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The Euro Menace: The USE vs. The USA
EFL. Read the whole thing. From Andrew Sullivan.Of all the remarkable consequences of the war against Saddam Hussein, one stands out for its sheer unlikeliness: The subject of Europe has become interesting to Americans again. In the run-up to the war, France and Germany revealed an unprecedented hostility toward the Bush administration's foreign policy. Americans noticed. France, in particular, orchestrated a global campaign to prevent the United States from deposing its former client, Saddam. And, since the war, France has continued to frustrate U.S. foreign policy—most recently when Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin visited Yasser Arafat, whom the United States has tried to isolate. Worse, with the unveiling of a new federalist constitution for a "United States of Europe" in June, the anti-American trend will be subtly but profoundly institutionalized. It's past time that Americans wake up and see this new threat for what it is. For the longest time, of course, America's approach to European unity was one of supportive neglect. In the wake of World War II, there was no reason whatsoever for the United States to object to increased Western European integration, the expansion of intra-European trade, and the pacification of ancient conflicts, especially between France and Germany. In fact, there were many good reasons to endorse and encourage increased European integration. But this analysis always obscured something at the heart of the European project. From the beginning, European unity was understood, especially in French eyes, as a counterweight to the global hegemony of the United States. The calculation was simple: No single European power could ever hope to approximate U.S. wealth, population, or power. Even the most formidable European nation—Germany—had a population only one-third as large as that of the United States. A nation such as France, with an ancient history of global influence and a recent history of military humiliation, looked to the European project as a way to regain what it had once lost. Beneath the patina of shared sovereignty, there was the dream of a new sovereignty—more powerful than any in the past. Britain's accession to the European Economic Community (EEC), long prevented by the Anglophobic Charles de Gaulle, was only embraced because it appeared at the time to represent Britain's retreat from its commonwealth and U.S. allegiances, and toward a new commitment to forging a federal European entity. Read the rest. Posted by: lkl 2003-06-16 |
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