The Washington
Times
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Who needs NATO?Diana West
The
Washington Times
Published February 28, 2003
Just one more thing about
France. After all the analysis of its motives for trying to thwart a
U.S.-led invasion, we gather that France is out to prove its "relevance;"
that French President Jacques Chirac is "bent on securing his place in
history;" that France wants to counterbalance American might by taking its
rightful place, it thinks, at the head of a united Europe. In other words,
it seems that all of France's histrionics — what was it Foreign Minister
Dominique de Villepin said, straight-faced, at "this temple of the United
Nations" about France always standing "upright in the face of history
before mankind"? — boil down to one big power
grab.
But where's the muscle? With
Britain, Italy, Spain, Denmark, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Poland,
Portugal, Albania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Estonia, Latvia, Macedonia, Romania,
Slovakia, and Slovenia — "New Europe" — joining President Bush's
"coalition of the willing," you'd think the old cheese stands alone
(except for Germany and Belgium). France, however, doesn't share this
impression. So what backs up the big talk? Strategist and author Robert
Kagan might answer that nothing does. That is, his nifty theory on what
really separates the United States and Europe — that the United States
fully expects to exercise power in an anarchic, Hobbesian world, while
Europeans believe they have evolved "beyond power" into a "world of laws
and rules and transnational negotiation" — assumes that traditional
notions of "power" in Europe are increasingly beside the
point.
This suggests that what we're
witnessing in France is a matter of, well, gall, both insupportable and
unsupported. But, I'm not so sure. France may have something besides
vetoes and resolutions up its sleeve, something that trumps NATO and, if
necessary, the European Union — or at least allows the French to think so.
That "something" is its deeply layered, binding relationship with the
Arab-Muslim world.
It seems that what
helps make the French so cavalier about the Atlantic alliance is its place
in a bona fide Mediterranean bloc. This goes beyond the lucrative oil
concessions and weapons contracts with Iraq we hear about. It involves a
complex relationship at every level — economic, educational, religious,
artistic, legal, demographic — between France and the Arab-Muslim world, a
surprisingly overlooked collaboration that now includes the rest of the EU
nations in what is officially known as the Euro-Arab Dialogue. Over
roughly 30 years, this Dialogue has led to a change in European, and
particularly French, culture of a magnitude at first difficult to grasp.
The historian Bat Ye'or — perhaps as great a prophet as she is a path-
breaking historian — pinpoints the origins of this transformation in a
stunning article at www.frontpagemag.com.
It all began, she writes, with the terms
of a terrible bargain struck between Europe, largely at France's
instigation, and the Arab League countries around the time of the Arab oil
embargo of 1973: oil and business markets for Europe in exchange for
anti-Israel policies for the Arab world.
"The Europeans tried to maintain the Dialogue on a base of economic
relations, while the Arab countries tied the oil and business markets to
the European alignment on their anti-Israeli policies," she writes.
"However, the Dialogue was not restricted to influencing European foreign
policy against Israel and detaching Europe from America. It also aimed at
establishing...a massive Arab-Muslim presence [in Europe] by the
immigration and settlement of millions of Muslims." The goal? As Bat Ye'or
sees it, "to integrate Europe and the Arab-Muslim world into one political
and economic bloc, by mixing populations [multiculturalism], weakening the
Atlantic solidarity, and isolating
America."
This sounds like a Dialogue
worth listening to. It helps explain the French vision, as described in
the New York Times by former Chirac adviser Pierre Lellouche, of "Europe
as a bridge between the developing and developed world." It indicates that
continental Europe is not the extent of French designs. And it helps
explain why France is such a "stability"-booster in the neighborhood of
Iraq and other dictatorships: Any changes war could bring to Arab-Muslim
regimes, from retooling to rebirth, could also change the Dialogue — which
is not something France wants to
hear.
Such revelations should also clue
us in another reason the ex-communist proto-democracies of New Europe are
with the United States. Because the Euro-Arab Dialogue never extended to
Eastern Europe, Euro-Arab ties don't exist there. (As members of the
Eastern Bloc, these same countries once toed a reflexively anti-United
States, anti-Israel line, but such dogma has gone the way of the USSR.)
Absent this special relationship, there have been none of the major
influxes of Muslim immigrants into these countries that have transformed
the demographics of Old Europe.
The
Israeli newspaper Haaretz has mentioned some of these same points in an
essay exploring why the upsurge of violent anti-Semitism that swept
Western Europe last year largely missed Eastern Europe. Interesting to see
what else they tell us.
Diana West is a syndicated columnist. Her column
appears on Fridays.
Copyright © 2003
News World Communications, Inc.
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