Chapter eight: the mock turtle's story.(Great Powers in Wonderland)(Critical essay)

"If you don't know where you are going, any road will rake you there."

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

THE EUROPEAN is a "composite power" It frequently have a "common foreign and security policy" more on paper than in reality. Moreover, internal issues are likely to take up much of the EU's attention and energy. But there will also be more exceptions to this rule--that is, challenges where EU policy will be more than the "lowest common denominator" cobbled together from the sum of its members' individual policies. What will push the EU along this trajectory toward an "ever closer Union" as a global player will be the ineluctable pressure of problems in which individual member states--even the biggest, such as Germany--will not be able to make a difference on their own. Take climate policy, where the EU has had a unified position since the early days of the ozone-layer protection efforts in 1985, despite the facts that, first, it is never quite clear who is in charge--member governments or the EU--and, second, the EU's united position changed from that of a laggard (during the 1980s) to that of self-proclaimed vanguard on efforts to protect the global environment. Or take international security, where the EU has rapidly expanded cooperation and "Europeanization" on efforts to combat international terrorism, and recently has strengthened its common policy on nuclear nonproliferation, led by a joint initiative of France, Germany and the United Kingdom.

Unlike the other great powers, the EU is not only a composite but also an incomplete power: its special characteristics make it naturally inclined toward cooperation with others, while its limited ability to act as one on the global scene renders it particularly vulnerable to a dearth of coordination. Its closest and most natural partner in cooperation is the United States, for reasons of shared values, common interests and a long history of collaboration. But precisely because of this proximity, America often also serves as a foil for Europe to emphasize distinctiveness, as an external unifier of Europeans among themselves. Thus, the EU is the power most defined by its relationship with America and inclined to work with the United States. This usually happens when the Europeans feel that the directions in which Washington wants to lead are compatible with Europe's own broad conception of international order and that Washington's leadership style respects European sensibilities. Take nuclear-nonproliferation policy. Since the end of the cold war, the United States and the EU have worked together quite effectively on a range of such issues--as long as both were in agreement on upholding and strengthening the existing Non-proliferation Treaty regime. But when the Republican majority in Congress under President Clinton and, later, the present administration moved away from this consensus, tensions within the alliance grew as the Europeans insisted on sustaining the multilateral treaty framework and its key institutions: the IAEA and the UN Security Council. American and European nonproliferation policies began to diverge, with grave consequences.

When the United States and EU disagree, the Europeans will try to provide an alternative--either by developing a new framework for cooperation or, failing that, by pushing ahead on their own. The Kyoto Protocol and the International Criminal Court provide examples of the latter; the breakdown of the transatlantic and European alliances over Iraq in 2002-2003 illustrates the former. But this crisis also led both sides to reassess the need to work together, and it triggered a new European initiative, which provides an interesting and innovative example for multilateral cooperation, both within the EU and beyond: the negotiations with Tehran over its nuclear program. Those negotiations were initially conceived ...