WASHINGTON, Oct. 19 (UPI) -- For a brief moment after the terrorist atrocities of Sept. 11, the European allies rose to the occasion. At NATO, they invoked Article V of the original treaty, to declare the attack on the United States to be an attack on them all. At the 15-nation European Union, they pledged "to work together with the United States to bring to justice the perpetrators, the instigators and the accomplices involved in committing these barbaric acts."
It was too good to last, too good to be true. Much of Europe is drifting back to normal.
"Europe will not follow Britain and America blindfold," sniffed Belgium's foreign minister, Louis Michel. He went on to criticize British Prime Minister Tony Blair -- who has almost single-handed convinced Americans that they do have reliable allies and friends across the Atlantic -- as "bellicose". (The French word could equally well be translated as "war-mongering.")
Belgium? Who cares about Belgium? Well, under the rules of the 15-nation EU, every country gets to hold the presidency of the European Council for six months on a rotating basis. They host and organize all the intergovernment meetings, set the agenda, and speak for Europe. Just now it is Belgium's turn, so for once this dysfunctional little amalgam of mutually loathing Flemings and Walloons actually matters.
Not that Belgium matters much. The country on Friday produced a pitiful draft declaration of the EU position on the war for an EU summit in Ghent, Belgium, which was long on hand-wringing humanitarianism and very short on supportive action. The French and British told the Belgians to go away and draft something tougher.
The fissure in Europe is not just between anti-American wimps and robust Atlanticists (for there is much pusillanimity and America-loathing on the British left). There is also a rift between the big powers and the rest. French President Jacques Chirac invited Britain's Blair and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder to meet privately just before the Ghent summit -- a Big 3 get-together that infuriated the other 12 EU nations.
"It's a shame that some countries are going to be attending and some not," sniffed EU Commission President Romano Prodi, a former Italian premier who likes to think of Italy as a great power, too. Belgium's Michel managed to provoke a formal Italian complaint after a light-hearted TV appearance in which he "scored" the way other leaders were behaving in the crisis. He gave Italy's Prime minister Silvio Berlusconi zero points, a score matched only by Osama bin Laden, the United States' No. 1 suspect as the mastermind behind the Sept. 11 terror attacks.
But the little European powers are marginalizing themselves. The Dutch were the holdouts at the initial NATO meeting. (Blair had to make a personal call to the Dutch prime minister to get him to agree to invoke Article V.) The Swedes, Finns, Austrians and Irish still cling to their Cold War-era neutrality, and fastidiously decline to join the NATO whose power protected them for so long.
Belgium's Michel is rare only in that he had the guts to talk publicly. In private, at dinner parties and diplomatic receptions, the euro-sneers about Blair as Bush's poodle, or Britain trying to punch above its weight, or Britain's instinctive loyalties to America disqualifying "the Anglo-Saxons" from any true European vocation, thicken the air.
That heartwarming moment when France's Le Monde declared "we are all Americans now" did not last long. Concern for masses of Afghan refugees, collateral damage and the destabilizing political fallout in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the Middle East has sparked a rash of anti-war demonstrations and got the Europeans fretting again about American high-handedness.
"Cracks are appearing on the European façade," noted France's Liberation on Friday. "The human costs of this war are causing growing unease."
Europe also frets at being left out. Both Germany's Die Zeit and France's Le Monde decided to reprint a commentary from Russia's Andrei Piontkowski, of Moscow's Stragetic Studies Center, who says that the new closeness of Russia and the United States is marginalizing Europe.
"The Americans alone are deploying their armed forces and their only ally so far is Britain. In future, Russia could well join them. We are revisiting the war-time model of the Big 3, when Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill decided everything. Putin, Bush and Blair could be taking their place."
This is silly, but the fact that Piontkowski's thoughts were picked out by the two papers that cover the Franco-German establishment says a lot about the current febrile state of Europe. So does the almost desperate way in which the French and German governments are trying to negotiate some of their troops into the military act, despite the Pentagon's reluctance to complicate its command and control problems when so little military assistance is actually needed. And unlike Britain, which has aircraft carriers and cruise missiles, all that the French and Germans can offer are special forces.
Europeans want the trappings of great power status, but (with the exception of Britain) can rally neither the political will nor the defense budgets to pay for it. The German defense budget is now down to a historic low of 1.5 percent of GDP. The annual report of the International Institute of Strategic Studies, published Friday, concluded that the EU could not even meet its own grandiose aspiration to field a 60,000-strong Rapid Reaction Force by the year 2003.
Since the Europeans won't put their money where their mouths are, it is a tribute to American courtesy that President George W. Bush spends so much time listening to any of them except Blair.
