What European Foreign Policy?

With or without Britain (but specially with it), EU foreign policy can have four possible consequences for the United States.

The first is that the EU will assume its fair share in defending liberal world order, sometimes in disagreement with the nuances of American policy, but basically acting in partnership with it. Unfortunately, this is the least likely option, not only for the ideological and political reasons outlined above, but because the European nations are cutting their defense budgets and steadily becoming less competitive arms manufacturers. For them, force is not so much an option of last resort as no option at all.

Second, EU foreign and security policy could be simply ineffectual because the decision-making process will require an approach based upon the lowest common denominator. It would be virtually impossible to achieve a consensus to do anything significant on current form.

Third, it could be ineffectual in terms of its impact on a given situation while also being obstructive of effective American responses - as in the Middle East, or in targeting weapons of mass destruction or combating rogue regimes. Thus, the EU would send the Irans, Iraqs and Libyas of the world the message that they may continue to resist the Americans with impunity, because the more emollient and commercially-minded EU will always give them a way out.

The fourth possibility is that Europe will successfully come together and form an entity - Chancellor Kohl's third bloc - that seeks gradually to challenge and diminish American influence on the Continent and elsewhere. This, certainly, is the undisguised ambition of the French.

Britain relates vitally to these four possibilities. Britain is at the center, geographically, culturally and politically, of an Atlantic community, whereas it is in all respects on the periphery of an exclusively or predominantly European order. Despite the British government's sincere attachment to NATO, the unintended consequence of a Britain ever more closely integrated into a European foreign and defense policy would be a Britain torn away from its natural Atlanticist vocation.

Consider, too, the implications for the United States. If a fully fledged common foreign and security policy, with majority voting, had been operating at the time of the Gulf War in 1990-91, it is certain beyond any doubt that the majority of EU nations would have voted against military action, and Britain could then not have acted in concert with the United States. Nor could Britain have bucked the inclinations of its European partners and allowed the Americans to bomb Libya from British bases in April 1986. Nor, again, could Britain have launched its own Falklands campaign.

At the start of the Yugoslav crisis in 1991, the then president of the European Council, Jacques Pots, declared, "This is the hour of Europe. If one problem can be solved by the Europeans, it is the Yugoslav problem. This is a European country and it is not up to the Americans." What ensued is notorious, but only an eventual American military and diplomatic presence secured any progress at all.

The Potential of NAFTA

Unlike other EU countries, Britain has a choice. It has a common Atlantic home. If Europe realized this it would either make Eurofederalism a more comfortable prospect for Britain, or, by not doing so, demonstrate conclusively just how uncomfortable Eurofederalism could be for the British. If it were to choose the first course, such shameful and punitive abuses of Britain's minority position as the overly broad and prolonged European embargo on British beef would not recur. In either case, the British government and people would be in a much better position to make an informed decision than they are now. Britain is now proceeding one unsteady step at a time, with no sense of its real destination and little serious public analysis of consequences or alternatives.

The United States is better placed than any country - even Britain itself - to halt this dismal progress. It is time Washington reassessed its view of Britain and Europe, for ultimately the issue is more important than almost anything that currently preoccupies it. If post-Thatcher Britain has been trying to "muddle through" the European question, it has at least been aware of some potential dangers of Euro-integration, and the British public has been commendably resistant to premature Euro-euphoria. There is no evidence, however, that any recent U.S. administration has thought these questions through - either with respect to the European Union itself or Britain's putative role in it. As to the latter, if Europe integrates successfully and continues to be a reliable and constructive independent ally, it will not be because Britain has tipped the intra-European scales in a sensible direction. Britain has only about 15 percent of Europe's population and economy, and is very much the odd man out in terms of its attitudes and perspectives. Europe will or will not cohere and behave with maturity. Britain will be an influence but nothing like a determining one. Britain could, however, be decisive in assuring that an American-led bloc had a wide margin of superior strength over an integrated European rival.

Still - and contrary to widespread Euro-integrationist feeling, including the American variety - Britain will have more influence with Europe by being reasonably independent of it and not subsumed into it; by maintaining its much maligned, much envied, imprecise, but certainly special, relationship with the United States and Canada. The course suggested here - continuation of British membership of Common Market; non-membership of the European political and juridical union; becoming part of the expanding North American Free Trade Area - would give the United Kingdom greater access to markets than any other country in the world enjoys. It would be the antithesis of "little England." Britain would preserve all its options to associate more closely with Europe if it wished. The British national interest would be best served by such a course.

If, that is, it is available. That availability is up to the United States to decide. U.S. influence in Europe does not depend on its use of Britain as a Trojan horse, even if either country intended Britain to play that role. Obviously, the United States should not take any initiatives that could be construed as anti-European. But it would be appropriate, and certainly not premature, to support Canadian efforts to broaden NAFTA, and not just to the stabler countries of Latin America, the Norwegians and the Swiss. The Poles, Czechs, Hungarians and Turks - who, because of the structure of transfer payments in the EU (and other complexities in the case of Turkey), are going to have a very long, possibly interminable, wait for EU membership - should be brought into a renamed NAFTA as quickly as possible. All are or will be in NATO. They must be secured in the Western world, and the European Unionists, hobbled by protectionist socialism, cannot be relied upon to achieve that end.

And Britain - still one of the world's eight or so most important countries after the United States - remains America's truest, most important ally. It would not be provocative to offer Britain an associate status in NAFTA. And it would certainly not serve legitimate American interests to have Britain, for lack of any alternative, either subsumed into a Europe for which the Anglo-Americans have generous but uncertain hopes - or succumb at last to Curzon's curse.

Conrad Black is chairman of Hollinger International Inc., a newspaper publisher whose titles include the London Daily and Sunday Telegraph, the Chicago Sun-Times, the National Post of Canada and the Jerusalem Post. He contributes irregularly to a variety of publications in the United States, the U.K. and Canada.

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