-Caveat Lector-
"Behind Europe's acceptance of U.S. leadership in the
Yugoslav crisis, however grudging and bitter, is the fact that
the European Union itself has no leader.
"After the EU's executive branch and governing commission
floundered in scandal--"
(Is that convenient, or what?)
"Four of the globe's five leading defense contractors are
American-based firms, and the annual sales of just two of them,
Lockheed Martin and Boeing-McDonnell Douglas, exceed those of all
European defense firms combined.
Bitter Debate in Europe on U.S. Role/
Washington's dominance of NATO creates wave of anti-Americanism
by Frank Viviano
San Francisco Chronicle, April 15, 1999
As bombing raids mount over Serbia, NATO's war against
Slobodan Milosevic is paralleled by a bitter war of words
raging inside the borders of the Atlantic Alliance itself.
The confrontation pits NATO's supporters against an unlikely
coalition of opponents -- ranging from the Communist Party in
Italy to the extreme right-wing National Front in France, along
with a broad range of prominent intellectuals and mainstream
politicians -- who view the intervention in Kosovo as a thinly
disguised effort to impose Washington's will on Europe's future.
``Held on a leash by the Americans, we have violated
international law and the charter of the United Nations,''
charges former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt.
``Europe cannot accept the presence on its soil of a man
(Milosevic) and a regime which, for nearly 10 years, has engaged
in Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and now in Kosovo, in ethnic
cleansing operations, assassinations and massacres,'' responds
French President Jacques Chirac.
Ironically, NATO's critics and supporters alike ask
precisely the same question that troubles many Americans: Will
Europe ever be able to police its own back yard?
Kosovo demonstrates ``that a common European defense policy
is brutally absent today, and also that such a policy has never
appeared so necessary,'' Francois Hollande, first secretary of
France's governing Socialist Party, said Friday.
``NATO has become the de facto department of diplomacy,
defense and security in Europe,'' declares former French Interior
Minister Charles Pasqua, a right-wing critic of the Kosovo
intervention.
There is little sign that the controversy will halt the
bombing, which is firmly backed by the center-left parties that
govern 13 of the European Union's 15 member-states in 1999 and
also by a majority of their voters.
But there is every sign that the bitterness will be lasting,
as will European unhappiness with military reliance on the United
States.
``The partnership with NATO in the Yugoslav crisis is simply
a cloak, masking great differences between the United States and
its European allies,'' a former high-ranking aide to U.N.
Secretary-General Kofi Annan said in a Chronicle interview before
the bombing campaign had even begun.
Since then, the cloak has decidedly come off, in a wave of
the harshest anti-Americanism to sweep Western Europe since the
Vietnam War.
The acrimony has been greatest in France, where suspicion of
U.S. intentions always runs high and where the commitment of
troops and equipment to the Kosovo intervention is the largest of
any European country in the alliance.
HOSTILE COMMENTARIES
At times, newspaper commentaries are so unremittingly
hostile to the United States that a reader might well imagine
Paris is at war with the Pentagon, rather than with the Yugoslav
army.
``In the event of total victory (in Kosovo), one would have
to say that it is both a great military success for NATO -- that
is, for the United States -- and an irreparable humanitarian
catastrophe, a political setback for Europe,'' thundered Alain
Joxe, director of France's elite Graduate School of Social
Studies and an influential political pundit.
America's strategic and economic views ``are dangerous and
foreign to our political ethics,'' he wrote in Le Monde on
Monday. Its activities in Kosovo ``do not set the stage for
postwar reconstruction, but for mafia chaos.''
Regis Debray, a longtime adviser to late French President
Francois Mitterrand, went so far as to charge that his fellow
Europeans had become brain-dead automatons, their minds destroyed
by American imperialism and too much exposure to frivolous U.S.
cultural exports.
In a fog induced by overconsumption of McDonald's, CNN and
Hollywood movies, ``America is deprogramming Europe, which grows
as uncivilized and myopic as its leader,'' he wrote in a widely
quoted attack on the Kosovo intervention April 1.
``America: You have to be against her. That's the basic
demand of intellectual conformism, on the left and on the right
(in Europe),'' French writer Pascal Bruckner answered in an angry
reply. ``In short, you put those who want to save the Kosovars on
the same level as those who want to liquidate them.''
PHILOSOPHER'S VIEW
If the memory of Auschwitz means anything, insists German
philosopher Hans Magnus Enzenberger, ``Europeans themselves are
not merely capable of intervening (in Kosovo), we are morally
obligated to do so.''
Why then is the European Union so paralyzed, so wary of
acting without U.S. leadership? With 3 million troops, the
European defense establishment is more than able to meet the
purely military challenge of Yugoslavia. Nor is it too pinched
for cash to act.
``The total arms expenditures of the EU's 15 member states
surpass $200 billion per year,'' notes Armand de Decker,
president of the Defense Commission of the Western European
Union. ``That's almost as much as the military budget of the
United States, which is $250 billion.''
The problem is that Europe's defense expenditures -- and
more importantly, its decision-making procedures -- are parceled
out over 15 central governments, legislatures and political party
leaders. As most EU countries merge their economies and move
toward a single currency, the prospects for a common defense
policy remain cloudy.
If anything, those prospects are even dimmer than they were
before 1999 opened. The first three months of this year were
marked by unprecedented divisiveness and scandal in the EU,
leading up to the wholesale resignation in late March of the
organization's entire 20-member ruling European Commission and
its president, Jacques Santer.
GLIMMER OF PROGRESS
Prior to the European Commission scandal, there had been a
glimmer of progress.
At a September Anglo-French summit in St. Malo, France,
Chirac and British Prime Minister Tony Blair signed a declaration
urging that joint defense arrangements be considered.
But to date, concrete measures have been rare. Beyond the
establishment of a small experimental Franco-German infantry
force and the release of a 1997 position paper on further
military integration, almost no steps have been taken to create
permanent common security institutions.
Even in the position paper, both French and German
strategists assume that their common efforts will be conducted
under a larger NATO umbrella.
``The great force wielded by the United States in conflicts
is that they are decisive and they act,'' concedes French Defense
Minister Alain Richard.
Concern over Europe's dependence on America -- and its own
indecisiveness -- has grown steadily since the first bloody
phases of Yugoslavia's collapse between 1991 and 1995, which left
200,000 dead and 3 million homeless in Croatia and Bosnia.
Sent in as peacemakers, but hamstrung by the lack of a
well-defined mandate, the European-led United Nations Protection
Force (UNPROFOR) was powerless to halt massacres that transpired
in plain sight.
The nadir came on July 10, 1995, when Serbian forces overran
the eastern Bosnian city of Srebrenica, which was technically a
U.N.-protected enclave. As Dutch troops helplessly watched, the
Serbs disarmed and dragged off nearly all of the city's men. An
estimated 8,000 to 10,000 are believed to have been summarily
executed.
The war also resulted in hundreds of U.N. casualties,
primarily among French, British and other European troops who
were not allowed to defend themselves fully, much less defend
millions of terrified civilians.
'NO ENEMY TO FIGHT'
``I left a mission in which there was no clear understanding
what came next,'' said France's Lieutenant General Bertrand
Guillaume de Lapresle, who resigned as commander in chief of
UNPROFOR in 1995. ``I was a general with no enemy to fight and no
victory to win. What I can't put out of my mind is the 140 U.N.
soldiers who gave their lives in Bosnia, and the 1,200 who were
wounded.''
By contrast, ``NATO has a very clearly defined enemy and a
clear determination to achieve a military victory,'' de Lapresle
said.
``Welcome to Europe,'' a bitter French foreign legionnaire
told a Chronicle reporter in 1995, shortly after their U.N. plane
was hit by Serbian anti-aircraft fire over Sarajevo and forced
into an emergency landing. ``Our approach is to let them shoot at
us as much as they like, and wait for the Americans to tell us
when we can shoot back.''
On August 30 of that year, NATO air strikes supervised by
the United States were finally called in, and the Bosnian Serbs
agreed to a cease-fire within a few weeks.
Bosnia cast the absence of a coordinated European defense
policy in painfully stark terms, and set the controversial
precedent that is now being followed in Kosovo.
``The Europeans -- essentially the Germans, British and
French -- play their part in the (Kosovo) offensive. But they
would have been perfectly unable to manage it without the United
States,'' conclude French political analysts Alain Frachon and
Daniel Vernet.
WHY NO EUROPEAN NATION HAS EMERGED AS A LEADER
Behind Europe's acceptance of U.S. leadership in the
Yugoslav crisis, however grudging and bitter, is the fact that
the European Union itself has no leader.
With the EU's executive branch and governing commission
floundering in scandal and unprecedented disarray, none of the
organization's member states seems ready to step in and provide
direction.
Three nations -- Britain, France and Germany -- have the
population size, global influence and military capabilities to
claim such leadership. Yet for different reasons, each is unable
to exercise it.
In Germany, the reason is history. The EU was established
in the ruins of World War II, and its fundamental intention was
to create a European-wide political buffer against the resurgence
of expansionist German nationalism. Although Bonn commits a
hefty $42 billion annually to defense, making it one of the
world's five top military spenders, it is still relegated to a
supporting role in military affairs.
Indeed, until the Kosovo intervention, to which it has
contributed special Tornado fighters equipped with radar-jamming
gear, Germany had never directly participated in a NATO action.
The British, whose widely admired political system and World
War II victory might have led to pre-eminent status in postwar
Europe, did not join the EU (then known as the Common Market)
until 1973 and have often played a disruptive part in its
unifying efforts since. After refusing to sign on to the euro,
the EU's new single currency, and rejecting key trade and social
agreements, the British have effectively opted out of European
leadership by choice.
That leaves France, which was the central player in the
foundation of the EU's parent body 40 years ago, and is the
world's third largest defense spender with a yearly military
budget of $48 billion. For many years, its dominance in Europe
was unchallenged.
France's problem today is politics, and specifically the
impact of ``cohabitation'' -- the French term for shared
government, with power at the top split between left and right,
between prime minister and president. Cohabitation has stymied
French governance for most of the past 13 years, making it
difficult for Paris to rule France efficiently, much less
undertake leadership in a European war.
Europe's leadership quandary in a security crisis is
compounded by a yawning technology gap between the old and new
worlds, which has obliged French, British and German operations
to rely on U.S. computers and satellites in battlefield command
and control.
Four of the globe's five leading defense contractors are
U.S. firms. Just two of them, Lockheed Martin and Boeing-
McDonnell Douglas, have an annual sales turnover -- and research
and development capacity -- 50 percent higher than all European
defense firms combined.
``American `hyper-power' irritates us because it bluntly
reduces us to the recognition of our own historic diminishment,''
says Bruno Racine, a chief adviser to former French Prime
Minister Alain Juppe.
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