Matters are made worse by a more pervasive decline in Europe’s internal vitality. Both the legitimacy of the existing socioeconomic system and even the surfacing sense of European identity appear to be vulnerable. In a number of European states, one can detect a crisis of confidence and a loss of creative momentum, as well as an inward perspective that is both isolationist and escapist from the larger dilemmas of the world. It is not clear whether most Europeans even want Europe to be a major power and whether they are prepared to do what is needed for it to become one. Even residual European anti-Americanism, currently quite weak, is curiously cynical: the Europeans deplore American “hegemony” but take comfort in being sheltered by it.
The political momentum for Europe’s unification was once driven by three main impulses: the memories of the destructive two world wars, the desire for economic recovery, and the insecurity generated by the Soviet threat. By the mid-nineties, however, these impulses had faded. Economic recovery by and large has been achieved; if anything, the problem Europe increasingly faces is that of an excessively burdensome welfare system that is sapping its economic vitality, while the passionate resistance to any reform by special interests is diverting European political attention inward. The Soviet threat has disappeared, while the desire of some Europeans to gain independence from American tutelage has not translated into a compelling impulse for continental unification.
The European cause has been increasingly sustained by the bureaucratic momentum generated by the large institutional machinery created by the European Community and its successor, the European Union. The idea of unity still enjoys significant popular support, but it tends to be lukewarm, lacking in passion and a sense of mission. In general, the Western Europe of today conveys the impression of a troubled, unfocused, comfortable yet socially uneasy set of societies, not partaking of any larger vision. European unification is increasingly a process and not a cause.
Still, the political elites of two leading European nations—France and Germany—remain largely committed to the goal of shaping and defining a Europe that would truly be Europe. They are thus Europe’s principal architects. Working together, they could construct a Europe worthy of its past and of its potential. But each is committed to a somewhat different vision and design, and neither is strong enough to prevail by itself.
This condition creates for the United States a special opportunity for decisive intervention. It necessitates American engagement on behalf of Europe’s unity, for otherwise unification could grind to a halt and then gradually even be undone. But any effective American involvement in Europe’s construction has to be guided by clarity in American thinking regarding what kind of Europe America prefers and is ready to promote—an equal partner or a junior ally—and regarding the eventual scope of both the European Union and NATO. It also requires careful management of Europe’s two principal architects.
GRANDEUR AND REDEMPTION
France seeks reincarnation as Europe; Germany hopes for redemption through Europe. These varying motivations go a long way toward explaining and defining the substance of the alternative French and German designs for Europe.
For France, Europe is the means for regaining France’s past greatness. Even before World War II, serious French thinkers on international affairs already worried about the progressive decline of Europe’s centrality in world affairs. During the several decades of the Cold War, that worry turned into resentment over the “Anglo-Saxon” domination of the West, not to speak of contempt for the related “Americanization” of Western culture. The creation of a genuine Europe—in Charles De Gaulle’s words, “from the Atlantic to the Urals”—was to remedy that deplorable state of affairs. And such a Europe, since it would be led by Paris, would simultaneously regain for France the grandeur that the French still feel remains their nation’s special destiny.
For Germany, a commitment to Europe is the basis for national redemption, while an intimate connection to America is central to its security. Accordingly, a Europe more assertively independent of America is not a viable option. For Germany, redemption + security = Europe + America. That formula defines Germany’s posture and policy, making Germany simultaneously Europe’s truly good citizen and America’s strongest European supporter.
Germany sees in its fervent commitment to Europe a historical cleansing, a restoration of its moral and political credentials. By redeeming itself through Europe, Germany is restoring its own greatness while gaining a mission that would not automatically mobilize European resentments and fears against Germany. If Germans seek the German national interest, that runs the risk of alienating other Europeans; if Germans promote Europe’s common interest, that garners European support and respect.
On the central issues of the Cold War, France was a loyal, dedicated, and determined ally. It stood shoulder to shoulder with America when the chips were down. Whether during the two Berlin blockades or during the Cuban missile crisis, there was no doubt about French steadfastness. But France’s support for NATO was tempered by a simultaneous French desire to assert a separate French political identity and to preserve for France its essential freedom of action, especially on matters that pertained to France’s global status or to the future of Europe.
There is an element of delusional obsession in the French political elite’s preoccupation with the notion that France is still a global power. When Prime Minister Alain Juppé, echoing his predecessors, declared to the National Assembly in May 1995 that “France can and must assert its vocation as a world power,” the gathering broke out into spontaneous applause. The French insistence on the development of its own nuclear deterrent was motivated largely by the view that France would thereby enhance its own freedom of action and at the same time gain the capacity to influence American life-and-death decisions regarding the security of the Western alliance as a whole. It was not vis-à-vis the Soviet Union that France sought to upgrade its status, for the French nuclear deterrent had, at the very best, only a marginal impact on Soviet war-making capabilities. Paris felt instead that its own nuclear weapons would give France a role in the Cold War’s top-level and most dangerous decision-making processes.
In French thinking, the possession of nuclear weapons fortified France’s claim to being a global power, of having a voice that had to be respected worldwide. It tangibly reinforced France’s position as one of the five veto-wielding UN Security Council members, all five also nuclear powers. In the French perspective, the British nuclear deterrent was simply an extension of the American, especially given the British commitment to the special relationship and the British abstention from the effort to construct an independent Europe. (That the French nuclear program significantly benefited from covert U.S. assistance was, to the French, of no consequence for France’s strategic calculus.) The French nuclear deterrent also consolidated, in the French mindset, France’s commanding position as the leading continental power, the only truly European state so endowed.
France’s global ambitions were also expressed through its determined efforts to sustain a special security role in most of the Francophone African countries. Despite the loss, after prolonged combat, of Vietnam and Algeria and the abandonment of a wider empire, that security mission, as well as continued French control over scattered Pacific islands (which have provided the venue for controversial French atomic tests), has reinforced the conviction of the French elite that France, indeed, still has a global role to play, despite the reality of being essentially a middle-rank postimperial European power.
All of the foregoing has sustained as well as motivated France’s claim to the mantle of European leadership. With Britain self-marginalized and essentially an appendage to U.S. power and with Germany divided for much of the Cold War and still handicapped by its twentieth-century history, France could seize the idea of Europe, identify itself with it, and usurp it as identical with France’s conception of itself. The country that first invented the idea of the sovereign nation-state and made nationalism into a civic religion thus found it quite natural to see itself—with the same emotional commitment that was once invested in “la patrie”—as the embodiment of an independent but united Europe. The grandeur of a French-led Europe would then be France’s as well.
This special vocation, generated by a deeply felt sense of historical destiny and fortified by a unique cultural pride, has major policy implications. The key geopolitical space that France had to keep within its orbit of influence—or, at least, prevent from being dominated by a more powerful state than itself—can be drawn on the map in the form of a semicircle. It includes the Iberian Peninsula, the northern shore of the western Mediterranean, and Germany up to East-Central Europe (see map on page 64). That is not only the minimal radius of French security; it is also the essential zone of French political interest. Only with the support of the southern states assured, and with Germany’s backing guaranteed, can the goal of constructing a unified and independent Europe, led by France, be effectively pursued. And obviously, within that geopolitical orbit, the increasingly powerful Germany is bound to be the most difficult
