Ninety years ago, Lord Curzon--an intellectual grandee and holder of high offices, including viceroy of India and foreign secretary--opined that, without its empire,

England from having been the arbiter will sink at best into the inglorious playground of the world. Our antiquities, our natural beauties, our mansion houses and parks will attract a crowd of wandering pilgrims. People will come to see us just as they climbed the Acropolis at Athens or ascend the waters of the Nile. England will become a sort of glorified Belgium.

This, it has turned out, was unduly pessimistic. While the Empire is all but gone, Britain remains one of the eight or so countries, grouped in the second rank behind the United States, that retain some world role. The United Kingdom's status in the world owes less to its nuclear weapons and permanent seat at the UN Security Council than to its prosperity on the edge of Europe, and its central historical and cultural position in the English-speaking world which it founded. In an international political universe of some 180 countries, Britain's status is not an unenviable one, and from this platform of deserved respect it is possible to envision several alternative courses for Britain's future.

At any rate, it should be possible. But the discussion of the British future today evidences almost no hint of open horizons. Instead, the British national imagination is staggering in a sludge of inevitability about a progressively tighter European Union. While there is virtually no enthusiasm in Britain for plunging deeper into such a Union--all the polls show a profound disenchantment with the Brussels bureaucracy, a deep reticence about monetary union, and growing skepticism about the economic implications of a British future in Europe--the general sense is that it will happen anyway.

The Blair government is both a microcosm of this state of affairs and a contributor to it. It has kept Britain away from the euro for the time being, yet its body language suggests grudging accession in a few years--unless, of course, catastrophe overtakes the experiment in the meantime. It is not entirely clear whether the Blair government's
reluctance to embrace the Union reflects real doubts about its viability and logic, or about whether entry would best serve Britain's interests, or, again, whether it is merely that political expediency has suggested a slow approach to an accepted end. Whatever the motives, the resulting uncertainty is demoralizing.

Advocates of immediate entry into the European Monetary Union certainly exist in Britain. But while a grandiose vision of a united Europe is the chief argument for Eurofederalism bandied about in continental Europe, in Britain the federalists, apart from a few people in transactional financial businesses, are reduced to a fatalistic advocacy that Britain should be part of a tight European union--one culminating in federation--if only because staying out may be more harmful than going in. The truth is that many in Britain fear isolation, and, with it, marginalization. Without an empire, there is a widespread view that the country must associate with some larger group, and Europe appears to most to be the only such group at hand.

What seems to have been forgotten at least until recently is that, unlike any other European country, the United Kingdom has both an Atlantic and European vocation. Europe and North America are both plausible associations for the British, the latter much superior to the former in many ways. Unfortunately, Britain's North American alternative is underdeveloped in public discourse. It is the main purpose of this essay to unfurl its logic, which, it turns out, is a wholesome one not only for Great Britain, but also for the United States and Canada.

The Ambivalence of Britain

Britain coped with the loss of empire with more dignity than other great imperial powers. But the country is still afflicted by an existential loneliness, dating at least from the Suez fiasco of 1956, and the history of Britain's ambivalent association with the European project reflects that loneliness.

Less than a year after the Suez crisis, the Treaty of Rome was signed. The final loss of what had become the imperial illusion thus dovetailed almost perfectly with the rise of the European integration project. The four decades that followed were marked by British uncertainty and inconsistency toward Europe. Harold Macmillan, prime minister from 1957 to 1963, tried to combine a special closeness to the United States (affecting to play the sage Greek to Kennedy's Roman) with membership in the Common Market--only to be harshly rejected by de Gaulle, who found such a combination unacceptable and vetoed Britain's Common Market application in 1962. Harold Wilson was initially Euroskeptical (1964-70), then cautiously pro-European in his second term (1974-76), but always ambiguous and evasive. There was nothing ambiguous about the nearly pathologically anti-American Edward Heath (1970-74), who did his best to deconstruct almost any relationship with the United States. One of nature's corporatists, while advocating a modest common market he strove to promote practically unlimited European supra-nationalism--but he could bring neither his party nor his countrymen along with him to any appreciable degree.

Margaret Thatcher (1979-90) rebuilt the American relationship, demonstrated that Britain could influence U.S. policy making, and showed that Britain retained autonomous moral authority in the world. Toward Europe she was less consistent. She was one of the instigators of the Single European Act, which required some surrender of sovereignty on the part of the members, and under cabinet pressure took Britain into the Exchange Rate Mechanism, fixing the relationship between members' currencies. Then she declared her implacable opposition to a more supra-national Europe. John Major (1990-97) started out believing Europe could be placated with gestures stopping well short of integration, but discovered otherwise. (The revival of British prosperity began when Britain fell out of the Exchange Rate Mechanism in 1992.)

Tony Blair's ambivalence, already noted, is almost impenetrable and rather illogical, especially for a new leader with an impregnable position in Parliament and the polls. Mr. Blair has said he will pool sovereignty without surrendering it and will be governed by the British national interest in monetary union and other euro questions. This would suggest that choices are available. But to say so outright would not be compatible with the basic argument propounded by British
Eurofederalists--with whom Blair and his party are closely associated--that Euro-integration is inexorable and Britain should get in step with the ineluctable forces of history if it wants to exercise any influence in Europe. Blair is right: he not only has a choice, but he will have to make it sooner or later. Unfortunately,
like most of his countrymen, he seems to have an impoverished notion of the alternatives.

Two Political Cultures

During most of the period just outlined, British public interest in the European question was tepid. Certainly, the 1975 referendum on whether to leave or remain in the Common Market produced a burst of furious debate, but for ten to fifteen years after that there was a kind of intellectual demobilization. It was only as the Common Market
became the Community, and the Community finally became the Union, that unease grew rapidly at the spectacle of a Britain increasingly isolated and often outvoted eleven to one. That uneasiness grew further when evidence accumulated that Jacques Delors' soothing notions of subsidiarity within the Union--essentially the promise that local matters would still be decided close to their point of origin, by local and not central EU authorities--was simply a scam. Increasingly, polls indicated that the British public was becoming disillusioned with the endless cascade of authoritarian directives
from Brussels, which, in the interests of "harmonization", sought to regulate even the most obscure aspects of British life, from the stacking of fruit in supermarkets to seasons for bird-shooting in the northern counties. By now, almost all polls show that 70 percent of the people oppose any further move into Europe, and that a significant minority would be happy to depart Europe politically altogether, while keeping the free-trade arrangements.

The British consistently support the Common Market's free movement of goods and people, and few want to give up such a common sense advantage. But increasingly there is resentment that it has been encumbered with all sorts of unwanted economic policy costs and dangers. Recently, these dangers have been highlighted by remarks from the new German finance minister and governing party chairman, Oskar Lafontaine, calling for Britain to accept higher tax rates,
greater social spending and an increased EU annual membership fee; and from the German foreign minister, Joschka Fischer, calling for an end to individual country vetoes and a majority voting system in which Britain would be swamped. Even more recently, the revelation by the normally docile EU Court of Auditors that $5 billion annually is squandered by the European Commission in fraudulent or grossly wasteful spending has further shaken the federalists.

The problems transcend economics. The prevailing British view is that British political institutions, which have served the country well for centuries, should not be stripped jurisdictionally to clothe Brussels and Strasbourg, which are unaccountable and authoritarian by Anglo-Saxon standards; that Britain should not go back to the pre-Thatcher European levels of taxation and industrial strife; and that Britain should not slam the door on its relationships with the United States and Canada. These relationships (along with the geographical fact of the English Channel) have been Britain's greatest strategic asset in this century, and the British are understandably reluctant to dismantle them. So for that matter are the Canadians--and so too should be the Americans.

But the logic of the Atlantic connection does not come solely from strategic considerations. It is also grounded in political culture. The French and Germans, for well-known historic reasons, have social safety nets that have effectively become hammocks. Out of fear of the role of discontented mobs in their history, a role that has no real
parallel in the history of the English-speaking countries, France and Germany have tax and benefit systems which, at least by Anglo-American standards, subsidize unemployment and destroy the incentive to work. By British and North American standards they have semi-dysfunctional dirigist economies, with excessive levels of taxation and unemployment, largely because they are paying huge quantities of Danegeld to the urban masses and uneconomic small
farmers. Their political traditions are corporatist not liberal, arising in the case of France from such illustrious but thoroughly authoritarian figures as Richelieu, Colbert, Napoleon and de Gaulle.

As for Germany, it is a cliché to say that it was unified too late, had great difficulty determining whether it was an eastern or western-facing nation, and that whenever it set out to assure its own security it ended up making its neighbors insecure. Clichés aside, while Germany is now well unified in accepted borders, and while the extension of NATO to Poland will have the highly desirable effect that the eastern border of the Western world is not also a German border, that country still projects its own sense of historical loneliness. It is possible, and feared by some, that the German
desire for security could cause it to exert pressure on other countries to immerse themselves more completely in Europe than many of their citizens, including a strong current majority of the British, find comfortable.

In sharp contrast to Britain and the United States, none of the largest continental European countries has durably effective political institutions. Those of Germany date from 1949; France's from 1958; Spain's from 1975. The Italians are still trying to reform their constitution. It is understandable that countries so placed might feel that they are not giving up much in institutional terms by moving toward federation. Indeed, some favor federation as a way of bypassing national institutions that have become sclerotic, ineffectual and politically immobile. Most British, for good reason, do not.

The British electorate's instincts against political immersion in Europe are sensible, but to turn away from Europe altogether to embrace Britain's post-imperial solitude is to court Curzon's curse. So both the Major and Blair governments have temporized at a fundamental level, suggesting that Britain can be a political contortionist: "at the heart of Europe", at the side of the United States, and at the head of the Commonwealth, all at the same time. Both Euro-integrationists and ambivalent dissemblers of both major parties imply that Britain can cede sovereignty without surrendering it, build up Brussels and Strasbourg without reducing Westminster--in short, have its cake and eat it too.

This is the illogic of the present position of the British government, and the only way to resolve it is to imagine that there
could be a multi-speed or variable geometry Europe--in other words, a European Union flexible enough to negotiate singular relationships with a variety of its members. That, however, is not the emerging pattern either in Brussels or Strasbourg; that pattern is one of imposed uniformity, not of variety and flexibility to accommodate individual needs. To date, so-called opt-outs have been shown to be of limited value, and in all probability any further ones would only once again delay Britain's reckoning with Europe.

The Atlantic Option

It should be clear by now that Britain's options are not limited to embracing the European Union or settling for loneliness. Others are available. One is for Britain to join the European Economic Area (EEA) with Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein. EEA membership would maintain Britain's full access to the single market, avoid further political integration, and save most of the present financial cost of the EU. Then there is the Swiss option--embracing the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) but not the EEA. This would give almost as good an access to the EU market, but would allow only free movement of goods, not of people. It would also impose delays on British citizens travelling to EU countries. Even the most ardent Euroskeptic would not regard that as progress. Britain could in any case use the existence of its veto right and its large current account deficit with the EU to negotiate complete reciprocal access of goods and people, withdrawal from the political and judicial institutions, thus emancipating itself from the herniating mass of authoritarian Euro-directives with which it has been deluged--now totaling over 230,000 pages of mind-numbing regulations.

I have listed these options for the sake of completeness, but none of them is commensurate with the scale of Britain's problem--which is to find for itself a place in the world that is appropriate to its history, its political culture, its economic interest and its strategic needs. The alternatives listed either embrace isolation or simply associate Britain with other relatively isolated countries. There is another option, however, that does meet the test of proportionality, and that builds from long-standing strategic and economic realities--and that is the Atlantic option.

As to economic reality, Britain is already deeply enmeshed commercially with the United States and Canada. In percentage terms, Britain trades almost twice as much with North America as do the other EU countries as a group. At the same time, Britain's share of trade with the EU has actually declined recently. If exports shipped on to non-EU destinations through Rotterdam and other European ports are included, together with overseas investment earnings, the EU's share of British exports is probably about 40 percent--which amounts to less than 10 percent of the United Kingdom's GDP. Conversely, the exports of a number of countries to the EU, including those of the United States, have risen considerably more rapidly than have Britain's in recent years, showing that EU membership is not entirely necessary for access to the European market. Over the last ten years, direct net investment in the United Kingdom from the United States and Canada has been one and a half times the corresponding figure for EU investment in Great Britain. As well, U.K. net direct investment in North America has been more than double its investment in the EU. These trends are continuing, impervious to EU preferences.

Now that the World Trade Organization is administering the Uruguay Round of trade liberalization agreements, the EU's common external tariff has fallen from 5.7 percent to 3.6 percent. This should not constitute a prohibitive barrier even to a Britain that was not in the EU, given its more bearable social costs and provided it retained control of its own currency. The fear of being frozen out of Europe by vindictive community bureaucrats is now, I believe, a complete fraud, though one would not know it to listen to the alarmist comments of many of Britain's political leaders and much of its media.

Indeed, the facts suggest that it is rather the other way around. The annual cost of Britain's adherence to the EU is nearly £10 billion in gross budgetary contributions. While almost half of this is returned in EU spending, it is spent, as former Chancellor of the Exchequer Norman Lamont has pointed out, "on things which the U.K. government would not choose to spend money on." Higher food prices in the U.K. because of the Common Agricultural Policy cost Britain rather more than £6 billion annually, though again about half of that is rebated directly to British farmers. The overall cost of the EU to Britain then is between £8 and £12 billion, or around 1.5 percent of GDP. There are in addition the significant costs imposed by EU regulation, and the heavy political price of eroding sovereignty--which includes the tacit encouragement of provincial separatism, as Scottish and Welsh nationalists envision receiving the sort of direct grants enjoyed by Ireland.

Despite these costs, and the £3 billion annual trade deficit the U.K. runs with the EU, there are still those who deflect such unpleasantries with the noble hope that Britain will ultimately Thatcherize Europe rather than be de-Thatcherized by it. The truth is, however, that the United Kingdom could now probably assert a stronger and more positive influence on the European Union from outside than it could by going further into it. Free from its costs and interferences, Britain could export successfully into it, thus demonstrating the superior competitiveness of the so-called Anglo-Saxon model. For since the Uruguay Round, attempts by the EU to limit imports from non-members can only be sustained if they are unanimously upheld by multi-national trade panels, which is very unlikely.

As a consequence of all this, it would be logical for Britain to negotiate entry into NAFTA, which will probably be renamed and which is already negotiating with the European Economic Area and European Free Trade Association, as well as with Chile. Such an expanding NAFTA would have every commercial advantage over the EU. It is based on the Anglo-American free-market model of relatively restrained taxation and social spending, which is the principal reason why, over the last fifteen years, the United States and Canada together have created a net average of two million more new jobs per year than have the countries of the European Union. NAFTA, as its name implies, is a free-trade area only. The United States will not make any significant concessions of sovereignty and does not expect other countries to do so. A trading bloc based on NAFTA and the more advanced South American countries could also expand into eastern Europe faster than the EU. Such a bloc, after all, would not be encumbered by such impediments as the EU's Common Agricultural Policy, and its powerful urge to protect onerous French and German social costs.

There is no need to repeat here the nature of the Anglo-American special relationship, which is both broad and deep, historical and contemporary. It is enough to point out that none of the continental European countries has a particular affinity with the United States and Canada, or anything remotely comparable to Britain's dramatic modern historic intimacy with North America.

Beyond that, an even closer British association with North America could serve a broader, and very European, purpose. The British public's fear of loss of jurisdiction and socialist backsliding in a federal Europe is well founded--and Britain, by staying outside, could be the example that might prevent the EU as a whole from smothering all its fully subscribing members with centralized Euro-socialism.

When the possibility of an Atlantic option for Britain is broached, the cry goes up in British Eurofederalist circles that the United Kingdom would be dominated by the United States. The words "fifty-first state" are often uttered derisively, even though any such association would be a loose one--and as if there were not a much greater danger of Britain being intruded upon by the Europeans. In fact, Britain's sovereignty would be in much better condition than it now is. Canada, whose distinctiveness from the northern American states is fairly tenuous apart from Quebec, has lost no additional sovereignty after entering into the free-trade agreement, even though over 40 percent of Canada's GNP is derived from trade with the United States--more than four times the percentage of British GNP taken up by trade with the EU. More important, Canada suffers none of the jurisdictional intrusions that are routine in the British slouch to Eurofederalism.

The Lights Go On in Washington

One of the reasons so few Britons think in terms of an Atlantic option is that few people in the United States or Canada encourage them to do so. True, the leaders of the opposition in Canada last year urged a NAFTA invitation for Britain, but just as the British are stuck in some unhelpful intellectual patterns, so too are many Americans.

The United States has been a supporter of an "ever closer European Union", to use the parlance of the European treaties, since the Truman administration. The initial motivation for such a policy was clear: by promoting European cooperation and integration, the United States hoped to contain the Soviet threat and avoid having to intervene a third time in a European war. If European strategic unity as represented by NATO was good, then so must be its economic--and ultimately political--unity. The American conception of European integration was thus of a piece with that of its European founders and promoters, a parallel thought natural among allies joined together in the contest with Moscow. Indeed, as that contest endured, grew more intense, and spread throughout the world in the late 1950s and 1960s, U.S. enthusiasm for European cooperation and eventually the European Common Market and Community steadily increased. With it went an urge to propel Britain into Europe, essentially to strengthen West European backbones as Cold War allies.

Over the years, the practice of America pushing Britain toward Europe continued, and it has not been abandoned since the end of the Cold War. This is partly out of habit and understandable intellectual inertia. It may be, too, that the present U.S. administration has felt, rightly, that Britain would be a force for good government in Europe. With the Continentals mired in a bureaucratically induced slog of low-growth, high unemployment economics, it makes at least superficial sense to hope that post-Thatcherite Britain could teach them something about basic economic arithmetic, without the stigma of being importers of American capitalism. Tony Blair has hinted at this: a British Euro-capitalism.

In all of this, no argument offered by Americans or other foreigners on behalf of full British integration with Europe has had much to do with British national interests. And the least the U.S. government should do is stop trying to push Britain in a direction in which the British people show little inclination to go.

Happily, there is some evidence that more discerning Americans are now having second thoughts about the course Europe is pursuing. Prominent administration officials such as the Deputy Treasury Secretary Larry Summers have cautioned against the dangers of bringing in EMU without accompanying structural labor market and long-term fiscal reforms. The American experience put political union ahead of economic union, and many Americans--including senior legislators and members of the current administration--have indicated their belief that trying to do things in reverse order is hazardous.

At the same time, some senior American foreign policy experts are becoming concerned about the likely influence of a centralized Europe--or of a failed attempt at a centralized Europe--on the Western alliance and on the conduct of U.S. strategic policy. Europe's shabby and dangerous mistreatment of Turkey, the Middle East's most important country--in which the leading European powers cravenly hide behind the Greeks--is a case in point, and a warning of the kind of behavior that might characterize the new Europe. (It is, it should be noted, in stark contrast to the much more enlightened
U.S. and Canadian treatment of Mexico.)

Europe could become an American problem at an even deeper level. Martin Feldstein and others have expressed concern that the attempt to manage a monetary union and the subsequent development of a political union could lead to increased conflicts both within Europe and between Europe and the United States. Henry Kissinger has
suggested that the tensions inherent in the EMU gamble hold the potential for a stampede to the extremes of Left and Right, leading to the very instability that successive administrations have sought to prevent. Even if Europe succeeds in placing the cart of monetary union before the horse of a single labor and housing market, without sufficiently coherent political control--and there is little of that commodity currently evident--there is no reason to suppose that a united Europe would necessarily be more willing to share the burdens of global leadership.

Of course, it is conceivable that France and Germany, acting together, could rediscover a vocation for enlightened international policy making, but on recent form it would be imprudent to count on it. Kissinger and others are surely right to say that it is much more likely that the energies of those countries would be spent emancipating themselves from the leadership of the United States, dismantling history's most successful alliance system, and possibly engaging in aggressive competition with Washington for global leadership. For no one, and certainly no American, should underestimate the extent to which Eurofederalism is inspired by a resentment of the power and success of the United States--and, as some would have it, the "Anglo-Saxons"--over the last fifty years.

The European concern to "stand up" to America has undistinguished cultural and political antecedents. It figured prominently, for example, in the writings of Werner Daitz, the head of the Third Reich's Central Research Institute for National Economic Order and Large Area Economics, and of Vichyite apologists such as Drieu La Rochelle and Francis Delaisi. Obviously, current Euro-integrationists draw no inspiration from such distasteful precedents, but these
disreputable forms of anti-Americanism still lurk on the extremes of European politics and have the capacity to impinge on the center at times of tension and crisis. The main home for such sentiments remains France, where they are espoused by both pro- and anti-European forces--and, indeed, sometimes expressed at the very top. Thus, Georges-Marc Benamou in Le Dernier Mitterrand quotes the late French president as having said in his latter years:

"France does not know it, but we are at war with 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."

And at the EU summit in November 1995 in Madrid, President Chirac, himself ostensibly a conservative, extolled the alleged victory of "European values" over the ideology of world conservatism (led by the United States). The unhelpful, not to say neurotic, French response to the pre-eminence of the United States in the world is well illustrated by recent French antics in respect of Iraq.

Such attitudes are not peculiar to France, even if they are strongest there. In Germany, even the staunchly pro-American former Chancellor Kohl stated in a speech in Louvain in 1996 that he conceived of a world of three blocs: the United States, the Far East and the EU, and went on to urge that Europe should "assert itself" against the other two. His successors are unlikely to be friendlier or more enlightened.

And then there is Britain itself. Virtually the only political groups that speak with any enthusiasm of Eurofederalism in Britain today are the odd couple consisting of the old Left and the anti-American wing of the Tories. The detritus of the old Labour Party looks to Europe to re-impose on Britain pre-Thatcher levels of social spending, taxation and union-dominated industrial relations. The anti-American Tories are an unlikely mélange of Heathite corporatists, nostalgic
imperialists and those affecting a pseudo-aristocratic disdain for American "vulgarity." (For a recent and egregious example of the last of these, see Ian Gilmour in the London Review of Books, December 10, 1998. Lord Gilmour goes out of his way to express hostility to the views I expound in this essay.)

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.