Europe still matters

HAS Tony Blair completely blown it over Europe? It certainly feels a bit like it. His ambition to put Britain at “the heart of Europe” now seems absurd. His pact with the United States on Iraq has caused such a rift between Britain and France that it’s just like the good old days when the two countries didn’t even pretend to be friends.

For a while the French maintained a kind of dignified hauteur in response to the vulgar abuse heaped upon them by the British tabloids for being “cheese-eating surrender monkeys” (or “primates capitulards et toujours en qute de fromages”, as Le Monde translated it). But last week French neo-fascists started defacing British war graves with slogans so childishly offensive that they were almost worthy of the Sun. “Rosbeefs go home,” said one. “May Saddam prevail and spill your blood,” said another, ignoring the fact that the British war dead had already spilt theirs in defence of France. The nastiest slogan complained that British bodies were polluting French soil. However much Britain and America may claim that most of Europe is on their side, they can’t conceal the fact that France and Germany, its two most important nations and those that truly constitute its heart, are uncompromisingly opposed to them. And France is once again confirmed in its long standing conviction that, in a crisis, Britain will always side with the Americans against “old” Europe.

For Tony Blair, his love affair with America must be intoxicating. While here at home he faces nothing but moaning criticism, in the US his popularity has soared to such heights that it exceeds even that enjoyed by Margaret Thatcher during the Reagan presidency. In the New York Times, the columnist Thomas Friedman argues that Blair would make a much finer leader of the free world than President Bush. The editor of the New Yorker, David Remnick, has written that “Tony Blair set out the case for action against Saddam Hussein with infinitely more detail, intelligence and clarity than anyone in the Bush administration has seen fit to do.” This must be heady stuff for the prime minister. Even so, things do not bode well for the Anglo-American relationship. For a start, there has been growing tension in Iraq between the British and American forces. Never have British soldiers been so outspoken in their criticism of “friendly fire” by their American allies.

When a low-flying American A10 aircraft attacked a British tank, killing one British soldier and injuring others, one of the injured survivors accused the pilot of having “absolutely no regard for human life. I believe he was a cowboy”. Another survivor called it “ridiculous” that an A10, with its advanced technology, was unable to identify a British tank displaying a union flag and coalition markings. “Combat is what I have been trained for,” he said. “I can command my vehicle.  I can keep it from being attacked. What I have not been trained to do is look over my shoulder to see whether an American is shooting at me.”

Underlying such complaints is the feeling that we are more sensitive and humane than the Americans, that we care more than they do for native populations, and that the way to peace is to earn the natives’ trust by such devices as wearing berets instead of helmets. Cheney, Rumsfeld and company believe, instead, that unfettered force is the only thing some people understand and that America must no longer be shy of using its military might to impose peace upon the world. We may have chosen to join America in deposing Saddam Hussein by force, but the war has shown how we are, in many ways, closer in outlook to the soppy continental Europeans than to the macho, gun-slinging folks that now dominate the Bush administration. Blair is in deep trouble.

If the Americans fail to repay his loyalty in a convincing manner, above all by committing themselves to a peace settlement between the Israelis and the Palestinians, he may end up looking as if he has been stitched up. In turn, we British may feel disillusioned with what’s left of the special relationship, increasingly out of sympathy with American attitudes, and rather more in sympathy with the cheese-eating surrender monkeys and their friends across the Channel. Crazy though the idea may seem, it could be the bruising experience of our partnership with America in the second Gulf war that finally convinces us that our destiny lies in Europe.