Mr Blair is not Mrs Thatcher

Date: 05/04/03

Anti-Europeans have high hopes of Tony Blair. They're in for disappointment

THERE was no great fanfare. Most British newspapers, their thoughts elsewhere, failed even to note the event. But this week, NATO handed over peacekeeping duties in the battle-scarred former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia to a force of 350 soldiers from the European Union (EU). Small beer compared with what's going on in Iraq, but the first time that troops have operated under the EU's flag. Next year, the EU, with Britain and France in the van, is due to take on the much bigger job being carried out by the 12,000-strong NATO stabilisation force in Bosnia.

Peacekeeping is not war-fighting and NATO is still providing much of the back-up. But it does illustrate a couple of things. The first is that, despite everything that has happened in the last three months, it is too soon to declare the attempts to put together a limited EU common foreign and security policy a completely busted flush. The differences over Iraq are acute, but they are the exception rather than the rule: on the majority of foreign policy issues, from the Middle East peace process to the role of international organisations and the value of treaties such as Kyoto, most European countries see eye to eye.

The second is that, for all the harsh words and grandstanding, even in this most contentious area, the EU continues to go about its business in a fairly normal way. As a senior British diplomat puts it: “People are jumpy and everyone feels under pressure, but the EU carries on.”

It is worth saying this if only to counter some currently voguish ideas about the future of Britain's relationship with Europe, encouraged, it must be said, by Tony Blair's portentous remark that there would have to be a “reckoning” after the war. Excited anti-Europeans, for whom the last few weeks have been a delicious vindication, dare to hope that Mr Blair the war leader could soon tread in Margaret Thatcher's footsteps in other ways as well. After all, what did this once most starry-eyed Europhile do when finally forced to choose between Europe and America? Has he not learned, like nearly all of his predecessors, that Britain's fundamental interests and those of its continental “partners” are always doomed to diverge?

Surely, Prime Minister Blatcher will want not only to resist the encroachments of the coming European constitution, but to lead “new” Europe against the integrationist project of the evil Franco-German axis? When it comes to the euro, who would want to share a currency with the cheese-eating surrender monkeys? And while we're about it, what about joining NAFTA?

This is the stuff of fantasy. Mr Blair may have acquired a shrewd appreciation of what the French president Jacques Chirac is about, but for all the tough language he uses these days, he is no Mrs Thatcher. Unlike her, he is instinctively non-confrontational, but more importantly, and also unlike her, he neither feels isolated, nor would relish it if he was. Strange as it may seem, Mr Blair believes, in spite of everything, that there is still everything to play for.

He has a point. Even when it comes to Iraq, Britain has the backing of Spain, Italy, Denmark, the Netherlands and Portugal. As one might expect, a good deal of attention is being paid to keeping this informal alliance in working order. But on the much bigger long-term issue of how Europe should conduct its relationship with America, Mr Blair calculates that it is France that has few real friends. Quite apart from the eight largely pro-American accession countries (to whom Mr Chirac has been so self-destructively offensive), the Irish, the Finns, the Swedes and, up to a point, the Greeks, while uneasy about the war, have shown little interest in the French president's notion of a core group of countries pursuing a form of neo-Gaullism directed from Paris.

From a British perspective, the most interesting question is whether Germany can be detached from the French camp. At present, the chances don't look good. The German foreign minister, Joschka Fischer, has been horrified by what he sees as the bullying and bellicosity of the Bush administration. But privately, Mr Fischer concedes that Europe has no choice other than to have a strategic relationship with America, while the chancellor, Gerhard Schröder is a lonely figure these days, much in need of friends. Despite the electoral popularity of Mr Schröder's pacifism, most of the German political and business establishment is deeply unhappy about being tarred with Mr Chirac's idiosyncratic anti-Americanism. Mr Blair thinks that the Germans may want to move back from the limb they are currently out on. If that is the case, he is keen to help in the difficult job of repairing relations with Washington.

It's a French thing

The problems with France run much deeper. Despite a reasonably cordial 20-minute telephone conversation earlier this week between Mr Blair and Mr Chirac about the war's aftermath, there is great wariness on both sides, which is spilling into the negotiations on the European constitution. A sign of the continuing ill-feeling is that the French are pressing for qualified majority voting on “revenue abatement” - a blatant attempt to sabotage the budgetary rebate won by Mrs Thatcher in the 1980s.

In British eyes, however, there won't be a lot of progress until Mr Chirac faces up to the reality that on the big issue of Europe's relationship with America, he has picked a fight he can't win. “It's a question of whether he actually wants to try and deal with world problems or whether he'd rather just massage his profile at home,” says one British diplomat. One test of that will be if France signs up for the more active counter-terrorism and, particularly, counter-proliferation agenda that Mr Blair intends to urge on the EU.

Mr Blair is not about to turn his back on Europe for a very good reason: he thinks he's winning.

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