Transatlantic Relations in the 21st Century

Europe, America and the Rise of the Rest

Erwan Lagadec

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781136301957
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

This book offers an overview of the interface between European integration, transatlantic relations, and the 'rise of the rest' in the early 21st century.

The collapse of the Soviet bloc opened up an era in which the drivers and perceived benefits of the US alliance among European countries have become more variegated and shifting. The proposition that the US remains at once an 'indispensable' and 'intolerable' nation in Europe is a key concept in the alliance, as the US remains inextricably tied to the continent through economic, military and cultural links.

This work examines this complex subject area from many angles, including an analysis of the historical and cultural contexts of America's relations with Europe, as well as a discussion of the politics of transatlantic affairs which utilises evidence gleaned from a series of case-studies. In the concluding chapters, the author assesses the likelihood that the West can entrench its global dominance in the realms of "soft" and "hard" power, and by effecting a "controlled reform" that will see multilateral structures open up to emerging powers.

This book will be of great interest to students of European Politics, EU integration, transatlantic relations, US foreign policy/diplomacy, International Security and IR in general.

1
Indispensable and intolerable nation

The US in European geopolitics

Though it has been perceived as a hubristic assertion of the American uni-polar moment, Madeleine Albright’s oft-quoted description of the US, in the 1990s, as the “indispensable nation” was partly borne of the defensive concern that this characterization was now open to question.¹ Albright seemed to recognize that the supremacy and relevance of the US needed to be reasserted, in a world now supposedly post-historical, orphaned of the Soviet colossus that had made American co-equal predominance self-evident. In other words, the Secretary of State did not only mean to insist that the US was indispensable: but that it remained so.

Though not restricted to it, Albright’s point applied primarily to the European theater and the transatlantic alliance. Her concern that the US might no longer be perceived as the indispensable nation among European capitals was plain to see when she famously fulminated a shortlist of red lines (the “three D’s”) that Europeans ought not to cross as they developed an autonomous European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP), in the wake of the December 1998 St Malo summit.² Albright feared that ESDP might have a deleterious impact on the Alliance; in other words, it might precipitate the end of the indispensable role of the US in Europe. The same paradigm permeated the theological pronouncements of US Ambassador to NATO, Nicholas Burns, when he later described the EU’s security policy as “one of the greatest dangers to the transatlantic relationship.”³

This line of thought was, and remains, seriously flawed. It ignores the strategic-historical drivers that continue to guarantee US preeminence in Europe; as well as the ambivalence inherent in European perceptions of the American role that must trigger occasional (though fruitless) European protests against it. In other words, the US does not remain indispensable in spite of the fall of the Wall: on the contrary, the end of the Cold War has made it more genuinely pivotal in Europe than ever before. At the same time, however, American power in Europe is not only indispensable: it is also intolerable.

Perceptions of an indispensable and intolerable US do not neatly divide two opposing camps among European countries (“Atlanticist” and “Gaullist”): all of them simultaneously hold both views, though they publicly might embrace one of the two more readily and more vocally. Nor is the conflict between those two facets of the US role edging towards resolution with the eventual triumph of one perception over the other. Albright and Burns’ concerns were triggered by a mistaken belief that they were confronting an irreversible European mutiny whose opening shots were fired when Chirac and Blair initiated ESDP in December 1998. In fact, the two terms of the paradox – the indispensable and intolerable nature of American power in Europe – must persist for the foreseeable future because this paradox is rooted in stubborn geopolitical realities that result from European historical experience.

In other words, post-Cold War transatlantic relations can only be properly assessed, and their evolution correctly anticipated, if restored in the context of a broader timeframe. The US’ role in Europe did not emerge with the Cold War; it will not recede now that this historical phase is over. The status of the US in Europe reflects historical realities that are measured in centuries, not decades. In a nutshell, the US is indispensable now more than ever because it has now – and only now – resolved Europe’s long, frustrating quest for a hegemon. Yet America must at the same time remain intolerable in Europe because the same resolution, though effective, is fundamentally flawed.

Europe has been looking for a universal security guarantee, provided by a single hegemon, since the fall of the Roman Empire in ad 476. An essential founding myth of European consciousness is that Rome had been that hegemon, and had provided that guarantee. The myth required considerable rewriting of history: but this was made easier by the fact that the Romans themselves had been keen to describe their own Empire as universal in spite of geographical reality. Areas of Europe beyond the scope of the Empire were dismissed by Imperial writers as the land of “barbarians,” whose existence did not impugn on universality because they were essentially sub-human.⁴ The limes (the frontiers of the Empire) therefore was not a border between “us” and “them,” inside and outside: but between the universe, the cosmos, the known world, genuine humanity on one hand, and non-existence on the other.⁵ Christian thought, culminating with St Augustine’s City of God, has played a major role in cultivating the utopia of Rome’s universal dominion (pax romana), which it used as a metaphor and inspiration for the equally universal spiritual dominion of the church. The fall of Romulus Augustus in ad 476 shattered the Roman dream, by making it clear that the barbaric limbos “beyond” were real enough to put an end to Rome’s exalted existence. Since then, Europe’s collective consciousness has lamented the lost universal dominion.

The church was the first to attempt to cloak itself in the ragged remains of the Emperors’ clothes, by claiming that the Donation of Constantine had made it the true heir of Roman hegemony, not only spiritually, but also politically.⁶ In the sixth century, Emperor Justinian and his general Belisarius embarked on an impressive but ultimately futile attempt to “renovate” a pan-European (indeed, pan-Mediterranean) empire, aiming to dismiss 476 as an aberration, a contretemps, a momentary nightmare out of the dream of universal security.⁷ After Justinian’s failure, the same renovatio Romanorum imperii was attempted at intervals throughout the medieval period: first by Charlemagne in ad 800, later when Otto I was crowned Holy Roman Emperor in ad 962.⁸ The sway of the myth of universal dominion was such that both the Caroligian and Ottonian empires claimed success although they only encompassed a stump of their Roman predecessor; indeed, both had to compose with the existence of a rival claim to Rome’s inheritance – also unequal to the task – in Byzantium’s Eastern Greek empire.

Though it lost out to Otto’s Germanies in taking up the imperial orb, France throughout the middle ages and the modern era leveraged its massive population and resources to become the most credible candidate for pan-European domination: yet it never became more than a flawed continental superpower. The vicissitudes of the Hundred Years’ War have created the illusion that its two protagonists, France and England, were evenly matched as early as 1337. However, the very fact that France could sustain defeat after crushing defeat at the hand of the English and still come out triumphant 116 years later suggests an altogether different reality. France by any measure was the colossus of medieval Europe, outnumbering the English population by a factor of four to one, according to conservative estimates.⁹ English expeditions in France throughout the war were little more than parasitic enterprises, with no more serious hope of taking control of the clay-footed giant through military means than a latter-day Rwandan militia spreading terror in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The sun-king Louis XIV tapped into the same considerable resources when he resurrected French claims for European political domination in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. One hundred years later, Napoleon Bonaparte sounded the last hurrah of France’s claim for “universal” dominion, before an early demographic transition led to the abrupt decline of French power resources in comparison to its rising rivals, Britain and Germany.

Germany itself, of course, was also well placed to become Europe’s hegemon, and repeatedly attempted to do so even before its belated political unification in 1871. Population and border shifts in the wake of World War I and II have obscured the old geography of Europe, in which Germanic populations were dominant from the market-towns of Alsace in the west, to the Hanseatic ports of the Baltic and the mines of Transylvania in the east. As we have seen, the Ottonians leveraged the pivotal position of Germanic Europe when they created the Holy Roman Empire. The Habsburgs’ skill for astute dynastic alliances came close to ultimate success when a tangle of intermarriages over several generations produced, with Charles V, an emperor upon whose dominions the sun famously never set.¹⁰ However, Charles’ universal claims shattered under the weight of Germanic politics (now fed by a powerful religious narrative), when the rebellion of the Lutheran Schmalkaldic League caused Charles to acknowledge that he had overreached, resign his throne and split his empire between son and brother. Though less nostalgic of ancient Rome than was Mussolini’s fascist regime, Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich hearkened back to a bizarre combination of Ottonian neo-medievalism and Roman imperial glory. In comparison to Charles V and Hitler, Bismarck’s ambitions for the intervening Second Reich were rather modest, though they still were predicated on Prussia defeating the Austrian empire and France. It is not surprising, once he had proceeded to do both, that Bismarck in 1871 brought the new German empire to life at Versailles – thereby seizing the baton of imperial legacy away from Louis XIV’s memory, with the aim to resolve once and for all the tug-of-war between France and Germany for universal dominion.¹¹ Yet the chancellor’s vision did not survive the trenches of the World War I. Germany had to take a less felicitous return trip to Versailles in 1919, its ambitions (momentarily) squashed.

Thus Europe throughout its medieval and early modern history, became tantalizingly close to recovering the dream of Rome’s universal dominion, but never achieved it. Too many obstacles prevented the rebirth of hegemony in Europe.

The first set of impediments pertains to geography. It would be overly deterministic to claim that Europe’s geography has dictated its destiny in isolation of any other factor: yet it remains true that Europe’s landscape is ill-suited for empire-builders. Rome itself, as we have seen, had to dismiss the limits of its own universality, and explain away Teutoburg through a geographical sleight of hand.¹² The problem for would-be European hegemons is essentially three-fold: a combination of islands, mountains, and the Eurasian plain.

The British Isles are the first obstacle. Their impregnability certainly has been exaggerated by cohorts of British writers who have been known to describe them as a bastion against European dictators and decadent continental influences more generally. The truth is that in the pre-industrial era, when sailing was more convenient than land travel, the English Channel remained an imperfect guarantee against invasion. It did not seem particularly daunting to Caesar and Claudius in 55 bc and ad 43, to William the Bastard in 1066, or to Louis VIII in 1216 – though the enterprise had clearly become more formidable by the time of Napoleon’s ill-fated invasion plans. The fact remains that the island of Britain in the modern era has been a permanent thorn in the side of all candidates for pan-European hegemony.

Mountains are a second impediment. The Southern half of Europe is a rugged mess of broken mountain chains that provide the worst possible terrain for invading armies. Charlemagne and Napoleon both were beaten in Spain. Burgundy in 1476 was repelled by the Swiss at Morat, shortly before the Habsburgs themselves were beaten back from what had been their homeland. In the spring of 1941, the price paid by Hitler in the invasion of Yugoslavia and Greece was such that this campaign contributed to delaying operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union, with famous consequences.¹³

Barbarossa itself, of course, like Napoleon’s own disastrous retreat out of Moscow, underlines the third colossal obstacle to European hegemony: the Eurasian plain, whose featureless landscape has allowed foreign invasions as often as its sheer scale has defeated them.

Nor are geographical factors alone in impeding universal dominion in Europe. Political realities and historical path-dependence have played an equally important part in defeating a litany of would-be European hegemons. Though a myopic view of European history tends to date the birth of the modern state to the Westphalian treaties of 1648, Europe did not wait so late to witness the coalescence of national identities that made hegemonic invasions unsustainable. The preexistence of a strong national sentiment and its attendant state apparatus came close to impeding William the Bastard’s invasion of England as early as 1066. It was also in evidence in France under Philip Augustus at the turn of the thirteenth century. Meanwhile Bohemia, by the middle of the following century and Charles IV’s advent, had already constructed a collective identity so irrepressible that it would defeat all attempts to subsume the Czech people into a succession of hegemonic empires until 1989. In sum, from Charlemagne’s ignominious defeat at the hands of the Basques in Roncevaux to Napoleon’s and Hitler’s inability to root out insurgencies, a long list of European overlords have seen their quest for supremacy end in catastrophic failure, not only because islands were remote, mountains impassable, and distances too vast: but because national sentiments across Europe would not let them succeed.

England’s (later Britain’s) strategic outlook has been the third major impediment on the path of all candidates for European hegemony. England’s single-minded priority, once it turned into an island kingdom with the loss of its last continental bridgehead at Calais in 1558, has been to maintain a balance of power on the European continent. Europe, in London’s eyes, had to remain divided. Its geographical, cultural, and commercial heart, with its gateways the Rhine and the Meuse, had to remain open for English or British commerce.¹⁴ France and Germany therefore were to be kept in check, and their alternate claims for continental dominion were to be defeated whenever they reemerged.

Britain’s attitude towards continental hegemony, however, was occasionally mitigated by a competing strategic priority, when London turned its sight away from Europe and onto its overseas empire. The loss of Calais in 1558 is symbolic of both strands in British instincts; while England thereby became the offshore arbiter of European conflicts, the same year also marked the advent of Elizabeth I – the patron of Walter Raleigh, the inspiration for the birth of England’s colonial empire at Roanoke in 1587 and Jamestown in eponymous Virginia 20 years later.

This ambivalence in English strategic horizons raises an essential corollary in the story of Europe’s “hegemonic problem”: the fact that all intra-European security guarantees have so often been betrayed that they long ago died from a thousand cuts. England or Britain could never in fact become a trustworthy overseer of European peace and balance-of-power in the face of French, German, later Russian, claims for hegemony. Uncertainty always remained that London, when pressed to intervene, would in fact retreat to a splendid isolation and reject its European mandate, preferring instead to focus on empire-building. Thus Czechoslovakia after Munich was described by Prime Minister Chamberlain as a “far-away country [of which] we know nothing”: the UK evidently had come to know more and care more about India, Afghanistan, or South Africa than about Bohemia.

Nor have French security guarantees sustained the test of time any more convincingly. Too many of them have been exclusively predicated on an attempt to prevent German domination. A consistent French ambition in this regard has been to encircle Germanic lands and open a second front against them in the East. Any alliance struck with Germany’s oriental neighbors therefore was based on ulterior motives, and would vanish in a moment – with little or no regard for the welfare of allies – as soon as German ambitions had been stemmed. This is the common pattern of France’s recurrent Eastern alliances, from Francis I’s Ottoman compact¹⁵ and Napoleon’s meeting with Alexander I at Tilsit, to the Third Republic’s ill-fated “Petite Entente” with Central European countries in the 1920s. Within five years Tilsit ended with war between the two emperors.¹⁶ The Petite Entente was compromised first in underhanded fashion at Locarno – when France agreed with Germany upon the inviolability of their common border, at the expense of its Eastern partners, who benefited from no such assurance¹⁷ – before the “Eastern Alliance” finally and ruthlessly was shattered at Munich in September 1938.

The other two colossi in the European theater, Germany and Russia, are for their part prevented by geography from extending any credible security guarantee to anyone. The Eurasian plain again is at the root of the issue: insofar as it made German and Russian borders indistinct and indefensible, the two countries by geographical definition could only ever remain threats, or “guarantors of insecurity,” in the eyes of their neighbors. Soviet-led invasions of Hungary in 1956, and Czechoslovakia in 1968 suggest that the Warsaw pact was no exception to the rule.

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Indispensable and intolerable nation: the US in European geopolitics
• 2 “Friends again” or “drifting apart”?
• 3 Defining threats and interests: drivers, processes, and objectives
• 4 Transatlantic threat perceptions: “With friends like these, who needs enemies”?
• 5 The forgotten ballast: economic interdependence vs. high politics
• 6 Regional case studies: the politics of transatlantic relations
• 7 NATO after Lisbon: new compact or obfuscation of irreconcilable differences?
• 8 Dogmas and dependence: assessing the NATO–CSDP impasse
• 9 US–NATO–EU cooperation on the ground
• 10 The military balance: emerging threats or new providers of global public goods?
• 11 Normative contest: the decline of Western “soft power”?
• 12 Locking in Western dominance: the West in international organizations
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index