International Herald Tribune
29th February 1996
Eighty years ago this week, young men were being mowed down like grass in the fields around Verdun, in a battle that killed 250,000 French and German soldiers to virtually no military effect. Next 1st July it will be 80 years since the start of the battle of the Somme, which killed 400,000 young Britons, Germans and Frenchmen for the sake of a slice of land the size of Paris's Left Bank. If you wonder why the Europe of 1996 stumbles around the world in a daze, remember how that first war led to Hitler, and an even greater war only 23 years later, and understand that Europe is a place made smaller by what it has done to itself.
The diminution of Europe will once more be on display when most of the EU's leaders go to Bangkok to meet their Asian counterparts. But the Europe on show in Bangkok is no wielder of power. Although Europe's trade with Asia is growing faster than the US's, the Europeans in Bangkok will have little to say about other things that matter more than trade. It is the US, not Europe, that is trying to manage the potentially explosive confrontations in Korea and the Taiwan Strait. It is the US that has been burdened with the job of trying to construct a network of institutions that might control 21st century China.
The foreign policy horizon of most European politicians remains astonishingly narrow. It is not just east Asia that lies outside their range of vision. The danger zone in central Asia, where Russia meets the Muslim world, is still terra incognita to them. Closer to home, the land to their east is a blur: they have been slow to open the EU to the new democracies of eastern Europe, and they are reluctant to work out what they will do if by July there is a President Zyuganov in Moscow. Even on its own doorstep, Europe still leaves much of the door-minding to others. Richard Holbrooke was right when he said that the Europeans slept through the recent row between Greece and Turkey. They also missed the point of the Yugoslav disaster-there can never be "neutral intervention."
Why is it that the countries of an EU that has more people and more money than the US cannot behave like a power in the world? Ignore the answer given by the enthusiasts for a federal Europe. All we need, say these people, is better machinery. Give us an agenda of what Europe should be doing, more majority voting in the committees, and someone like Val?ry Giscard d'Estaing to speak as "Europe's foreign minister" and Europe will walk tall again. No, it will not, as the past few years have shown. The machinery will not move unless it is driven by a common will. A common will requires the peoples of Europe-French, German, British, Italian, Spanish-to see the world in roughly the same way. This means that they have to want the same solutions to the same problems, and be equally willing to put their money and soldiers behind the pursuit of those solutions. They must feel that Europe is one pair of eyes, one pair of hands.
But this is not how the peoples of Europe feel. In 1990, Britain and France sent their soldiers to fight Saddam Hussein, but Germany would not join them. In 1991, the Germans wanted to tell Serbia that it should accept the break-up of Yugoslavia, but France and most of the others demurred. In 1992, the French decided to back the junta in Algeria that cancelled a free election, but the rest of Europe thought this was folly. And so on. The different peoples of Europe can agree to act together only in small things where their judgements, their emotions and their interests do not diverge. In the big things, they do diverge.
Think of the self-assurance with which the columns of doomed youth marched up to the trenches in 1916. Compare that with the diffidence of Germany, Britain and even France in 1996. It takes a long time for a wounded continent to recover from a century like this. The old gentleman of Europe, you might say, remains in a state of shock.
