-Caveat Lector- -------- Original Message -------- Subject: EU / NATO Date: Tue, 20 Apr 1999 13:09:08 -0700 From: nurev <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Organization: Nurev Independent Research From- The Guardian --J2 ===================== Hand in hand on the western front In the discreet Belgian suburbs, two powerful men are bonding By Martin Walker Monday April 19, 1999 As if he were conducting a secret love affair, the calendar of the late and unlamented European Commission President, Jacques Santer, has for the past year listed regular, early morning meetings with someone identified only as "S''. This discreet monthly rendezvous was a breakfast with Javier Solana, secretary-general of Nato. The two men did not have far to travel. The Nato HQ is on the main road to Brussels airport, in the suburb of Evere, about seven minutes by car from the Commission building at the Schumann roundabout. But if Nato and the EU Commission have inhabited the same city for 33 years, they live officially on different planets. This has been deliberate. Nato only came to Brussels in 1966, when President de Gaulle evicted the HQ from France, and French animosity towards the US-dominated alliance ensured that it stayed at arm's length from the institutions of Europe. Hence the discretion of those monthly breakfasts. But the catalysing effect of the long Balkan wars of the 1990s has been making this as untenable as it is ridiculous. Nato and the EU have stumbled and drifted into a roughly rational form of division of labour for the Balkans. Nato does the hard political-military stuff and the EU does the soft foreign policy of humanitarian aid and reconstruction. At its most absurd, this means Nato airstrikes knock down Serbian telecommunications towers and the EU helps finance their reconstruction, so the warplanes can knock them down again. Kosovo means that the two institutions are now joined at the hip. Germany's latest proposal of a Marshall Plan to reconstruct the Balkans and bring them into the EU and Nato has now become simultaneously Nato's war aim and the EU's long-term peace plan. This cosy new relationship was to have been formalised later this week at a grand jamboree for Nato's 50th birthday at which Barbra Streisand was to sing and President Bill Clinton was to put his seal on America's gracious acceptance of a separate European defence identity within Nato. Previous US administrations had sent stiff diplomatic notes, warning that Nato's future was at risk, whenever Europeans hesitantly suggested such a heresy. The Clinton team, recognising the value of lending their intelligence and logistics assets while Europe provided cannon-fodder for operations of marginal US interest, has been more relaxed. It is a bit like the Indian Army of the British Raj. The Americans provide the staff officers, gunners and engineers; Europeans are the sepoys. The problem is that, except for our unusable nuclear weapons, we Europeans are barely up to sepoy status yet. We have 2 million men under arms (compared to 1.2 million for the US) but spend about two thirds of the US defence budget, and are thus an entire technological generation behind them. It was when Tony Blair and President Chirac were glumly informed by their general staffs last year that the combined French and British air forces could not seize command of the air over puny Serbia that the European revolution began. Britain gave up its long insistence that Europe's security depended on Nato and only Nato. The French finally accepted that Nato need not be merely a ploy to guarantee American hegemony. And at the St Malo summit last December, we jointly agreed to promote a European defence system. Last month at Reinhartshausen, the Germans came up with a plan for the bureaucracy to achieve this. It called for an EU military committee, of equivalent status to the EU's shadowy and powerful monetary committee, which was the crucial institution in the launch of the single currency. The Germans also proposed regular meetings of European general staffs, which should be fun for the Luxembourg colonel (commanding 800 troops) when he sits alongside the French and British nuclear-armed grandees. "I felt I was at the birth of an event as historic as the launch of the euro,' commented Spain's foreign minister, Abel Matutes. He may well be right, because of yet another revolution which has taken place to join the American, French and British rethinks. The Germans are finally shaking off the long, post-war habits of deference, thanks to the peace and love and radical politics generation of 1969. Just as it took Richard Nixon to open US diplomatic relations with Red China, it took that former Young Socialist revolutionary Gerhard Schroeder and the erstwhile Green pacifist Joschka Fischer to get the Luftwaffe bombing Belgrade again. So America's great postwar genetic achievement, of transforming belligerent Germans and Japanese into plump bourgeois pussycats, is ending. And that agreeable feature of the EU, as an economic superpower which deliberately chose not to match its wealth with military ambition, is withering fast. Those discreet EU-Nato breakfasts are set to become formal planning sessions, towards a European military vocation which we have yet to define. DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soapboxing! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright frauds is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credeence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector. ======================================================================== Archives Available at: http://home.ease.lsoft.com/archives/CTRL.html http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/ ======================================================================== To subscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SUBSCRIBE CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED] To UNsubscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SIGNOFF CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Om
