The French Way (34 page)

After the Dayton meetings observers noticed a “new swagger” in the White House. Clinton, who had been tentative in foreign affairs, especially in the use of military force, was now more confident in exercising global leadership. Warren Christopher noted that his European counterparts were relieved that determination and unity had replaced impotence and division: “They grumble that we dominated Dayton, but they really know that it would not have gotten done otherwise.”
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The Atlantic Alliance and the European Pillar

The end of the Cold War and Europe's feeble contribution to the victory in the Persian Gulf emboldened some Europeans to propose a common defense capability as a rival to NATO. The Americans, as it turned out, had other ideas. Reform of the Atlantic Alliance would put Mitterrand's France and Bush's America at cross purposes in the early 1990s.

The first premise of French security policy as the Cold War ended was that NATO, as constituted, represented American domination, or at least a restraint, on French freedom to act. A second premise was that the United States would relax its commitment to the Atlantic Alliance because without the Soviet danger Europe would no longer be the focus of U.S. attention. Another assumption was that a united Germany needed to be tied more closely to the European Union, and a common defense policy would be a means to this end.

This analysis meant France should resist any expansion of NATO's scope or functions and it need not seek a rapprochement with the alliance. The 1966 arrangement, which absented France from the alliance's integrated command, would continue as long as Mitterrand was
president. Nevertheless, since NATO remained the basis of security, it required rebalancing with a European partner. Given the inevitable retreat of America, France had the need and the opportunity to lead the way toward equipping Europe with its own defense capacity outside NATO so that the EU could act by itself when the alliance was unwilling. After the Maastricht Treaty was signed the Mitterrand administration wanted to add a common foreign and defense policy to the EU as well as monetary integration: it was bent on making the union a counterweight to the American-run Atlantic Alliance.

Washington had its own project for European security: it sought to extend the reach of the Atlantic Alliance without sacrificing control. A renovated alliance would remain the instrument for assuring America's necessary and rightful leadership of the European continent. Neither the Bush nor the Clinton administrations had any intention of diluting, much less surrendering, U.S. direction of the alliance and they proved intransigent in their opposition to any new European security arrangement that might rival NATO or undermine American domination.

As we saw in chapter 3, alliance reform had been raised in the midst of German reunification. When Presidents Bush and Mitterrand met at Key Largo, Florida, in April 1990 their differences over the future of NATO emerged: Mitterrand figuratively winced when Bush stated that in order to maintain America's commitment to the Old World the alliance needed to widen its “field of competence” to all of Europe's problems, including politics. U.S. National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft noted that if NATO were confined to its traditional role of defense, as Mitterrand wanted, the alliance would atrophy.
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The Bush administration intended not only to add political and peacekeeping responsibilities to a post-Cold War alliance but also sought to extend it geographically to embrace at least some of the former Soviet bloc countries in Eastern Europe and also to expand its activities outside Europe. The French maintained a minimalist position.
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They wanted no “out of area” activities; the alliance should remain confined to the
defense of the continent. French foreign minister Roland Dumas said the alliance should not “extend its zone of competence and transform itself into a grand directory for world affairs.”
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When French officials spoke about renovating the alliance they thought about shrinking it or keeping it as is and constructing a European defense; the Americans suspected that the French saw reform as a way to diminish American leadership in Europe. In a top staff meeting on security, Bush worried that the French wanted U.S. troops out of Europe, but James Baker surmised they would prefer the Americans became “mercenaries,” available for hire only when needed.
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At the London NATO summit in July 1990 the Bush administration imposed its plan for restructuring the alliance on the Europeans. The Americans knew that their approach would, in all likelihood, be emasculated if the allies were allowed to debate and amend it, so they curtailed discussion. The summit's declaration called for adding political options, like assigning NATO the task of mediating with the new democracies in Eastern Europe. In addition to stabilizing that region, the alliance was also to assume general responsibility for crisis management (the so-called non-Article 5 tasks). The French, in contrast, thought openings to the former Warsaw Pact countries as well as crisis management and “out-of-area” tasks belonged to the Europeans, not NATO. Both the negotiations themselves as well as the substance of the London declaration offended the French, who took exception to what they called “politicizing” the alliance. The French pique, according to American officials, revealed their frustration with the whole process of reordering the continent; one called French attitudes “a form of existential pessimism.”
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But the Americans had to admit they had been heavy-handed.
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In 1990-91, France, with German support, pressed for alliance reform aimed at a gradual shift of responsibility from the United States to the Europeans.
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Mitterrand argued that Europeans had to develop their own means of defense because the United States was bound to disengage. He told German chancellor Helmut Kohl that even though
the Soviet Union was withering away the Americans wanted to make the continent completely dependent and smother any impulse for a European defense, but this contradiction would not endure and within a few years “Europe will not exist and the United States will be less present.”
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France's defense minister Pierre Joxe observed that Europe had to provide for its own security because the United States “is unsure as to the role and responsibilities it wishes to shoulder.”
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The French were not alone in their contrariness: the Belgians, the Spanish, and in softer tones even the Germans wanted a greater place for the Europeans within the alliance. The Belgian foreign minister Mark Eyskens put it rather crudely: “Europe is an economic giant, a political dwarf, and a military worm.”
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France proposed giving the European community a defense capacity as a “pillar” of the EU by reinforcing the Western European Union (WEU), the vestigial security organization from the 1940s, and linking it to the EU. A WEU/EU defense organization, separable from NATO, would possess European forces that could be used without NATO's approval in places like the Balkans or even outside the continent. Jacques Delors, president of the European Commission was upset by the community's ineffectiveness in the Gulf War and boldly proclaimed that Europe needed “a common defense policy” built on the WEU as “a melting pot for a European defense” forming “the second pillar of the Atlantic Alliance.” The U.S. should not fear the creation of “an internal bloc” that, after proper consultations, would determine “its own course of action outside…the North Atlantic Treaty.”
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Not all EU members were pleased with this project; the British, in particular, opposed any departure that might diminish NATO or weaken the American commitment to Europe.

A second step was a joint proposal, formally advanced in October 1991, by President Mitterrand and Chancellor Kohl for the formation of a Eurocorps. This Franco-German military unit, beginning with a nucleus of 25,000 troops, could be expanded to other Europeans, but not to Americans: it would act on mission from either the WEU
or NATO in Europe. France stipulated that in a crisis the Eurocorps would retain its identity as a European unit and any member state could veto the links to NATO.
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This Franco-German defense initiative encountered hostility in Washington and London and a cool reception from most Europeans who feared undermining American protection. Invigorating the WEU, it seemed, was fraught with problems and the Eurocorps might remove the German military from the alliance. Meanwhile the Americans opposed any plan that might conceivably become a rival to NATO or undermine their authority over the alliance. Washington, like London, did not want the WEU incorporated into the EU, thus raising the possibility of a “European caucus” that might interfere with the decisionmaking apparatus of NATO.
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A defense planning document prepared by the Pentagon in 1992 was explicit about such fears: it called for “a substantial American presence in Europe,” but noted that to avoid a competitive relationship developing the United States “must seek to prevent the emergence of European-only security arrangements which would undermine NATO.”
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Officially the U.S. government approved the construction of a “European pillar,” but as one official candidly stated, it would not accept any independent structure that risked “emptying NATO of its substance…therefore losing the justification for the American presence in Europe.”
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The French government correctly attributed American opposition to the WEU/Eurocorps scheme as evidence of disingenuous posturing about the European pillar. The Americans, it seemed, were attempting the impossible: they wanted a greater contribution to defense from the Europeans while maintaining their traditional level of domination.

The Anglo-Americans actively subverted the WEU/Eurocorps plan. Bush wrote to Mitterrand, warning him that the Franco-German corps undermined the integrated command of the alliance and encouraged American isolationism.
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Washington and London proposed connecting the WEU with NATO rather than with the EU and they also initiated a NATO-based Rapid Reaction Force as an alternative to
the Eurocorps. Paris objected to the former and reluctantly accepted the latter as a way of maintaining French armed forces in Germany after unification.

A compromise was finally worked out at the Rome (NATO) Summit and the Maastricht (EU) Conference at the end of 1991, but not before disputes over renovating the alliance became public. In Rome Bush was so incensed with the French and Germans that during a public session he warned, “[W]e do not see the WEU as a European alternative to the alliance,” and then, behind closed doors, vented, “If Western Europe intends to create a security organization outside the alliance, tell me now.”
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Mitterrand, in turn, was so infuriated by Baker's effort at adding political missions to the alliance that he complained, “The alliance is good, but it is not the Holy Alliance.”
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In Rome the Americans, collaborating with allies like the British, the Dutch, the Danes, and the Portuguese, made certain the WEU project would not be independent of the Atlantic Alliance.

The Maastricht Conference gave Paris some satisfaction by assigning the newly minted European Union a Common Foreign and Security Policy as one of its structural “pillars” and pledging itself to constructing a European defense entity around the WEU. But the Americans and their supporters sabotaged the autonomy of this new defense entity (named the European Security and Defense Identity) with the obfuscation that it would function simultaneously as “the defense component of the European Union” and as “the European pillar of the Atlantic Alliance.” Similarly, the WEU was to act “in conformity with the positions adopted in the Atlantic Alliance.”
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These meetings thus affirmed NATO's role as the essential forum for defense policy. Most Europeans clearly preferred NATO as their protector rather than the promise of the WEU, which everyone knew was beset with structural and political problems. Six months later yet another conference settled whatever uncertainties lingered after the Maastricht Conference about the WEU/NATO rivalry. The Petersberg Declaration extended the WEU's tasks to humanitarian assistance, peacekeeping, and
peacemaking functions, but subordinated the organization to NATO. NATO, moreover, could now act “out-of-area” in certain cases. The Europeans had opted for the Atlantic Alliance and rejected the Frenchled alternative. A frustrated Mitterrand told the German chancellor that the Americans wanted to make NATO a structure “completely dependent on a Washington that would stifle any notion of European defense.”
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One American diplomat admitted, “We wanted Europeans to do more for themselves as long as they did exactly what we wanted. We supported WEU but not if it went off on its own.”
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The transition from the Cold War, even after these American diplomatic victories, continued to stir up transatlantic storms. The two foreign ministers, James Baker and Roland Dumas, were not on the best of terms. Talks between them so exasperated Secretary Baker that he challenged his counterpart: “Are you with us or against us?”
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Underlying this outburst was the fundamental rift over America's role in post-Cold War Europe. Paris believed that Washington, despite its rhetoric about burden sharing with Europeans, did not want to share its authority over security. Bush-Baker policies led French—and some other European—officials to conclude that “the U.S. desires a perpetually weakened community unable to act on the continent or in the world except under the banner of U.S. leadership.”
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One senior American official reflecting on these events admitted, “In the whole U.S. approach to the new Europe, we had no adequate sensitivity for the need to develop a dialogue on the future of European political union and security activities with the French. This was a significant mistake.”
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