EUROPE'S WORLD DEBATING FORUM

Autumn 2006

by Sebastian Mayer

RELATED ARTICLES:

---

Hubert Védrine advocates a unified, powerful and independent Europe as an alternative to a US-dominated, unipolar international order. He regrets Washington has not supported any significant European integration projects in recent times. It is maintained that not only the current government, but the American political elite altogether favours a unilateral foreign and security policy, disregarding the European Union as a serious equal. I believe, above all, Védrine’s standpoint needs two remarks which I will both commence with posing a question.

Do we really live in a unipolar world? I deem this is a truism rather than an established fact. A unipolar world would have one dominant actor which single-handedly is able to effectively resolve important international problems, no influential major powers, and various minor actors. Admittedly, if we merely discuss the availability of military hardware, the status of the US in the world is unrivalled both in terms of quantity and quality. But if we single out economics as one import domain of power, it has to be conceded that American global economic hegemony eroded already since the early 1970s. With reference to “soft power” – the ability to get something through attraction – there has been a dramatic decline in the Bush administration’s capacity to persuade others by values and legitimacy instead of coercion in the last years. Unlike its initial expectations, Washington was unable to win the hearts and minds of the people in Iraq and elsewhere. In consequence, there is an enormous gap between what was originally desired – democratising Iraq and using this as a trajectory to transform the Middle East – and the actual result: a chaos close to a Hobbesian war of all against all. Against this background it is more than obvious that awe-inspiring firepower is not enough for victory. In addition to comprehensive, tailor-made military capabilities, soft power is getting increasingly important in a world with low-intensity rather than state-centric conflicts. While it is true that in the current state of affairs it would be difficult to resolve any major crisis without the active help of Washington, it goes also the other way round: The US can’t go it alone.

Is the current US government in fact inherently unilateral and ignorant towards the EU? While this is a more controversial question, I have some doubts here also. Admittedly, the US is at present much less a European power than it used to be before 1989/1990. As the need for US military capabilities to deter the Soviet Union/Russia decreased, and since other challenges in the Middle East, Central-, Southeast- or East Asia gained relevance, the glue that binds both sides of the Atlantic is now much thinner. Also, already under Clinton the approach of the US towards the EU was somewhat schizophrenic, as Védrine rightly implies: On the one hand, Washington wished for a more independent European potential for security and defence as a means to disburden itself, while this independence was not supposed to go too far, particularly within NATO. Yet, the St. Malo Declaration of 1998 between France and the UK, which instigated the development of the European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP), was not only preceded by a qualitative change in British foreign policy. St. Malo was also, at least implicitly, endorsed by Washington, which expected ESDP to cope with minor conflicts at the European periphery. Against the background of the mutual transatlantic dependence in world affairs outlined above, there is some evidence of a move towards more multilateralism in the US administration, such as the loss of influence of the hard-line neo-cons on the President, or increasingly negative attitudes among the US public towards Bush’s Iraq policy, which the government cannot easily ignore. Although serious issues with reference to the autonomy of the ESDP remain to be worked out, I don’t see a long-term unilateral and ignorant US vis-à-vis the European Union.