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Much as I am fond of the US and its people, there are times when I do rather despair of the total naivety of some of them always demanding a black and white answer when the reality is nothing but a spectrum of greys going from black to white. A classic example of this was in Time magazine which I currently get on a weekly basis.

The question supposedly asked by Henry Kissinger: “Who do I call when I want to call Europe ?” Today as then and perhaps more so from a US perspective in these difficult times, the US wants to feel that there is a natural partner in the EU to help share the load but they really do need to wake up on this one because it is just never going to happen. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1967702,00.html

No United States of Europe

There will never be a United States of Europe and the reasons are fairly obvious and have been so since the 1920s as far as Europe is concerned. The watershed event of the 20^th Century was WW1, otherwise known as the “Great War” or, “The War to end all wars”. This was the death of the various European overseas Empires as well as the slaughter of a whole generation of the young men of all nations, if ever national borders were to dissolve peacefully, this would have been the time not in a post WWII era.

Every nation has been forged during conflict and as in the USA, often through Civil War, no great nation has been formed by wholly peaceful means. In this sense the EU is a totally artificial construct and even the premature introduction of a common currency, wholly daft, political window dressing rather than based upon sound economic principles.

In a sense, the EU is a descendent of the Hapsburg Empire. It is a “Yugoslavia” – The Balkans but on a greater scale, try to force the pace on unification and I suspect that war would be the result so the future prospects for the EU is for individual nation states bound together in a free trade area, the political and military clout that the US would like to see coming from the EU, will just never happen.

Only the dead have seen an end to war…Plato

The EU collectively lacks any core values that every citizen in whatever member state, would defend to the death, it is a “Rich fat boys club” and the only thing that binds them is an easy life otherwise, it is still today what it always was, run for the benefit of France and Germany. What kept the peace in Europe for 50 years or so was not the EU but the Cold War, it was the Americans and Russians being ‘eye ball to eye ball’ over the Iron Curtain that bought peace not the Treaty of Rome.

U.S. Secretary of State Robert Gates said at a NATO meeting: “The demilitarization of Europe — where large swaths of the general public and political class are averse to military force and the risks that go with it — has gone from a blessing in the 20th century to an impediment to achieving real security and lasting peace in the 21st.”

This was an interesting observation which at one and the same time, illustrates just how the USA misunderstands the situation and environment which, to a large part, they have created.

Decline and Fall ?

Perhaps in order to understand ‘today’ better, we need to go back to 4/5^th Century Britain during the decline of the Roman Empire. The Romans certainly didn’t want a repeat of the uprising led by Boadicea, http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/boudicca.shtml and in sense that mirrors what Gates said today “…has gone from a blessing in the 20th century…”

Britain became a successful part of the Roman Empire and the inhabitants became very ‘Romanized’ both in culture and life style however, by the late 4^th Century the storm clouds were gathering over the Roman Empire and Roman Britain too with incursions by Northern tribes. For defence, Roman Britain was reliant upon the Legions their capabilities for self defence, highly restricted so when the Legions were called back to Rome, Roman Britain fell and the inhabitants entered the “Dark Ages”.

Although one hopes that there will not be an identical outcome, there is a strong parallel between those times and the Europe of today which for 50 years, the whole lifetime of someone born immediately after WWII, has sheltered under American might and its Nuclear Umbrella. In what is essentially a ‘socialist’ Continent, European Governments have been happy to spend on welfare benefits and very little on defence.

America is Schizophrenic…

On the one hand and under the economic pressure of a major change in economic thinking which I am sure we will all survive, the USA is looking for a strong European partner to carry some of the burden these changes will bring and especially in terms of global security. In theory, a united Europe whose combined population is greater than the USA should easily be able to produce at least 100,000 troops as a contribution to a mission such as Afghanistan.

The British have 10,000 troops deployed and they are the biggest single national commitment after the US, one can understand the American rationale. But the reality is that a United States of Europe would most likely be less supportive to such aims than the individual EU member states are today, because the EU has not been welded together by military conquest, all decision making is long winded and consensual by nature. The EU is not a dynamic organisation and is much given to navel gazing rather than action.

There is of course a major danger to Europe in all this because unless Russia starts “playing up” again, American focus has already switched to the Pacific and it is likely that South America will become a more pressing issue in the years ahead as well. Whilst peace reigns, Europe is no longer an American priority, it is very much on the back boiler in Washington and the EU needs to be very aware of this especially in the area of Defence Spending.