Just as EU enlargement should be reuniting the continent, Iraq has exposed new patterns of division across Europe. Some of the cracks will close up again after the military campaign is over, as European leaders seek reconciliation. And, notwithstanding the deep disagreements over how to handle America, there is broad agreement about actual policies. The Europeans are united in wanting the UN to run the reconstruction of Iraq. They are also in general agreement on other areas of foreign policy, such as engagement with Iran and a new push on the road-map to middle east peace. The Balkans are becoming largely the EU's responsibility. And having taken over the Nato operation in Macedonia in March, the EU is preparing to run Bosnia from next year.
Nevertheless, the crisis has made brutally clear to many in Paris that the entry of ten new members in 2004 will change the balance of power in the EU forever, by bringing in countries that do not share France's global preferences. Unable to stop the admission of "new Europe," France is tempted to reach for a traditional remedy: a "hard core" of more integrated states which pursue projects of their own.
The concept of "Kern Europa" was espoused by two of Germany's leading Christian Democrats, Wolfgang Sch??uble and Karl Lamers, in 1994. Their idea was to found the core on the members of the euro. The trouble was that too many countries got into the single currency, confounding expectations that the Mediterranean countries would never qualify.
But some of the proponents of core Europe now have grander ambitions: nothing less than a refounding of the EU. In Paris, this is partly nostalgia for the original six members of the Union, a club which France was able to shape to its liking. If only the EU could just return to the state of grace of the 1950s and 1960s, before Britain joined, then Europe could be a power in its own right. Or so the argument goes.
The French idea is to create small, concrete projects which take on a life of their own-following Jean Monnet's logic of "solidarit?s de fait." The core can start small, with just a few symbolic projects. Most EU analysts chuckled when Belgium proposed a "defence union" in March, consisting of its own less-than-impressive armed forces as well as those of Luxembourg, France and Germany. But some in the French leadership take the initiative seriously-even though it is widely accepted that a European army without Britain would lack credibility. A meeting of the four countries is planned for the end of April.
The other motivation behind core Europe is to create a counterweight to US influence in the world. Dominique de Villepin, the French foreign minister, spelled it out in a speech in London at the end of March: "To be truly stable, this new world must be based on a number of regional poles, structured to face current threats. These poles should not compete against one another, but complement each other." The French debate is full of references to "multi-polarity" and "global balance"-code for building up an alternative to US power. This ambition underlay de Villepin and Chirac's courting of the African and Arab states in the weeks prior to the military campaign in Iraq. Ultimately, though, a core would have to be based on the EU, not on France's former colonies. And within Europe, the pivotal country is Germany. If Paris could build up a real alliance with Berlin, a core might have the force to pull in the other member states.
The trouble is that Germany does not share many of France's ambitions, beyond opposition to the Iraq war. Like Britain and the east Europeans, Germany's political class wants both strong transatlantic ties and a stronger Europe. Once Gerhard Schr?der goes, few German politicians are likely to have an appetite for a French initiative to establish a counterweight to the US.
There are other areas of disagreement too. The German establishment would like the commission and European Parliament to play a major role in EU foreign policy, while France wants to keep it mainly between central governments, as Britain does. Chirac is a strong proponent of a president for Europe, but Schr?der only belatedly endorsed the idea, with a number of caveats. Neither country is keen on the EU developing a unified migration and asylum policy. The two countries have issued a series of joint declarations that are long on rhetoric and institutional innovations, but short on policies and finance. Where is the grand project that would unite France and Germany but exclude all the new members and Britain?
But, in its own terms, the French political class is right to fear enlargement. Once the EU has 25 members, with full powers and strong views of their own, the political coalitions will be more unpredictable-not just on transatlantic relations, but on everything from economic reform to border policies. And on most issues, France will now find it hard to make friends with the east Europeans.
Chirac scornfully referred to the prospective members of the EU as "badly brought up," chastising them for having "missed a good opportunity to keep quiet" after they called for European unity on UN Security Council resolution 1441. He even hinted that France might try to deny them membership by holding a referendum on enlargement. France is the only country in the EU where more people oppose the entry of new members than welcome it, and as every member state's parliament has to approve the accession treaty, a "no" from France could indeed stop the process. But the threat is a bluff: Chirac and the centre-right government would have to campaign in favour of the accession treaty that they had signed, after all.
"As the EU enlarges eastwards, its centre of gravity will move westwards," a senior British diplomat predicted recently, hoping that it would bring Europe's heart closer to London than to Paris. But that may be wishful thinking. The new member states will certainly tip the balance towards support for Nato and away from France and other countries which want to create a European counterweight to US power. When faced with the stark choice of saying yes or no to the US, they said yes. But it was a very unwelcome dilemma for countries that want a strong Europe too. "How can I choose between my mother and father?" complains Dimitrij Rupel, Slovenia's foreign minister.
Moreover, the Iraq war may prove to be a special case and Washington cannot count on east European support for further military adventures. Public opinion in the east European countries is overwhelmingly against the war, just as it is in the rest of Europe. And on most foreign policy issues, these countries go with the Europeans not the Americans. They are strongly multilateralist, having suffered greatly from superpower domination during the cold war. Their position is more Blairite than pro-Bush, in trying to encourage the US to work through international institutions.
The east Europeans are generally neither "old" nor "new," their views are closer to the multilateralists of the cold war-like Konrad Adenauer and Helmut Schmidt-than to the Bush administration hawks. And it is young Europe, the generation below the age of 30, which is most vocally opposed to the war, not the older generation.
On most international issues, the new members are increasingly European in their preferences. They support the EU on issues like non-proliferation, the Kyoto protocol, the death penalty and the International Criminal Court - despite US pressure against. They usually vote with the other Europeans in the UN. Their voting patterns are not motivated simply by a need to win favour with the EU. As they move closer to membership, countries become increasingly socialised into the EU's ways of doing business. Their political classes have grown to think like the EU's current members.
The members-to-be want a strong transatlantic alliance, but they also want the EU to have an effective foreign and defence policy, especially in the Balkans and the eastern fringe of the enlarged Union. They will pull European foreign policy eastwards towards their own troublesome neighbours. Poland has already proposed developing a more substantive EU Ostpolitik towards Belarus, Moldova and Ukraine. Hungary and Slovenia want to integrate the Balkans into the European mainstream. The enlarged EU's unstable periphery-to the east and south-is of diminishing importance to Washington, but it is of vital concern to the new members.
The French fear and many Britons hope that the new members will be pro-US, neo-liberal, pro-free trade, Anglophone and anti-communautaire. Some of these stereotypes are justified: the post-communist economies had no choice but to privatise and open up to international investment. The idea of an EU "superstate" is not popular in countries that have only recently left unhappy federations of various kinds-from the Soviet Union to Yugoslavia.
But the east Europeans have not made enormous efforts to join the EU just to see it turn into a European Nafta. They want all the political integration too. The prospective members have already had most of the benefits of a Nafta without joining: free trade in industrial products, foreign direct investment and a large amount of aid. What they want from membership is full participation in the big decisions being made in Europe-including foreign policy, security and defence.
For this reason, the new members are wary of France's ambition to create a core Europe. But they are also suspicious of attempts by Britain to concentrate more decision-making, especially in the EU's external affairs, in the hands of the big countries. Power politics is unattractive if you have a population of less than 15m-as all the new members except Poland do.
None the less, resentment of France is likely to linger. The east Europeans recall Mitterrand's opposition to enlargement in the early 1990s. They were also shocked by Chirac's statement at Nice in 2000 that old member states which have contributed to the Union from its foundation should have more votes than new states. "Chirac seems to think that we could have joined in 1956 if we'd wanted to," said a Hungarian diplomat at the summit. "He seems to have forgotten that there were Soviet tanks on the streets of Budapest at the time."
Just after the 1989 revolutions, there was widespread Francophilia in central Europe, thanks to the many dissidents who had spent time in Paris and the French-speaking intellectuals in Warsaw, Prague, Bucharest and Sofia. Now, Chirac's attempt to put the east Europeans in their place reminded them more of Brezhnev than de Gaulle.
There will be no permanent fault-line between "old" and "new" in the enlarged Union. But the EU's new members will remain more opposed to French domination of Europe than to American domination of the globe.
