Military

Testimony
By
Radek Sikorski
Executive Director, New Atlantic Initiative,
Resident scholar, American Enterprise Institute,
former deputy minister for defense and for foreign affairs of Poland
to
the House Committee on International Relations,
Subcommittee on Europe on Tuesday, 17th June 2003
on
‘The future of Transatlantic Relations: A view from Europe’

Mr. Chairman, Congressmen,

Thank you for your invitation to speak before this august body.  You posed searching questions in your letter of invitation to me.  I shall answer them:

Do we really face a crisis in transatlantic relations?

Friends and allies wish each other well because they expect that the success of one will enhance the power and well being of all.  Rivals, on the other hand, see the success of one as a threat to the other.  During the recent war in Iraq, around a third of the people of France wished victory to Saddam Hussein rather than their formal ally, the United States.  Whatever the causes, I would call that a crisis, all the more severe for having reached from the diplomatic and political elites down to the people.

Another major European ally, Germany, asserted its sovereignty for the first time since unification.  In the guise of pacifism, Germany said ‘No’ to the United States on a matter of vital American national interest for the first time in half a century.

Other nations supported the United States in its confrontation with Saddam Hussein even though their governments were not truly convinced of the case for war, and their public opinion largely opposed it.  Europe has divided into those countries that are comfortable with American leadership, and those that are not.  This, I think, is a useful definition of what has been called ‘old’ and ‘new’ Europe.

If so, why?

Enmity between America and European powers is nothing new.  Since its foundation, the US has fought wars with most major European countries (except France and Poland) and it is the last sixty years that have been an exception, for obvious reasons: a shared perception of an overwhelming threat from the Soviet Union.  When that threat has disappeared, bonds of alliance were bound to loosen.

Is the alleged transatlantic drift more than just a dispute over foreign policy?

Some people in Europe claim that it is more than that.  European socialists claim that they have developed a unique social model, the social market economy, which combines the free market with the leveling of living standards through high transfer payments.  Protection for those already in jobs and state provision of health and pension services allegedly differentiate the European model of capitalism from its supposedly raw, American variety.   In view of the stagnation of the main Continental European economies, however, one is led to suspect that this view, though sincerely held, is a way of avoiding facing the need to carry out fundamental reforms.

Philosophically, much of Europe is tending towards post-national progressivism.  Many Europeans see the nation state not as the locus of their loyalty and the most natural unit of exercising democratic control over their governments, but as the agent of waging wars, which devasted Europe in the last century.

Many in Europe see the project of European integration as the only way to make war truly unthinkable and they are ready to pay the price of loss of sovereignty for this which would be unacceptable to the US public or politicians.

Europeans of this viewpoint are happy, for example, to treat the UN as the nascent world government solely responsible for authorizing the use of force, to advocate an international criminal court, and to support the Kyoto protocol, even if its provisions are detrimental to their own economies. As a result, some Europeans argue that Europe and America are diverging, not only in their interests but in their deepest values.

When did this begin—in 2001?

By 2001 the process was already well advanced.  When President Bush went to the European Union summit in Goteborg, in June 2001, Europe’s mostly Social-Democratic leaders harangued him about the death penalty and Kyoto, while anti-Bush mobs rioted outside.  

August 2002?

I presume that this date refers to the leaking of the Pentagon war plans on Iraq to a US newspaper, which was the first signal that was noticed in Europe that the US was serious about going to war.  To my knowledge the drawing up of the plans had not been preceded by consultations with allies either as to strategy or as to tactics.

The decision to go to war with Iraq without consulting allies and without a clear casus belli exacerbated  tendencies I had already mentioned and made it harder for European governments to explain the case for war to their citizens.   If the US had decided to remove Saddam Hussein at a time when he threw the UN inspectors out of the country, more Europeans would have been supportive.   The US made far less effort to explain the case for the second gulf war than for the first gulf war, even though the case for the first war—invasion of a neighboring country—was more apparent.  US diplomatic effort seemed perfunctory and were certainly ineffective.

Did the Iraq dispute represent a fissure in transatlantic relations or merely a policy disagreement with 4 nations of Europe?

It represented both because those countries that supported the US did not do so because they truly believed the case for war against Iraq but because they believed that it is important to show solidarity with the United States on a matter which the US administration deemed to be in its vital national security interest.  Those European governments that supported the war did so because in their judgment the necessity to preserve good relations with the US outweighed their doubts about the advisability of going to war without a clear provocation.

The fissure in Europe was not really about Iraq but about how to react to the US assertion of global dominance.  Britain and France had drawn contrary lessons from the Suez operation in 1956 in which they were sabotaged by the US.  Britain decided that henceforth it would pursue its interests in harmony with the US strategic agenda; France, that she can only maintain her position by relying on its own national resources and by thwarting US designs.  Unsurprisingly, the two countries have been leaders of the two halves of Europe reacting differently to US initiative on Iraq.

Is the overall European attitude about how Europe views the outside world, assesses threats and seeks to meet them that different from the US?

Yes, it is, partly thanks to American influence.  One of the most striking intellectual surprises a European experiences in Washington is that the US thinks strategically on a global scale.  In Europe, we tend to think on a regional scale—and this is a result of the implicit bargain that obtained during the Cold War.  Protecting their own continent from Soviet attack really was the best thing that Europeans could do for the United States and for the transatlantic alliance as a whole.  The US supported European integration as part of that strategy.  Being the main putative theatre of operations, West Europeans did not have spare capacities to project power in the rest of the world; they were mostly glad for the US to carry the burden of protecting global sea lanes and countering Soviet ambitions in the third world.  Barring a few exceptions, such as the British war in the Falklands and French interventions in Africa, Europeans lost interest, and forgot the habits, of global responsibilities.  Because the European Union has evolved as a consensual, semi-legal process, a growing number of Europeans tend to think that most disputes can be solved in this manner.  Because the European Union is founded on the ethos of overcoming national sovereignty, many Western Europeans are suspicious of countries which speak and act as they themselves used to do.

Is there a growing anti-American sentiment in Europe or were the recent anti-American protests more narrowly tied to anti-US military power/anti-Iraq policy?

Anti-Americanism in Europe pre-dates the founding of the United States and will always be with us.    In some countries, such as France, it is endemic while in others, such as Poland, almost non-existent.  Europe, indeed most of the world, entertains love/hate feelings for the United States.  While admiring American technology, American mass culture, American-style democracy, American energy and American enthusiasm, historically-rooted societies also resent the disruption of traditional customs and hierarchies that American culture brings.  America stands for modernity, and most societies are by nature conservative, hence the inevitable resentment.  However, latent, culturally-based anti-Americanism tends to flare up only over particular US policies: once over Vietnam and the positioning of Cruise missiles in Europe, today over policies toward the Middle East.

America’s store of goodwill in Eastern Europe is partly the result of the US’s staunch stand against Communism and partly the result of programs that were carried out during the Cold War.  Both dissidents and party apparatchiks came to the US on Fulbright scholarships; they all listened to Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty.  Today, thousands of young East Europeans go on EU-sponsored scientific exchanges and only dozens come to the US.  Unless this trend is reversed, therefore, the next generation of East Europeans will become more Euro-centric.

Is Europe anti-Bush?

Many Europeans objected to President Bush even before he took any significant foreign policy decisions.  European politics is shifted to the left of American politics.  Mainstream democrats would function as conservatives in Europe.  The majority of European countries, and mainstream media, are dominated by Social-Democrats, whose stances would make them liberal Democrats in the US.  Hence, President Bush’s positions on such domestic issues as the death penalty, guns, abortion or taxation were greeted with animus by Europe’s socialist establishment.  European Social Democrats see President Bush as a challenge to their own internal political consensus and as a possible source of encouragement to their own conservative critics.

Attitudes to President Bush are very different in Western and Eastern Europe.  In the new democracies, people tend to remember that the man who had done the most to bring about their liberation from Communism—President Ronald Reagan—was also denounced by transatlantic chattering classes.  Therefore George W. Bush gets the benefit of the doubt.  During the same European journey in June 2001 to which I had already referred to, President Bush was greeted by angry rioters in Goteborg, Sweden.  In Warsaw, Poland, there were also demonstrators—hundreds of well-wishers, demonstrating in his favor.

In Western Europe, the public likes their politicians to be suave, cynical and intellectual in the Enlightenment tradition.  Toughness, earnestness and public expressions of faith go against the grain.

Can Europeans be at once pro-Europe and pro-Atlantic or are these growing more incompatible?

France has an alternative geostrategic vision of a ‘European Europe’ that would be a counterweight to American power.  To put it metaphorically: France would like to create a situation in which Germany is the horse, the rest of Europe is the cart, and France is the driver of this horse and cart.  One suspects that she would then drive the vehicle toward a head-on collision with an American tank.  I don’t believe this is in the interest of the majority of Europeans, or even in the interest of France.

I believe that the great majority of the European public still wishes to be both pro-EU and pro-Atlantic.  This has been the traditional policy not only of countries such a Britain but, crucially, of Germany.  The new entrants into the EU will, I believe, strengthen the pro-Atlantic lobby.  But the swing country is Germany.  With Germany remaining pro-Atlantic, the project to construct a European counterweight to the United States remains a Gaullist eccentricity.  However, with Germany backing the French vision, Europe splits into roughly equal pro-Atlantic and anti-American halves.  It is in the vital interest of the United States and of Europe to make Germany return to its traditional position as a linchpin of both EU and NATO.

It is also crucial to spread the perimeter of the Atlantic community to those countries of the former Soviet Bloc, such as Ukraine, Belorus, Moldova and further, that are likely to pursue the kinds of policies that West European nations have pursued until recently.  It is also vital for European states to retain national decision-making in security policy for the foreseeable future and for that security policy to be based on the NATO alliance, which gives political and legal basis for the US presence in Europe.

Is it evident that European and American security are no longer indivisible?

On the contrary.  I believe that Europe and America share two vital geostrategic interests: first, cleaning up the detritus of the Soviet empire and helping nations of that region make a transition to free-market democracy; And, second, democratizing the Greater Middle East.  Most of Europe has behaved as a status quo power toward that region but now that the US has led the way many Europeans are beginning to see the obvious, namely, that they are the immediate destination for refugees, criminal networks and terrorism emanating from failed Muslim states and that Europe would present the most convenient target of weapons of mass destruction.  On the other hand, Europe would be the biggest beneficiary if those societies became successful.  Democratizing the Greater Middle East could be as important a transatlantic project as democratizing the Soviet Bloc once was.  But if this is to happen, allies have to be involved in every stage of decision-making.  Nobody likes being taken for granted, even if it is in their interest to agree.

Are there forces in Europe which are intent on marginalizing US influence in Europe and NATO?

It is impossible to marginalize the US in NATO because without the US NATO would not exist so it is, rather, a question about those people who would like to replace NATO with a purely European defense pact.  There are such people, both on the right and the left of European politics, and in the more obscure parts of the European bureaucracy.  The Iraq dispute has also convinced many mainstream people in Europe that Europeans need to coordinate their foreign policies more if they are to gain influence in Washington. 

In the eyes of Europe, how badly were the EU and NATO damaged over the war in Iraq?

There ought to be a silver lining to the fact that the EU split down the middle on an issue on which the European public was united.  Those who would like to build Europe on the basis of anti-Americanism should understand that if they could not united Europe in opposition to the unpopular American-led war in Iraq, than the project cannot succeed.

NATO should also benefit in the medium term.  The war in Iraq put an end to the post-cold war period and everybody seems to have understood that the alliance has to re-tool for new challenges.

Putting aside Iraq, where would the relationship likely be today?

It would be a mix of co-operation and competition.  In bodies such as the UN Human Rights Commission, the West still acts together in solidarity against dictatorships, giving witness to our shared common values.  In trade matters, EU and the US are equals and are guilty of similar sins in, for example, protecting their agriculture.  In military matters, the US global supremacy will be a fact of life for at least a couple of generations.  The latter has not been fully appreciated in Europe and needs adjustment in policy planning.

As a result of the recent dispute over Iraq, will German-American and Franco-American relations be less predictable or coherent?

Evidently, so.  Germany can no longer be counted on automatically to take America’s lead on major issues.  France, on the other hand, seems to have stepped into the shoes of the former Soviet Union as the de facto leader of the non-aligned movement that is suspicious of American projects and will resist US initiatives in international bodies.

What kind of United States does Europe want?

It depends on who in Europe you ask.  Some of us, mainly on the right in the new democracies, are happy with America being the leader of the West both on the international scene and on domestic issues, in giving example on how to roll back socialism.  Others, largely on the left in Western Europe, would like the US to become a giant Canada, that is a country that recognizes the superiority of the European economic model, downgrades its military and follows the lead of the elites of transnational progressivism on philosophical and lifestyle issue.

Most Europeans would like a United States that shows respect for the views of mankind, that works harder to make its arguments on the international scene and that leads by persuasion and example.

May I conclude Mr. Chairman, by saying that despite the concern I have expressed, I believe that what unites Europe and the United States is still far deeper and far more important, than what divides them.  When the two halves of our Western civilization act in concert, we rule the world; when we divide, each suffers.  It is therefore in the interest of all our peoples to work for the improvement of our relations.