Super-state: the new Europe and its challenge to America

224 Pages·2005·0.879 MB·English

by  Haseler, Stephen

Super-State
Also by Stephen Haseler
The Gaitskellites
The Death of British Democracy
Eurocommunism
Ba�le For Britain: Thatcher and the New Liberals
Anti-Americanism
The Politics of Giving
The End of the House of Windsor
The English Tribe
The Super-Rich
Super-State
The New Europe and
Its Challenge to America
Stephen Haseler
Published in 2004 by I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd
6 Salem Road, London W2 4BU
175 Fi�h Avenue, New York NY 10010
www.ibtauris.com
In the United States of America and in Canada distributed by
Palgrave Macmillan, a division of St Martin’s Press
175 Fi�h Avenue, New York NY 10010
Copyright © Stephen Haseler, 2004
The right of Stephen Haseler to be identified as the author of this work
has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs
and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book,
or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced
into a retrieval system, or transmi�ed, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without
the prior wri�en permission of the publisher.
���� 1 86064 843 6
��� 978 1 86064 843 4
A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
A full CIP record for this book is available from the Library
of Congress
Library of Congress catalog card: available
Typeset in Ehrhardt MT by Steve Tribe, Andover
Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin
Contents
Preface vii
Introduction Europe’s Hour 1
Chapter 1 Europe and the American Empire 9
From Ascendancy to Subordination
Chapter 2 Europe Says ‘No’ 37
September 11th, Iraq and the Ruptured Alliance
Chapter 3 The Making of a Superpower 65
The Euro and Beyond?
Chapter 4 Towards a Super-State 83
A Government for Europe
Chapter 5 The European Core 97
‘Charlemagna’ Is Born Again
Chapter 6 A Country Called ‘Europe’ 117
Identity and Democracy in an
Americanized World
Chapter 7 Europe Versus the USA 141
The Ba�le for Eurasia
Chapter 8 Goodbye, Columbus 163
The End of American NATO
Notes 193
Index 209

Preface
This is a book about Europe’s future. But, as my life on both sides
of the Atlantic has taught me, any book about Europe must also
be a book about America. Super-State has been in the making for
two decades. For me, as a young Englishman living and working
in cold-war London and Washington during the 1970s and 1980s,
America was the answer to all Europe’s problems. She was the
saviour in 1945, and was now, during the cold war, the defender.
Like many Europeans of my generation, I readily accepted the full
Atlanticist outlook (and the ‘hands across the sea’ sentiment which
drove it). During these years I saw, I still believe rightly, Europe and
America (certainly Britain and America) as possessing identical, or
near-identical, interests – above all, the joint need to deter Soviet
influence in Europe.
And in the 1970s and 1980s, in Reagan’s America, I had a superb
and privileged vantage-point – in the influential Washington think-
tanks and in US universities. There I met the impressive breed of
conservative, and more specifically, neo-conservative, thinkers and
strategists, who were beginning to influence the Republican Party,
and who now, a�er the Clinton interregnum, dominate the strategic
and political thinking of the Bush White House. Intriguingly, many
viii Super-State
of them, like me, were social democrats (and in the late 1970s they
were working for Democratic Senators Scoop Jackson and Daniel
Patrick Moynihan and other Democrats), and I still count them – I
hope even a�er this book – as my friends.
The sudden collapse of the Soviet Union brought this cold-war
world to an abrupt end. For many Europeans, the fall of the Berlin
Wall in 1989 is still the great historical watershed (as important
for Europe as ‘9/11’ is for the USA). And Europe without the Wall
ushered in more than just a new future for Europe. It changed the
character of the Atlantic world. For, with the Soviet threat removed,
Europe, suddenly, was no longer dependent upon the USA and US-
led NATO for its security. Europeans could now bring to an end
the unhealthy dependence on the USA which was the root cause of
growing anti-Americanism. The continent was now free to unite, and
to develop towards a federal future and eventually become a power
in the world, equal partners with the USA. And European unity had
been a long-proclaimed goal of Washington as well – ever since John
F. Kennedy’s call for the creation of ‘twin pillars’ for the West.
But on visits to post-cold-war Washington during the 1990s I
noticed a perceptible change in a�itude – not just from conservatives
in the Heritage Foundation and neo-conservatives in the American
Enterprise Institute and advisors to both Bush senior and junior,
but even amongst some moderate Democrats around Clinton.
As I describe in this book, a surprising hubris had taken hold of
the American capital long before 11 September 2001 – surprising
because, to me, one of the a�ractive features of Americans during
the cold war had been that for all their power, Americans possessed
a humility – and égalité – in their outlook and manners (not a noted
feature of Europe’s political grandees). But, America’s ‘victory’ in the
cold war had changed the atmosphere, and, amongst conservatives
at least, it had gone to their heads. By the late 1990s, harsh terms
like ‘hegemony’ and phrases like ‘global dominance’ were being
bandied around in an extraordinary triumphalist atmosphere. Some
amongst Washington’s foreign policy elites were actually coming to
believe that in the post-cold war era American power could police
and even dominate the world. It was an outlandish viewpoint, but
one which was to lead to the Bush presidency’s fateful decision to
invade a country which in no way threatened it.
And there was also a decided cooling towards Europe and
Europeans and a growing resistance to moves towards European
Preface ix
unity, particularly in the defence and security field. In the new
world view of Washington, Germany vacillated between being
a pacifist ‘Euro-wimp’ and a potentially resurgent power rival.
France was intensely irritating, but in a more edgy way than during
the cold war and, following the Iraq war, has become something
of an American obsession, a ‘bête noir’. And Britain, or ‘the Brits’,
were simply less noticed, and during the Iraq crisis almost taken
for granted, seen as always available for support (although the
more knowledgeable Washingtonians knew that such support was
somewhat unreliable).
And all the time Europe was moving towards ever-closer union
– particularly with the arrival of the euro on the world economic
stage in 1999, a truly seminal moment in European unity. But the
final pillar needed to construct the superpower (true unity on
defence and foreign policy) still eluded the Europeans. It is here,
though, that the fall-out from the great transatlantic crisis over
Iraq may yet prove decisive. For, first the Germans, and then the
French, by saying their historic ‘no’ to Washington during the high-
profile 2002 UN diplomatic ‘shoot-out’ over the Iraq invasion, have
reshaped Atlantic relations. And, together with what looks like a
developing new strategic alliance with Moscow, they may well
have, literally, begun to reshape world politics. The Iraq crisis has
also reinvigorated the Franco-German ‘European core’ (that I call
‘Charlemagna’), which, acting like a magnet for other EU countries
(even including Britain), can now drive Europe towards a common
defence and foreign policy, and, thus, full superpower-hood.
The Iraq crisis may have caused yet another fateful twist in
Atlantic relations, for the USA, no ma�er the administration, can be
expected to look unfavourably on any further strategic unification of
Europe and to play off ‘New Europe’ against ‘Old Europe’ at every
opportunity. As European and American interests, although similar
in many areas, are now significantly diverging, Europe and America
are now competing as much as cooperating around the world,
particularly so in energy-rich Eurasia, which, I argue, is a coming
ba�leground between the EU and the USA.
In Europe’s domestic debate about its own future, advocates
of European unity now have a major new argument on their side.
For, following 9/11, the War on Terrorism and the Iraq imbroglio,
US power in the world has become highly contentious; indeed,
as many polls show, Europe’s peoples no longer trust American
x Super-State
global leadership. They are also increasingly fearful of the kind of
Americanized or ‘globalized’ (o�en the same thing) future world
order o�en nowadays sketched out by thinkers in Washington.
And it is now abundantly clear that in the medium-term future, the
only power centre that has the potential to balance and to check US
power in the world is the EU (and then only if it finally creates a
foreign and defence policy). Such a new European superpower can
also serve to help forward a new global order very distinct from a
world of ‘American primacy’ or ‘American hegemony’ being offered
by US neo-conservatives in Washington.
In an ideal world, Europe would act to further a future world order
based upon international law, and would a�empt to create a world
governance within the framework of the UN. However, as I argue
in this book, although there is no future for American dominance in
the world, and American power will in the future be checked and
balanced, the USA (even should she retrench) can hardly be wri�en
out of the future of global politics. And as long as Washington feels
that it cannot accept multilateral governance, the UN will remain
hobbled, with world government a hope only. What though is
possible, and is now emerging, is a multi-polar, multi-superpower
world in which the USA, Europe, Japan and, later, probably China
and India (and maybe Russia) compete, negotiate and compromise
with each other, hopefully within the framework of the UN.
This book is unabashedly federalist – democratic federalist – in
its approach to the future of Europe. And it draws heavily on what
I consider to be a highly relevant American federal history. Some
enthusiasts for Europe believe that today’s European Union has
li�le to learn from US history – that great differences between the
EU and the USA, not least Europe’s language divisions and cultural
variety, rule out drawing sensible lessons and comparisons with
the nineteenth and early twentieth-century USA. I cannot agree.
For the basic similarities are too striking to be set aside. The basic
proportions are the same: a continent-wide system, similar issues
of federal-state relations, similar population size, similar level of
economic and cultural development, similar ethnic divisions and,
notwithstanding recent divergences (which I highlight in this book),
similar ideology and values.
Europe is not special or sui generis; in my view, Europeans should
put provincial conceits aside, and should, instead, be prepared to
learn the lessons from the rich American federal experience, and