Weak Muscles
The unbearable lightness of Brussels.

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By Geoffrey Wawro
April 8, 2003, 7:15 a.m

As I ran on the treadmill at the gym, I watched a pantomime on the television above me: Secretary of State Colin Powell conferring with EU foreign-policy czar Javier Solana at the State Department. The words were inaudible, but the body language revealed great tension: a doubting American and a nervous European.

Old Europeans — like Solana — have reason to be nervous. In the Iraq crisis, they overplayed a weak hand and went bust. They are now maneuvering to be let back into the Coalition, and one of their arguments is their growing power and influence. We hear it all the time: The EU is more populous and richer than the U.S.; Brussels matters.

Let me take you there, to the cockpit of Europe.

Brussels is a curious city. Once the metropole of a vast Congolese empire, it has shrunk perceptibly, and rather embarrassingly. The palaces and ministries, built for a larger Belgium with all of those ivory, rubber, and mineral revenues pilfered from Katanga and the Congo basin, seem out of place. Returning from the city center one day, I spied a vast neoclassical temple to my left and strolled over to investigate. It was King Leopold II's Palace of Justice, built between 1866 and 1883. Here, because of the avowed "universality" of Belgian law, you can accuse anyone of war crimes and try to haul him in. Colin Powell himself is under investigation here, as are Norman Schwarzkopf and George H. W. Bush, for the errant bomb that struck the Iraqi air-raid shelter in February 1991. Despite its vast pretensions, little of the palace's space is actually used; indeed, most is dissipated in soaring corridors, halls, and staircases, all of which seem calculated to make the recipient of justice feel very small indeed.

The city feels empty most of the time. The big parks are scarcely used, and whole quarters sit silent for most of the day. Many of the working population are "Eurocrats," who whiz in and out of faraway suburbs. In one of the royal parks on the outskirts, I saw a memorial to the Belgian "liberation" of the Congo from . . . who knows? The paternalistic frieze showed pith-helmeted Belgian heroes leading woolly haired Africans toward the delights of civilization. The inscription praised Belgium for freeing the Africans from a group that had only recently been chiseled off the monument and filled in with a blank bronze tablet. The newness of the tablet suggests that the villains of the piece were probably "Muslims" or "Arabs," the sharpest of the old African coastal slave traders. With a war in Iraq, a Belgian foreign minister railing at the U.S. for its "imperialism" — the pot calling the kettle black? — and an influx of Muslim immigrants to the EU, it seems that old imperial legends die rather easily.

A MILITARY GIANT — AND ITS POOR COUSIN
I met with an American official who deplored the "capabilities gap" dividing the U.S. from its European allies: America buys two thirds of the hardware consumed by NATO and invests three quarters of the alliance's military research and development. In the essential functions of modern war, Europe drops farther and farther behind, spending more on tomato subsidies each year than we spend on an entire Stryker brigade of medium-armored vehicles. Pity the poor European troops hung out on the not-so-sharp end of this system. "Americans," a European officer told me glumly, "suppress air defenses this way: they fly into the enemy air space and zap everything — nothing works afterward, no phones, no computers, no radars, no missiles. None of us Europeans have that capability. Instead, we fly into the enemy air space, trigger his SAMs, and then try to evade them." He pondered for a moment: "We need to get closer to the American system." Indeed: Portugal spends 85 percent of its small defense budget on personnel, and 50 percent of that on pensions. Germany, unable to shed tenured employees to make room for procurement, spends just $40 million a year on new vehicles and $1 billion to repair the old ones.

"New Europe" — those doughty young nations of the east praised by Donald Rumsfeld (and told to "shut up" by Jacques Chirac) — is on an entirely different track. Rather than persist with a Russian-model military, they are moving into "niche specialties" that will benefit a U.S.-led war effort. The Slovaks, for example, will invest their entire defense budget in just four things that we Americans can actually use in a coalition of the willing: light and mechanized infantry brigades, an artillery regiment, and a nuclear-biological-chemical clean-up battalion.

Unlike NATO — crammed into its old army hospital with flat budgets and dim prospects — the EU is growing unchecked. With its financing secure — "contributions" are automatically deducted from the GDP of each member state — it now has 20 commissioners running everything from agriculture to education, an inter-governmental council, a 626-seat European parliament, a court of justice, and a central bank. When the Berlaymont, the EU's fabled but asbestos-stuffed headquarters, was classified a "sick building" in 1993, the entire commission was simply moved to gleaming new premises. Overall, the EU sprawls through 17 buildings and provides Brussels with a large fraction of its inhabitants.

The Berlaymont is expected to be habitable again in 2004, and not a moment too soon, for the 15 EU nations have just agreed to the biggest enlargement in their history. Ten new states will join the bloc in 2004: Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia. The rich West Europeans quake at the prospect. With $45 billion — 47 percent of the EU budget — annually earmarked for agricultural subsidies (why do you think Austrian and French villages look so marvelously picturesque?), EU enlargement will have to politely stiff-arm all of these new butter, wheat, milk, pork, and olive oil producing countries. "CAP [Common Agricultural Policy] payments make farmers rich, and rich farmers richer," a Eurocrat told me reprovingly. "To slow down the acquisition of Mercedes and BMWs in rural Poland, we will phase in the CAP slowly." Unlucky Estonians and Cypriots will receive just 25 percent of the bounty that they are due in the first year, and will not enjoy the subsidies of a French or Spanish farmer until 2014. A golden curtain is dividing Europe, and it runs from Stettin on the Baltic to Trieste on the Adriatic.

“DEMOCRACY DEFICIT”
Since the really important things in Europe are arranged behind closed doors by the national governments (not in the 626-seat EU parliament), Europeans are always grousing about their "democracy deficit." Indeed, the exact nature of Europe's parliamentary system befuddles most Europeans, who see no linkage between their votes in EU elections and the 95,000 pages (at last count) of European laws and regulations, all of which seem to issue from unelected Eurocrats in the EU Commission and Council. Despite those vast crowds surging through the streets of Europe to protest Operation Iraqi Freedom, the European parliament has little impact on EU foreign or security policy, which remains the province of foreign and defense ministries in the member states. Revealingly, the EU has no commissioner for military affairs. Environment, fisheries, social affairs, and culture merit commissioners, but not the armed forces.

To quiet complaints about the "democracy deficit" at Brussels, the EU summoned a "Convention on the Future of Europe" in 1999. The presidency was rather infelicitously conferred upon former French president Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, whose murky presidency ended in disgrace in 1981 after he admitted to taking gifts of diamonds from one of Africa's most savage dictators, Jean-Bedel Bokassa. In return for all that ice, d’Estaing propped up Bokassa with military force and a billion-dollar loan (courtesy of the French taxpayer), and turned a blind eye to Bokassa's intermittent massacres and rumored cannibalism. Given the EU's passion for conservation, d’Estaing is an even odder choice. He made regular visits to Bokassa's Central African Empire to hunt endangered elephants herded into enclosures obligingly cleared of their rain-forest hardwoods.

D’Estaing has done little to improve his reputation in his new position, where he has intemperately railed against Turkish accession to the EU on the grounds that Europe must remain Christian. Though his brief term is merely to "debate the future of Europe," the aging former president, concerned for his legacy, is determined to write a full-blown "European Constitution" by December 2003. He speaks menacingly of the day "when there will be a single European ambassador in Washington." The convention over which d’Estaing presides was in a "listening phase" when I was there, passively hearing the wishes of "civil society" before initiating or amending anything. Civil society was apparently not talking. Indeed, European polls revealed that only 22 percent of Europeans even knew that there was a convention, and some of the new states slated to join in 2004 — having been told by Chirac to "shut up" when they backed the Anglo-American war with Iraq — have asked that any constitutional draft be put off until they are admitted to the union.

With feedback like this, d’Estaing is risking nothing. His convention takes all of the existing EU institutions for granted and enlargement is roaring ahead despite a majority in France and large minorities in Germany and Britain against it. On one of my last days in Brussels, Giscard was roundly attacked in the convention: "You never tell us what you are thinking," one suspicious delegate roared into the microphone. The reply was pure d’Estaing: "I will tell you what I think only when you have told me what you think."

My only EU military briefing took place in a gloomy, windowless room of a rather decrepit building. "Europe has been a battleground for 300 years. We've learned to reject war," a Belgian briefer declared, "and I must tell you that it is hard to get support for military spending anywhere in Europe these days." I believed him; looking around the building, the carpets were worn through and paint flaked from the walls. There is still no EU Military Commission, so European Security and Defense Policy (ESDP) is run by a task force that reports to the national governments. The Belgian described the modest work of the task force, contrasting the "insecurity and existential threat world" of Americans, who see threats everywhere, with the placidity of the Europeans, who "have learned the benefits of peace and conciliation, of embracing everyone." He seemed genuinely to believe that patient European methods will spread peace, love, and understanding into Russia, the Caucasus, and the Middle East. As he droned on, ignoring the threats posed by Saddam Hussein, Kim Jong Il, Osama bin Laden, and other rogues, my chin thudded against my chest and I fell asleep.

The EU will probably not fail, but it will not overpower the U.S. anytime soon. It will expand as a kind of nanny state, customs union, and international-relations ombudsman. It speaks now in the name of the U.N. because its most strident member has a Security Council seat and because Brussels has no working military machinery of its own to assist or obstruct the U.S. In Iraq, the EU failed to confront a tyrant and rescue a suffering people, preferring to repeat old patterns of appeasement that have their root in domestic worries and military weakness, the same factors that caused European appeasement in the 1930s. The U.S. must work with the Europeans and hear and respect their views, but it should never weaken strong policy initiatives — like Operation Iraqi Freedom — for the sake of a false or hypocritical consensus.

— Geoffrey Wawro is professor of strategic studies at the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, and anchor of the History Channel's Hardcover History. The views expressed in this piece are his, not those of the U.S. Navy or government.

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