With the Iraq occupation by U.S. troops diminishing in favor of a privatized contractual police action (mercenaries), it is a good time to look back at the European Union's reaction to the US and UK takeover of that poor nation. The European Union was rife with dissent, as hundreds of thousands took to the streets, and the ideological rhetoric soared.
In America, Cindy Sheehan (above) grew righteously angry after her son died.
This essay first appeared in the
Oregon Literary Review in 2008.
War and Dissent
In early 2003, as the United States and Great Britain plotted the invasion of Iraq, the fifteen member-states of the European Union fell into turmoil. Intense debate and infighting are common enough occurrences among the EU states, but nothing in Europe creates rhetorical heat quite like the question of war. The EU after all was partially designed 50 years ago to avoid war. The EU’s foundation is predicated on the value of peace: “The desire for peace led to exercises in regional integration, the process by which countries remove the barriers to free trade movement of people across national borders, integrate their markets, and build common sets of policies” (
McCormick p. 2).
The variant reactions of the European nations to the Iraq war can be attributed to several factors. As a group, the EU felt great sympathy for the US in the aftermath of 9/11. But the good will was short-lived for some EU members in light of the Bush Administration’s interpretation of how to best fight terrorism. Two fundamentally different philosophies dominated the prewar discourse among EU nations. One philosophy painted terrorism as a fully formed organization of international influence. Perceptions of al Qaeda are often formulated by this mistaken logic. Terrorism, the other philosophy implies, is seldom organized as a sustainable amalgam; it rather floats through international communities as a loose and often unrelated series of disputations tied to an array of real and imagined grievances. This is not to dispute al Qaeda’s connectedness as a terror system; it simply deflates the value in thinking of terrorism as an entity that can be crushed like an opposing army on a universal battlefield. Terrorists are criminals first and organization men, if at all, second. Thus the futility of approaching terrorism as a military exercise is evidenced by the so-called war on terror, which initially equated the anti-US government of Afghanistan with free agents of terrorism such as Osama bin Laden. The Taliban and bin Laden were rather too close and conspiratorial, of course, which is why the EU and NATO supported the 2001 war to oust the Taliban government. There was, then, substance to the US logic that the Taliban was, if not an organized terrorist group, a clear supporter of terrorism. Unfortunately, soon after the Taliban’s ouster, perceptions began to change at the top levels of the US and EU and the fighting spread to Iraq.
Two major EU players, France and Germany, in the interest of prolonged diplomatic efforts, coupled with a desire to see more evidence of Iraq’s disputed weapons program, opposed the second Iraq war. “War is always a last resort,” French President Jacques Chirac said days before the US-led invasion of Iraq. “It is always the worst of solutions because it brings death and misery” (
International Herald Tribune, 3/11/2007).
Because the Bush Administration sold the invasion of Iraq as an aspect of the war on terror, an illogical corollary that the majority of Americans bought, France became a target of ridicule by members of Congress, average citizens and reflexive writers in the US press. France and Germany were laughed off as the “Old Europe” in a press conference by US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. French fries sold in the US House commissary were renamed “freedom fries.” Stale bromides referencing France’s World War II defeat by the Nazis were reborn. The winds of war became a hurricane, and Europe was in the eye of the storm.
Germany’s Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder shared the effect of the heat-seeking rhetorical missiles launched by the US leadership and rightist press. His top advisor, Reinhardt Hesse declared, “We’re all working to find a non-war solution” (
BBC News, 1/22/2003). Pierre Lequiller, a member of the French National Assembly stated flatly—“We don’t want war” (
Ibid.)
Much to Schroeder’s and Chirac’s disappointment cracks in the EU peace initiative opened when some members lined up with the UK in support of the US-led “coalition of the willing.” Spanish Foreign Minister Ana Palacio said, “the situation in Iraq is ‘inextricably linked’ to the problem of terrorism” (
BBC News, 1/29/2003). Spain vowed to back Washington, as did Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi. Tempering his hard-line pro-US stance Berlusconi hedged somewhat by saying the UN must be given time to finish their job” of weapons inspections (Ibid.). But his intent was clear when he suggested “an Italian-Spanish-British axis to rival the Franco-German axis” in the heated debate among the EU’s pro and anti-war factions (
Ibid.)
The rift in the EU further widened when Denmark said it would support the war even without a new UN resolution. Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen said “existing UN resolutions give the green light for war, if Iraq does not fall in line with the call for disarmament” (
Ibid.)
In the Netherlands, the Christian Democrats of Jan Peter Balkenende threw their support behind Bush and Blair as well (
Ibid.)
Greece joined France and Germany in opposition to the war. Holding the EU presidency at the time, Greece was “very keen to steer the EU away from backing a war,” and also had “the unenviable tasks of trying to weld the divided Europe into something approaching a unified force on the issue” (
Ibid.).
The Nature of the Divide
The major disappointment for the anti-war faction in the EU was the alignment of the so-called “New Europe” states with Washington. These were the members of the former Soviet sphere of influence in Eastern Europe who, perhaps in recognition of the United States’ Cold War role in pressuring the Soviet Union to democratize, felt extreme loyalty to the US. Numerous of the Eastern European candidates for the 2004 enlargement backed the war. The Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary, and Slovakia supported the war coalition to varying degrees. The Czechs committed troops early, while Poland and Hungary mulled over troop commitments. Hungary allowed the US to use the Taszer airbase to train Iraqi exiles, doing so with the proviso that combat troops not be trained there. Speaking of Chirac, who had condemned the support of the 13 EU candidate countries that endorsed the war, Romanian President Ion Iliescu said, “Jacques Chirac should regret such expressions, which are not in the spirit of friendship and democratic relationships”
(BBC News, 2/19/2003). Chirac had accused the Eastern candidate countries of “childish and irresponsible behavior. It is not well-brought up behavior” (
Ibid.)
. He also warned the countries that they were in a “dangerous” position because the ratification of their entry into the EU was incomplete and their actions may have spoiled their chances of ratification (
Ibid.).
The rhetoric regarding the old and new Europe continued to fly, but many Europeans felt Rumsfeld fell into a trap when he called France and Germany “old Europe.”
The fragile single European project has been badly shaken. The characterization of old and new Europe was in fact quite mistaken. Compared to the past few centuries of European history, France and Germany standing together in resisting war is the new Europe, built on peaceful relations embedded in continental institution and the supremacy of the rule of law. And the former Soviet satellites that sided with the US represent the continuity from the old Europe built on balance-of-power policies that had led to world wars (
Ramesh Thakur, p. 3).
As alluded to above, the dissonance in the assignation of anti-terrorism philosophies cleaved the EU into opposing camps. Rumsfeld’s belief that the US could root out terrorists via an Iraq invasion was fallacious. As a result of the Iraq war, many critics believe terrorism has been exasperated. “The net result of all this has been a distraction from the war on terror,” writes Thakur. “The fall from grace of an America that was the object of everyone’s sympathy and support after 9/11 is nothing short of astonishing. That support understood and backed the war against the Taliban government of Afghanistan. It fractured when Washington turned its attention to Iraq, whose links to 9/11 were tenuous at best” (
Ibid, p. 4).
Why It Happened
It is time now to determine why the cleaving of the EU over Iraq occurred, beyond the aforementioned differing philosophical approaches to fighting terrorism. While the EU has accomplished much in its growth over 50 years, fundamental differences remain among the Union’s nations. Foremost among these are issues of sovereignty in the context of domestic security concerns. These are perhaps the lingering effects of the nationalism that propelled Europe into two devastating twentieth century wars.
The argument here is that while member states have ceded sovereignty on issues such as monetary policy, they have maintained a strong hold on external political and security issues…This coupled with other factors that enter into states’ calculation of foreign policy interests: states such as the UK have favored “Atlantic ties; those such as France and Germany have sought to solidify links with each other in order to become leaders on the world stage within Europe; the smaller states such as Ireland have remained ambivalent about the future of CFSP (Common and Foreign Security Policy) based on pure cost-benefit analysis and concerns regarding the loss of foreign policy “neutrality” (
Raj S. Chari and Francesco Cavatoria, p. 2).
Foreign policy has become a stressful area of EU infighting as a result of the military domination of the world by the US, which propels the willingness of the Eastern European nations to fall under the spell of American protectionism. While the Cold War has theoretically ended, concerns among the old Soviet satellites yet exist—has Russia completely reformed, or are her tentacles of influence still a danger to the newly sovereign nations stretching from the Balkans to Poland in Central Europe? “The Iraq war may represent the same story of impotence that has historically plagued Europe when trying to present a united front during major world crises,” wrote Chari and Cavatoria of the European Consortium for Political Research in 2003 (Ibid, p. 1). The authors note that the EU was also divided over sanctions against Iraq before the war. The US policy of imperial persuasion pushed by the Bush Administration forced deeper EU divisiveness as “the EU froze and failed to promote an alternative strategy acceptable to the rest of the global community” (
Ibid, p. 1).
The domestic and supranational concerns of the EU may be superseded by the ambivalent US view of the EU. Certainly the US has pushed its imperial policies and willingness to act unilaterally beyond the pale. As the world’s lone super power, America’s evaluation of global events counts for more than other nations’. Given the US’s arsenal of nuclear weapons and advanced technologies and its current expenditure to remain dominate militarily, the EU’s only hope to compete lies in the economic realm, where its GDP has surpassed the US’s. As an avowed peacekeeping entity the EU cannot go the route of major militarization and threaten the US.
The new realities of the transatlantic alliance were brought into the clear light of day by the dispute over the US-led invasion of Iraq. Most Europeans were already deeply alarmed by the unilateralist postures of George W. Bush, but this was not just about the stance of a single administration: Europeans and Americans had already parted company on a wide variety of fronts, from foreign policy to trade policy and domestic social policy, dating back to the Clinton and Bush Senior administrations and before. What was different in 2003 was that the Europeans finally realized that they had the means to oppose US policy in a meaningful way, and that serious questions could now be posed in public about American motives. They no longer felt obligated to support American policy where the two sides disagreed, and they also saw with new clarity that they needed the security and political assertiveness to back up their uncontested economic position in the world (
McCormick, p. 236).
The fundamental rejection of an anti-war consensus was based in the inability of the EU members to facilitate a supranational identity. Whether caused by real and/or imagined fears of offending the US, it is clear that deference to the US is of utmost concern to many EU members and is certainly not limited to the UK. The ongoing failure of the CFSP’s role in uniting Europe’s foreign policy plays into the hands of imperial US ambitions.
There is little doubt that the institutional procedures governing CFSP are cumbersome and that the Commission is not fully relevant…the political will of the domestic actors, pointing to the idea that the EU’s foreign policy institutional configuration is not of prime importance… Europe can make an effective contribution to peace in the world only if its nations pull together with the European Union…Indeed, a stark reminder of the failure of the EU to speak with one voice is the absence (bar a very general statement) of any strong CFSP statements during the crisis…(
Chari and Cavatoria, p. 4)
How deep is the rift between the US and Europe then? Recent history demonstrates that the Bush Administration is mainly ambivalent about the EU. Two notions predicate this. The first is that the US has generally recognized the importance of a strong, peaceful Europe that is capable of sharing the responsibilities of providing world stability. But has the US a real interest in the EU in light of the economic competition the Europeans provide, and in the potential damage to US world hegemony that a philosophically united anti-war EU would cause in places such as the Middle East?
“While Washington may have an interest in pursuing a policy of ‘divide
et impera’ towards European countries, EU member states could make an effort to build a unified CFSP, to which the US would be forced to adapt,” Chari and Cavatorta write. “The lack of European unity regarding the transatlantic relation is the result of a failure by the member states to realize that in many respects the US needs Europe just as much as Europe needs the US” (
Ibid.).
Finally, the lack of an anti-war consensus in the EU during the run up to the Iraq war can be gleaned by examining the work of the 15 European leaders that eventually emerged on February 18, 2003, a mere month before the US-led invasion of Iraq. It is a mix of undisguised support for the US balanced by a rhetorical nod to the anti-war states. “The Union’ objectives for Iraq remain full and effective disarmament in accordance with the relevant United Nations Security Council resolutions, in particular Resolution 1441. We want to achieve this peacefully. It is clear that this is what the people of Europe want” (
Text of European Union Declaration, February 18, 2003).
What the people wanted then did not count for very much. Hundreds of thousand marched in the streets of Europe’s major cities, but they were ignored by the politicians as the US and Great Britain rushed into war in pursuit of weapons that some inspectors suspected weren’t there. The “coalition” rushed in to achieve regime change without a clear understanding of the regime itself. It rushed into war to build a democracy in the heart of the Middle East, a historically undemocratic region. It rushed into war to inadvertently create an entirely new definition of terrorism, one that presumed groups of formerly sovereign peoples who resisted the US’s new imperial doctrine were indeed terrorists. The philosophy of irrationality won, despite the French President Jacques Chirac’s cry of “Non!”
Footnotes and Bibliography
Text
McCormick, John, Understanding the European Union: A Concise Introduction, Palgrave, New York and Hampshire (2005)
Media Web Sites
BBC News, http://news.bbc.co.uk
CBS News, www.cbsnews.com
The International Herald Tribune, www.iht.com
Academic Web Sites
www.unu.edu
www.essex.ac.uk
Robert Fisk's summary of
the middle game.
And Alexander Cockburn
calls a ruse a ruse.
TS
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