Europe as a Great Power

Abstract

Where is Europe?' Senator John McCain asked the United States Congress on 11 August 1992 with reference to the widening conflict in the former Yugoslavia. 'We have seen Germany recognize the sovereignty of some Yugoslav nations, but what evidence of leadership have they demonstrated beyond that action?'(f.1) The senator expressed not an isolated sentiment but rather the incomprehension of a good many of his colleagues at the unwillingness of America's strongest allies to cope with a crisis on their doorstep, and he touched on the reason why in the Balkans above all the New Europe of 1992 looked depressingly like older incarnations. Collective European will had been scarce in the face of unilateral German initiatives to force recognition of the breakaway republics of Croatia and Slovenia, and there was, as McCain spoke, little evidence of an emerging European formula for Balkan peace.The Balkan episode speaks volumes about contemporary Europe's preparedness to assume the responsibilities of a great power in the governance of post-cold war international relations. At no point during the political disintegration of Yugoslavia and the serial wars of succession that followed was a European-brokered peace and the enforcement thereof remotely convincing. Instead, Europe welcomed 20,000 United States troops to enforce an accord engineered by a Clinton administration reluctant to take up a task many Americans considered an inherently European calling. At that point, Michael Sturmer, a German historian, suggested that the only reasonable verdict available was that 'the Europeans, so powerful and active on the economic scene, will need Uncle Sam to protect them against their weakness, opportunism, and disunion.'(f.2) The contending forces in the Balkans had never recognized Europe as a force to be reckoned with. It projected neither moral authority nor the diplomatic stamina of a regional peacemaker.We are traditionally accustomed to thinking of great powers in terms of their ability to bring a degree of order and stability to relations among states in their region, an additional capacity to influence the norms governing relations between states globally, and their assumption of both special rights and responsibilities for the maintenance of those norms. We are also comfortable with the notion that the European states system constitutes a civilization and that Western Europe has since 1945 been involved in an effort to rehabilitate that civilization after its civil war of the first half of this century. Native to European standards of civilized behaviour, both within and between states, is the identification of the freedom of commerce, mobility, and personal conviction as fundamental human rights sanctified for some 350 million people in the European Convention on Human Rights. Measured by its post-cold war diplomacy, the New Europe remains a restorative project and features neither the attributes of a great power nor those of a particularly self-confident civilization.(f.3) Its states are often collectively incapable of exerting political will even within regions that may be considered part of the European periphery.The Nature Of The European ProjectIndeed, political will is a concept with which few European leaders are altogether comfortable after more than forty years of painstaking consensus-building and process-driven integration. The European Union (EU) has devoted only residual energies to the wreckage of its recognition diplomacy in Yugoslavia, largely because of what now appears to be an inability to look outward and beyond the administrative tasks of 'building Europe' that have consumed its attention for four decades. Before the fighting broke out, the discussion of the broader goals of a prospective European foreign policy proceeded in the somniferous vocabulary of integration, and it continued in much the same vein even as the Balkan war came to dominate the world press. At times, it was almost as if some invisible cone of silence over Brussels served to muffle the distant chatter of small arms in Sarajevo, Gorazde, and Srebrenica. …