Vote US Elections: What Do Europeans Want?

The question of whom Europeans want is far more easily answered: According to a recent Pew Poll, 80 percent of Germans want Kerry. 5 percent of the French want Bush. And even in the UK, the polls come out 47 to 16 in favor of the challenger. (Reassuringly, most of the Bush-averse make a clear distinction between the President and his country: „America Yes, Bush No“, the French daily Le Monde summarized the findings of a 10-country pre-election poll special.)

What they want from the next American President – and how much they want it as Europeans , rather than as Germans, Belgians or Latvians –, is much more difficult to decipher. On many issues, there are profound disagreements between elite opinion and the attitudes of the general public (as the Spanish election showed); and where policymaker and popular feelings seemingly coincide (as in Germany with regard to military intervention in Iraq), there are significant groups who are uneasy with the majority line.

One, perhaps even the, crucial question is: What do we want Americans to see at our end of the transatlantic relationship – a strong and unified EU, or a lumpy and reluctant agglomeration of 25 nation-states? Certainly, our allies could be forgiven for being confused – or thinking we don’t know the answer ourselves.

On the one hand, the largest expansion in the EU’s history, on May 1st, has shifted Europe’s center of gravity from integration to inclusion, from a federated to a strategic vision of Europe. Franco-German „core“ leadership ambitions have met with a resounding lack of enthusiasm; nor has a (somewhat more realistic) Franco-German-British triad fully materialized. The new Commission, for its part, is still wrangling with the European Parliament over nominations. The EU Constitution has yet to make its way through a tortuous process of national approval procedures – with unanimous acceptance an extremely unlikely outcome. Finally, European publics, alarmed at the weakness of their economies and upset by governmental efforts to cut the welfare state down to an affordable size, are becoming more introverted.

Paradoxically, there are also signs of an aggregation process that would have been quite inconceivable only a few years ago. Europe now has its own European Security Strategy, and a WMD strategy; both papers are very close in content and tone to their US counterparts. The EU, after conducting two smaller peacekeeping missions (in Macedonia and Congo) and a police operation (in Bosnia), is taking over a much larger challenge in form of NATO’s Bosnia operation on December 2; the Eurocorps, meanwhile, is leading NATO’s Isaf operation in Afghanistan. There is a common, tough and urgently pursued EU policy on Iran; and a serious debate on a future security role for Europe in Africa. The „battle group“ concept, plans for a European gendarmerie and the creation of the new European Defence Agency all indicate that the EU has understood it must get tough on defence and security. Increasingly, the EU states are acting in concert in international institutions and diplomatic conferences. And on the sub-EU level, the profound divisions that sprung up two years ago – because of U.S. disaggregation tactics, divisive Franco-German-Belgian „counterweighting“, and sharply divergent attitudes to U.S. leadership between Old and New Europeans – seem to be levelling out. Part of that may be due to our dismay at having failed to find a common stance on Iraq, or, even more simply, the fact that we are all still too busy digesting the consequences of enlargement to snipe at each other in the accustomed manner; or to our shock at America’s failures – after all, many of those who thought it was wrong of Washington to go to war did not doubt that it would succeed.

But there is more to it. The New Europeans (the Balts, in particular) seem to be infusing the Brussels bureaucracy with new talent and energy, suggesting that they are keen to have the best of both the NATO and the EU worlds. Nor are all the New Europeans satisfied with the experience of being asked to contribute boutique capabilities in NATO at the expense of comprehensive defense reform and demobilization; and they are even less happy with some of their experiences as junior partners in U.S.-led „coalitions of the willing“. Ironically, divided as European governments were over the war, European publics have never been so united as in their disapproval of it.

The key finding in a recent poll conducted by the German Marshall Fund was that Europeans wish to rely less on the United States (45 percent, down from 64 percent in 2002, look to U.S. leadership); and „Europeans want to see the EU become a superpower like the United States in order to cooperate better, rather than compete, with the U.S.“ Even the Poles and the Turks came out in the GMF canvas in favor of a re-balancing of the transatlantic power relationship. (Unfortunately, support for European superpowerdom sank to 36 percent when respondents were told greater military spending might be required.) Finally 85 percent of Europeans chose transatlantic cooperation over competition (10 percent).

All this indicates that even a conservative new Administration in Washington would be well advised not to follow the Heritage Foundation’s advice in a recent policy brief – cooperate, but disaggregate – , but rather to re-build its Europe policy around its relationship with the EU.

Tone matters, too. The Bush administration’s worst efforts were easily matched by European competitors during the runup to the Iraq war; since then, both sides have made a visible effort to ratchet down the level of verbal escalation. Nevertheless, the conversations with six European chiefs of government relayed by Senator Biden and reported by the noted Europhile commentator John Vinocur – „Blah blah blah, international cooperation ... (pause) Give me a break, huh.“ – cast a slight pall over European hopes for new heights of civility in a Kerry Administration.

A whole range of policies (or, if these fail, crises) will need to be addressed immediately after the election. And while we in Europe obviously need to get our act together far more energetically, the fact remains that most of the hot issues of the day are forever unresolvable if the U.S. is absent, ambiguous or obstructionist. Also, U.S. and European perceptions of urgency and desirable policy content have converged markedly in several cases – the best example being Iran’s nuclear ambitions. If anything, the Europeans are probably more united on Iran than the Bush camp is.

However, the list of issues where our policies need to be re-coordinated (and where Europeans have valid critiques to make) is long: preventing Iraq from tipping into a full-blown disaster area; the stabilization of Afghanistan in the face of yet another expected record opium harvest; the uncharted future course of the „War on Terror“ and its operational manifestations (OEF in Afghanistan, the coalition naval operations at the Horn of Africa and in the Persian Gulf); the continued impact of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on the stability of the Middle East; and perhaps how to recalibrate policy towards Russia if the Putin goverment continues on its present authoritarian course – to name only a few.

And one need not be persuaded by Germany’s aggressive new campaign for a permanent seat on the UN Security Council to feel that there is both a need and a growing groundswell for a more equitable reform of the United Nations. NATO, the GMF survey found, offers almost as much legitimacy for military intervention to Europeans as the UN. But it would be folly to deny that the military arm of the Alliance is overextended and showing its weaknesses in Afghanistan; pushing it even further into Iraq might be more than it can survive. If not now, it might soon become time to formalize some kind of geographical division of labor between NATO and the EU.

The transatlantic relationship has clearly become looser, and increasingly based on a pragmatic assessment of common interests rather than a community of values. Yet at the same time, our world has become smaller, and our dependency on each other greater than ever before. There is an opportunity lying in wait there, if we can take it.