The European Disunion; An alliance with America is impossible until Europe comes together.(Cover story)

Byline: Denis MacShane (MacShane is a Labour M.P. and was deputy foreign secretary in the Blair government.)

Does the welcome decline of European anti-Americanism mean Europe and the United States are converging? Not yet--and not for the foreseeable future. While government leaders in the European Union pay lip service to the United States and its ideals, they remain far apart on a slew of social and economic issues. But beyond that, a true alliance between the United States and the EU cannot take place until Europe finds a singular voice with which it can begin to build bridges across the Atlantic.

Despite decades of European integration, the French, the Swedes and the Greeks are more French, Swedish and Greek than ever before. The network of European politicians once headed by Jean Monnet and Robert Schuman, who forged the EU in the 1950s, has not been replaced. Europe has failed to coalesce into any kind of political-economic-social grouping that is willing and able to act as a partner with America. In fact, instead of consolidating, it clones itself. Five years ago, the European Commission was 15 strong. Now there are 27 commissioners. Each has his or her own staff and a fleet of chauffeur-driven cars, and each obeys the iron law of a self-cloning bureaucracy as they prove their existence by producing more and more directives. Under the proposed new European Treaty, there will be three "presidents" of Europe: a president of the Commission, speaking for the Brussels bureaucracy; a president of the European Council, representing the 27 nation-states of Europe, and a president of the European Parliament, with its weird mixture of quasi-fascists and loopy leftists forming their groups alongside mainstream parties. There will also be an EU foreign-policy "High Representative," who will speak for Europe but on the basis of policy upon which 27 national foreign ministers have agreed. The real deciders of foreign policy will remain the heads of state, each mindful of public opinion and the electoral calendar.

Europe may talk of a common foreign policy, but there are serious divergences. For instance, most EU detachments in Afghanistan refuse to operate under a single command. While the British, Canadians and Americans fight to prevent ...