Europe and the Establishment

Europe and the Establishment

In Britain, they have admitted the existence of "the establishment" ever since journalist Henry Fairlie coined the term in the mid-fifties.

Some observers thought that this could be avoided. They calculated that "New Europe's" arrival inside the European Union, together with the pro-Washington stances adopted by Spain and Italy over the Iraq war, would give the pro-Americans an equality of power and influence with the anti-Americans inside EU structures. Even if that calculation had been correct, the balance of that power would have been an exceedingly fine one.

It would almost certainly have been tipped on most issues in an anti-American direction by the institutional biases of the EU towards de facto anti-Americanism. But even the slender chance of occasional pro-American victories has now been removed by the results of the Spanish election. Spain will now join France and Germany in institutional anti-Americanism. There no disguising the reality that Europe is building an anti-American structure. Yet the CFR argues that the U.S. should continue its long post-war policy of assisting and encouraging that construction.

Of course, a committee that contains distinguished European politicians was never going to reach any other conclusion. "The European Idea" has replaced Christianity as the principal religion of France, Germany and most of Western Europe. It is a slight mystery, however, that a panel of distinguished Americans should unanimously go along with them.

One can perhaps see the fine Italian hand of Professor Kupchan in this recommendation. After all, he thinks that a strong social democratic Europe restraining the U.S. in a multilateral world would be a desirable outcome. Mr. Kagan's acquiescence may also be understandable since he believes that Europe has left the power game forever and that the U.S. can afford to let Europeans cultivate their garden in peace and quiet while Washington runs the world. From entirely opposite standpoints, both men think that the rise of a united anti-American Europe is nothing much to lose sleep over.

Surely Henry Kissinger, however, cannot share this complacency. He knows that rising powers rarely cultivate gardens -- and Europe, though apparently senescent today, might start having babies and marching again with very little advance warning. Given these historical possibilities, the U.S. might be better advised to quietly divide Europe in order to keep the West united and the world unipolar.

Perhaps, however, the key word in that sentence is "quietly." European integration has proceeded to the point where open U.S. opposition would provoke a serious crisis within Atlanticism. Washington might not emerge the victor from such a crisis. In addition, a policy of candid realpolitik is not to be expected from a CFR committee. Establishments cloak daggers and place velvet gloves on iron fists from habit as much as from policy. It is not impossible that some members of the CFR committee were placing two quite different bets when they made their eirenic proposals.

One bet was that Europe would respond with a genuine willingness to reach a new Euro-American "Grand Bargain" -thus demonstrating that its anti-American drift was reversible and undermining the thesis of this article. If so, well and good. The CFR committee could be the start of something big.

On the other hand, if Europe resumed its current anti-American course after a polite interval, the second bet would come into play. The CFR's recommendations would kick off a covert American campaign to win over some European states to Washington's viewpoint much more permanently and thus to undermine (or "disaggregate") the undivided European integration that America has supported until now. A covert campaign might begin with encouraging some friendly European governments to lose their referendums on the proposed European constitution. But it would eventually have to advocate "harder" and more controversial policies: the transformation of the EU from a federal state into more flexible confederal institutions; urging pro-American countries to retain their sovereignty and independent foreign policies inside these looser arrangements; and establishing Atlanticist structures s such as a transatlantic free trade area to entrench the Euro-American link against Franco-German resistance. This "deep" Atlanticism would finally need to be backed by a serious U.S. public diplomacy campaign to counter the ideology of anti-Americanism as European communism was ideologically opposed from the early days of the cold war.

If the CFR proposals contain the germ of this approach, then they amount to a very late start to a very necessary campaign. If they are what they seem on the surface, however, they mark the Washington establishment's sorrowful acceptance that the West is finally ceasing to exist.

 

John O'Sullivan is the editor of The National Interest.