes and policies since the end of the Cold War have been marked by a series of ambiguities, as that general benevolence to the European project has run into, and on occasion collided with, some of the implications of the EU’s development. Under the Bush administation, the initial plans for a European Security and Defence Identity laid out in the Maastricht Treaty provoked in February 1991 a sharp diplomatic note, the Bartholomew Memorandum, which warned that the pursuit of a separate European defence system would undermine the integrity of NATO and could jeopardize US commitment to the alliance. The Clinton administration, by contrast, has been notably more relaxed about ESDI. But the Clinton administration’s strong support for European integration in principle has clashed in practice with some of its policies over trade, with spasmodic attempts by Europe to assert its own role in the Middle East peace process, and with European objections to assertive US policies over Cuba, Iraq and Iran. These vicissitudes in the transatlantic relationship have been accompanied in recent years by some strident noises off, in the public discourse of both Europe and the United States. French criticisms of the American hyperpuissance have been countered by equally vigorous American rejoinders. John Bolton, Senior Vice President of the American Enterprise Institute, testifying on ESDI to the House Committee on International Relations in November 1999, noted: ‘We should openly acknowledge that the aim to align the foreign and defence policies of the EU’s members into one shared and uniform policy is at times motivated either by a desire to distance themselves from US influence, or in some cases by openly anti-American intentions.’20 The influential quarterly The National Interest has steered the US debate into terrain usually associated with the Eurosceptics of the British Tory party, advocating a British withdrawal from all but the free trading system of the EU, to join instead either the North American Free Trade Association or a more visionary union of English- speaking peoples. It has also given rare currency, for American audiences, to the supposed remark by President Mitterrand (cited by Georges-Marc Benamou in his Le Dernier Mitterrand) that ‘France does not know it, but we are at war with

19 Ms Rice spoke at the Woodrow Wilson Center, Washington DC, 27 April 2000. 20 J. Bolton, testimony to House Committee on International Relations, 10 Nov. 1999.

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America. Yes, a permanent war, a vital war, an economic war, a war without death. Yes, they are very hard, the Americans, they are voracious, they want undivided power over the world.’21 Along with former Chancellor Helmut Schmidt’s remark to the Washington Post that the new single currency would mean ‘America can no longer call the shots’, and some bitter exchanges over policies in Bosnia and Kosovo, these remarks have contributed to a distinct ambivalence in US attitudes to the Euro- pean project. This is not new. Each new European advance tends to provoke some strong American reactions. The single market and its target date of 1992 inspired a flurry of alarm about ‘Fortress Europe’, which ebbed when US exports to the EU subsequently doubled and its investments in Europe increased three- fold. The initial Bush administration alarm over ESDI has been noted. The coming of the euro provoked some equally overheated responses, notably Professor Martin Feldstein’s essay in Foreign Affairs suggesting ‘The euro means war’. By contrast, the Clinton administration has been broadly supportive of the main thrusts of European policy, from the launch of the euro to enlargement into eastern Europe, from the German proposal of a Stability Pact for the Balkans to the promotion of the Common Foreign and Security Policy and the new version of ESDI. Moreover, the two candidates to succeed President Clinton, Vice-President Al Gore and Governor George W. Bush, have each made it clear that they will continue this broad approach. Governor Bush’s foreign policy adviser, Condoleeza Rice, stressed the campaign’s approval for ESDI in April of this year, echoing the Clinton’s administration’s urgings for more European defence spending to restore lagging capabilities. Thus the overall American mental map of Europe is becoming clear. It extends to all of the European former Warsaw Pact states, including Romania and Bulgaria. It certainly includes Turkey. It also includes the three Baltic states, and Albania. It can include Ukraine and even Russia, if they behave themselves and put themselves on the economic, cultural and political maps through reform. The same goes for Serbia, since the association of the United States and the EU through the Stability Pact for the Balkans explicitly holds out the eventual prospects of EU and NATO membership to the states of the former Yugoslavia. And, as Zbigniew Bzrezinski has suggested, that could eventually lead to the inclusion of Georgia and Armenia on the far shores of the Black Sea, and bring Europe’s frontiers to the Caspian. Such a Greater Europe, stretching from the Atlantic to the Black Sea, possibly the Caspian, and even including Russia, would finally fulfil James Baker’s airy phrase ‘from Vancouver to Vladivostok’. That may exist on the far horizon of America’s vaster conceptions, but few members of the current Europe would happily see their boundaries stretch to China. Indeed, the more the sketchier parts of the American mental maps take shape, the more the question arises whether the Americans want Europe to bite off more than they

21 Cited in C. Black, ‘Britain’s Atlantic option’, The National Interest, Spring 1999.

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can chew, to assume its share of a kind of co-dominion. ‘Vancouver to Vladivostok’ has always carried the implication of an association of the northern hemisphere, which to Africans, Chinese and others might look uncomfortably like a white folks’ club. Even without Russia, the American conception of a Greater Europe carries some profound implications. Robert Hunter, former US Ambassador to NATO, has noted: ‘The NATO allies also have the task of deciding whether to act beyond the confines of Europe, potentially in North Africa, the Transcaucasus and Central Asia, and the Middle East and the Persian Gulf.’ He notes that NATO already has an involvement, if not yet a responsibility, in Central Asia, where all the fomer Soviet states except Tajikistan are members of the Partnership for Peace. ‘Turning to the Middle East, allied debate is no longer theoretical nor certain to remain limited to discretionary action not covered by the founding treaty. The NATO provisions for collective defence apply to armed attacks on any ally from whatever quarter, and that includes attacks with weapons of mass destruction (nuclear, biological, chemical).’22 The fact that a terrorist attack upon the US mainland could trigger under the terms of the treaty a collective NATO response may not yet have sunk in for some European allies and new aspirants. At this point, some of the problematic aspects of the American conception of Greater Europe come into play. The European allies, and the EU, have always been fortunate in that there are no areas where the vital interests of Europe and the United States might clash. Indeed, their association and alliance was based on the common vital interest in ensuring that continental Europe did not fall under Soviet sway. That may now be changing. The formal acceptance of Turkey as a candidate for EU membership brings within sight the day when Iraq, Iran and Syria will be immediate neighbours of the EU. The oil wealth of the Persian Gulf, and of the Caspian basin, will then be in the EU’s back yard, and the Middle East in general will become an immediate and close EU concern. This is new. While the Gulf war showed that Britain and France saw the security of Gulf oil as a vital national interest, this was not sufficient to trigger the participation of some other EU members. This is also important, as the Europeans and Americans have traditionally not seen eye to eye over Middle East and Gulf policies. In 1973 the Europeans—even Britain—refused landing rights to US aircraft taking vital supplies to Israel with its back to the wall during the Yom Kippur war. Only Britain offered landing rights to US bombers staging their strike on Libya in 1985. Differences with all the Europeans except Britain over sanctions against Iraq, and with the entire EU over sanctions against Iran, point to the possible conflicts of interest which could challenge the Atlantic alliance when Greater Europe takes shape, although the traditional strategic closeness between Turkey and the United States should prevent such differences getting out of hand. But in this sense, it seems that the American concept of Greater Europe has not been thought through.

22 Hunter, ‘Maximising NATO’.

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The American conception of Europe since the late 1940s has usually wavered more or less around the benign points of a continuum defined at one end by Europe as equal ally and at the other by Europe as satellite; or by Europe as commercial competitor and at the other extreme by Europe as implacable trade rival. Broadly, it has seen Europe as a partner, and has since the Kennedy administration cordially held out the image and prospect of the Atlantic alliance as dumb-bell, two equal weights held together by a firm iron rod. While true enough in economic terms, it was always a polite fiction in terms of military capability and of political reality. The US in NATO was always more than primus inter pares, and reserved the right to independent strategic action which it refused to swallow when France and Britain tried it at Suez in 1956. This unbalanced relationship, while highly congenial to the United States and to most European allies, is unlikely to survive the coming of Greater Europe. It could work well, as Americans on the whole assume it will, with Europe taking more of its share of the strategic burden and improving its currently inadequate military capabilities, and the Americans accepting with good grace a greater European voice in policy-making. It could, however, veer in unfortunate directions if vital interests in the Gulf or the Middle East collide, if the US Congress sours further on the European commitment, and if the United States sees the neo-Gaullist conception of Europe as an alternative pole to America’s current eminence overtaking the Atlanticist tradition. So far, only US academics like Robert Leiber are saying openly that one attraction of NATO enlargement is that new members like the Poles, Czechs and Hungarians, and eventually the Baltic states, will increase the weight of the Atlanticist voice in the new Europe. But in private and off the record, in this phase of French sniping at the American hyperpuissance, many US officials count on it. The concern that Greater Europe, equipped with its own foreign policy and military force, might not be a wholly unmixed blessing is starting to cast the occasional shadow over the variable geography of the mental maps.

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