Paris, June 7, 2005 – While it will be months before the results are fully known, the train-wreck of the European constitutional treaty may have been a very good thing for the European Union.
It has saved it from an open-ended commitment to expansion that could have been fatal to the EU’s own political coherence and to any European expectation of playing a vigorous and independent future role in international relations.


Expanded eventually to an association of as many as 35 nations (some of them Moslem), as some proposed, the EU could not possibly have had a foreign policy that went much beyond a collective flinch in reaction to manifest threat. Even with 25 members, the inhibitions to action are serious.
Therefore American benediction of a strong and united Europe, as indicated in Washington in recent days, and as conveyed to NATO’s EU members by Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer following his recent U.S. trip, is a safer endorsement than it would have seemed before the French and Dutch voted against the constitution.
It comes with a qualification, reasonably enough, from the Washington point of view. De Hoop Scheffer told interviewers in Berlin this week that “the Bush administration wants to see Europe as a strong partner. It is clear there is no interest in the U.S. in seeing a Europe which is weakened, less efficient and less effective.”
This, though, is true only so long as the European partners put their forces and resources to work under U.S. leadership, as in NATO’s Afghan security operation and its Iraq officers’ training program. The old NATO that acted in unison on the basis of equality, with political decisions by consensus, has for practical purposes ceased to exist, since Donald Rumsfeld announced that the new Washington rule is coalitions for missions.
The French and Dutch votes against EU expansion, and Tony Blair’s suspension of British preparations for a referendum (which undoubtedly would have produced a ‘no’ vote), leave little hope for the constitutional treaty.
The constitution must be approved unanimously to be adopted, and even for the European Council to consider revision of the text and its re-submission to recalcitrant members, 20 of 25 member-countries have to have ratified the treaty.
At the moment, two have rejected it, a third, Luxembourg, may say no even if it still holds its referendum; Denmark’s referendum is likely to be cancelled, and the British referendum never held. In Sweden, until recently counted on for a safe ‘yes’, 65% of the public wanted a referendum even before the French and Dutch votes -- scarcely a good sign. It takes considerable optimism to think that this duck is not dead.
If it is dead then the United States will not have a Europe that admits Turkey, Ukraine, Georgia, while remaining open to still other new members in the Middle East and the ex-Soviet Asian states, all in order to consolidate them into what Washington envisages as its democratic (if geographically extended) “New Middle East.”
Instead, the United States, even more than now, may face a divided Europe, functioning on the legal base of the Nice Treaty. This privileges Poland in European decision-making, but also Spain.
Tony Blair will be in a strong position during the second half of 2005, when he will hold the presidency of the EU, but his own position in Britain remains vulnerable. His influence in Europe will depend in part on the outcome of the German elections this fall, and on what happens next in France -- and indeed in Iraq, where matters currently go badly.
The division within Europe of most interest to Washington concerns EU military and security ambitions. Nicholas Burns, the U.S. Undersecretary of State and a former ambassador to NATO, bluntly told a NATO conference in Sweden May 25: “Let’s get it straight. NATO does the big military operations” (or to be more accurate, U.S.-led coalitions drawn from NATO and elsewhere are expected to do them). The EU handles peacekeeping operations. “If not,” he said, “there will be friction, and you [meaning the Europeans] are not going to be happy.”
The chastened European Union that emerges from the expansion crisis is expected to be one in which the main European foreign and security-policy activists, France and Germany, will be weakened. Gerhard Schroeder could be out of office in the fall. Jacques Chirac is now politically beleaguered, even if his prime minister is the Frenchman the Bush administration most loves to hate, Dominique de Villepin.
But despite the threat from Burns, common sense says that the United States is not going to get what it wants, a submissive European Union. The Europeans are divided on the issue, of course, but perhaps less than Washington thinks.
The ‘force’ – so to speak – is with the people who want an autonomous Europe, counterweight to the United States. This is because they are acting from the primordial impulse of a society to affirm identity and independence. Otherwise known as nationalism, this impulse is the one that in France and the Netherlands defeated an expansion that would put an end to the European possibility to act independently. One would imagine that ultimately the force will prevail.
Copyright Tribune Media Services. All Rights Reserved.