This article from today's NY Times is relevant to current discussions and 
more illuminating than some beauty contest on AOL.

My view, FWIW, is that the deep differences between the US and Europe have 
been there for a long time, but have lain submerged since the collapse of 
the Soviet Union by the period of relative peace and prosperity on both 
sides of the Atlantic. It took the aftermath of 9/11 to expose them. No 
matter what the outcome of the Iraq issue, there will be mutual distrust 
between the US government and European governments for a long time, and, 
unfortunately, between the people of both too.

For Old Friends, Iraq Bares a Deep Rift


February 14, 2003
By RICHARD BERNSTEIN

BRUSSELS, Feb. 13 - As antiwar demonstrators prepare for
what they are saying will be among the largest protest
marches in history this weekend, many in Europe are asking
themselves: how did trans-Atlantic relations, which were so
good so recently, get so bad so quickly?

What has become clear to many here is that the Bush
administration's preparations for a possible war with Iraq
have provoked something far beyond the normal disagreements
that sometimes take place among allies - as happened many
times during the cold war and more recently over such
questions as the Kyoto Protocol on global warming or the
International Criminal Court, both favored in Europe but
rejected in Washington.

Now, something deep and fundamental in the different views
of Europe and the United States seems to have been brought
to the surface by the Iraqi crisis.

Several hundred thousand antiwar protesters are expected
Saturday on the streets of London alone, and it has become
clear that the European public, from Britain to Poland,
from "old" Europe to "new" Europe, is against war in Iraq.

Indeed, it is almost as if President Bush and his
administration have unwittingly brought about a popular
unity on this continent that belies the sharp differences
among Europe's governments, which are openly divided on the
question of a war to dislodge President Saddam Hussein.

With turmoil in NATO, divisions on the Security Council and
undiplomatically angry words being shouted across the
Atlantic, many here have started to worry about the
prospect of permanent damage to the very structures on
which European peace and prosperity have been based for the
past half century and more.

"Everything's falling to pieces; that's really the case, I
believe," Michael Stürmer, a professor of history and an
editorial writer at the conservative German daily Die Welt,
said in a recent conversation. "We have various problems,
all knotted together."

It may be - and some diplomats here in the seat of the
European community are predicting this - that over the next
few weeks the trans-Atlantic gaps are going to be bridged
and that such alarming spectacles as the current disarray
in NATO will disappear.

In this optimistic view, after the report of United Nations
inspectors on Friday, the United States will manage to get
a resolution passed in the Security Council that will
authorize force, and then the French, who have led the
charge against war, will move from opposing military action
to taking part in it.

But such an outcome looks remote today. One of the reasons
the leaders of Germany and France have so publicly defied
the United States - in the United Nations as well as in
NATO - is that it is popular to do so.

Certainly, it did not look like that just a few weeks ago.
To be sure, American opposition to the Kyoto treaty,
coupled with a kind of visceral distrust of the Bush
administration, might have prepared the ground for
widespread European opposition to American plans for war in
Iraq.

But essentially, last fall, sympathy prompted by the losses
of Sept. 11 was widespread, and on the strategic front,
developments seemed positive.

Both NATO and the European Union were in the process of
historic and tandem expansions, incorporating the former
members of the Eastern bloc and spreading the net of
military security, economic expansion and democratic
governments to the very borders of Russia.

A majority of Europeans supported the United States in
earlier military actions, from the Persian Gulf war of 1991
to the Kosovo war of 1999 to the action in Afghanistan
after Sept. 11.

Now all that has been turned on its head. The German
government, for the first time in its postwar history, has
put itself in direct conflict over a major issue with the
United States, and this is a very big change.

For years, even though Germany was a close partner with
France when it came to powering the European Community
forward, it always resisted the Gaullist impulse to keep a
certain distance from America.

In only a few weeks, however, Germany, Europe's largest
country and its most important economy by far, has entered
into a sort of informal coalition whose very identity is
opposition to a policy that an American administration
deems vital to the security of the United States and the
world.

To some extent, the divisions express what some have
identified as growing fundamental cultural differences
between Europe and the United States.

Most conspicuously, in the wake of Sept. 11, a gap has
opened up in the European and American perceptions of
danger. It is not too much to say that while Americans
intensely sense a new vulnerability and an urgent new need
for self-defense, Europeans, after the end of the cold war,
do not. Put bluntly, the people of Berlin now feel safer
even as the people of New York sense a new danger.

"I do think that there are different perceptions of risks
on both sides," Javier Solana, the foreign affairs chief
for the European Union, said in an interview.

While Americans recently experienced an attack on their
mainland, Europeans, as Mr. Solana put this, are enjoying
"the most secure period of our history."

Americans, aware of European peace and security, believe
that these happy conditions were made possible by 50 years
of American military expenditures and protection, which
they feel that Europeans appreciate less than they should.

Europeans, while aware of American military protection,
perhaps because of it, feel safe, safer than they should
feel, in the view of some here.

"My father fought in two wars, but it's impossible to think
that my sons will fight in wars in Europe," Mr. Solana
said. "But we are not aware enough of the danger of weapons
of mass destruction, and we have to correct that. Weapons
of mass destruction are not just an American problem, they
are a problem for all of us."

It is not that Europeans, a clear majority of whom are
shown by polls across Europe to be opposed to war, have any
kind regard for Mr. Hussein and his government.

But few of them seem really to believe that Mr. Hussein is
anything more than another of the world's dictators,
perhaps one of the most cutthroat of them, but not the most
dangerous. Kim Jong Il, North Korea's leader, probably
holds that distinction in the minds of many Europeans.

By contrast, in many quarters in Europe, the public deems
unbridled American power in the service of a pre-emptive
strike to be the greater international menace.

"What happens in the future if China or Russia decide that
some other country is a threat to them, and they decide to
go to war?" asked an editor for a Germany publishing
company attending an antiwar demonstration in Munich last
weekend. "What are you going to do then?"

There are those analyzing European-American differences who
find this discrepancy in the view of threats could have a
long-term effect on the main organizations of
American-European cooperation, especially NATO.

"The North Atlantic alliance could survive without a common
threat," said Jonathan Eyal, director of studies at the
Royal United Services Institute for Defense Studies, a
British research organization. "Actually it has gone from
strength to strength in the years since the end of the cold
war. But it cannot survive without a common perception of
what constitutes a threat."

Other cultural differences, many of them described in an
article by Robert Kagan, an American analyst, read widely
on both sides of the Atlantic, have been cited to explain
the deeper reasons for the trans-Atlantic conflict.
Europeans, embedded for decades by now in a community that
has required ever more sacrifices of sovereignty, have come
to see their future as part of a network of states, in
which war, once so common and so devastating on this
continent has come to be seen as illegitimate and
unjustified, except in self-defense.

Americans, by contrast, are still fiercely attached to
their sovereignty. Moreover, certain Americans,
specifically the conservatives and neo-conservatives who
make policy in the Bush administration, nurture a strong
distrust of international organizations like the United
Nations, which, in their view, is afflicted by a kind of
unrealistic piousness, the first principle of which is that
war is never morally justified except in cases of direct
self-defense.

Matters are made more complicated by the fact that Europe
itself, or, at least, European elites, are themselves
deeply split on the question of Iraq.

Three weeks ago, a group of countries across Europe, a
geographic sample extending from Britain in the north, to
Italy in the south and to Poland in the east, signed a
letter supporting the United States on Iraq.

A week later, on the very day of Secretary of State Colin
L. Powell's speech at the United Nations, 10 former members
of the Soviet bloc signed a similar statement.

"The intention of the letter was not to divide Europe, as
was being said in Germany and France," Alexandr Vondra, a
deputy foreign minister of the Czech Republic, said.

"But a few weeks ago there we were listening to Chirac's
message on Iraq stating European policy to be peace, peace,
peace, and he didn't consult with us about it," he said,
referring to President Jacques Chirac of France. "We had to
hear it on the TV news."

"In economic affairs, on matters of European integration,
Germany and France can do what they want, I suppose," he
continued, "but when our relations with the United States
are at stake, I think they have to be much more careful."

The divide inside Europe could also have long-term
implications, since, even with populations that are
antiwar, the countries of the old East are viewed as both
more closely attached to the United States than those of
the West and more suspicious of France and Germany,
Europe's powerful major instrument.

"No country in Eastern Europe is going to be dictated to by
Paris or Berlin," Mr. Eyal, the research director in
London, said.

Mr. Vondra said, "For 50 years the United States helped us;
now it's time for once for us to help the United States."

But if the Iraq question has created obstacles to a common
European foreign and defense policy, there appears to be
little doubt that the main divide remains between the
European public and the American desire for a military
solution in Iraq. That divide does not look likely to
narrow soon.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/14/international/europe/14EURO.html?ex=1046261296&ei=1&en=b61c5a943547eafa


Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company

--------------------------------
Tom Brandt
Northtech Systems, Inc.
130 S. 1st Street, Suite 220
Ann Arbor, MI 48104-1343
http://www.northtech.com/

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