Changing Partners? Britain hoped to remake Europe in its own image. It has succeeded chiefly in alienating its allies.

Byline: William Underhill

Ambassadors are a cagey bunch. Publicly, they speak in the coded language of diplomacy. But what are the somber suits really thinking? Try this: the new members of the European Union are "rude" and "ungrateful." The bloc's Common Agricultural Policy is "the most stupid, immoral state-subsidized policy in human history, give or take Communism." The notion of EU solidarity is "discredited, inefficient and socialistic." The union's bureaucracy is "bollocky" and the European Parliament, "blathering."

Thank you, Charles Crawford. The British ambassador to Poland recorded those very private thoughts in an e-mail, leaked in mid-December to the British press. OK, they were intended as a joke, a spoof speech for Prime Minister Tony Blair, but they nonetheless played to the core issue at the European Union's latest summit in Brussels. Its near failure to reach agreement on a new seven-year budget reveals a new East-West divide in Europe. On one side: a British faction keen to see the Union remodeled as a loose association of nation-states, devoted to revitalizing their economies but with limited funds and a Brussels bureaucracy kept firmly in check. On the other: the old-timers, most notably the French, wedded to the ideal of an ever-closer Union and such costly causes as protecting its farmers. In the middle: the newcomers from the East, who have bought the idea of modernization but still believe in European solidarity--in the form of badly needed EU cash.

Let's skip the tawdry wrangles over money: Britain's reluctance to trim its cherished rebate versus France's equally sacrosanct agricultural subsidies. For Peter to pay Paul, the British suggested trimming the development aid that Europe's post-communist stragglers were counting on to update their economies. The president of the European Commission, Jose Manuel Duro Barroso, was moved to liken Blair to the "the sheriff of Nottingham," robbing the poor to reward the rich.

What hurts in Eastern Europe is Britain's apparent perfidy. Yes, the budget ...