From Suez to Baghdad

Date: 22/03/03

The Iraq crisis may determine the future of European relations with the United States

THROUGHOUT the current crisis Britain and France have been guided by fundamentally different instincts. France believes that the European Union must balance - and sometimes confront - American power. Britain believes that Europe and the United States can mould the world together. Both views were shaped almost 50 years ago by the Suez crisis of 1956. The war with Saddam Hussein may prove just as decisive in forming the attitudes that future generations of Europe's leaders will have towards American power.

The echoes and ironies of the Suez crisis are hard to avoid. Then it was Britain and France that launched a military action aimed at toppling a Middle Eastern dictator, Nasser of Egypt - and it was the United States which worried about legality and the international impact of intervention without a wider mandate. In the run-up to war, John Foster Dulles, the American secretary of state, argued that the use of force against Nasser “would make bitter enemies of the entire population of the Middle East”. The British and the French, however, were cast in the role of today's impatient Americans. They were, as a historian, Peter Clarke, puts it, “bent on intervention and increasingly impatient of the time-wasting pantomime at the United Nations, ostensibly aimed at a diplomatic settlement.” Eventually they abandoned the UN process and went to war.

Reminded of these parallels this week, a British Foreign Office minister replied: “Very neat, but remember this time the French, unlike the Americans, aren't in any position to pull the plug on us.” The Franco-British intervention in Suez failed because, faced with a run on the pound, the British were unable to resist American economic pressure to pull back. Once Britain had got over its shock and anger at American “betrayal”, it drew a simple conclusion: in future, British foreign policy should always be carefully aligned with America's global objectives.

France drew the opposite lesson. When Anthony Eden, the British prime minister, called Guy Mollet, his French counterpart, to tell him that Britain had agreed to an immediate ceasefire in Egypt, Mollet was in the middle of a meeting with Konrad Adenauer, the German chancellor. As the historian William Hitchcock records: “When Mollet, totally deflated by Eden's call, returned to the room, the German chancellor bucked him up by denouncing the Americans and British as unreliable. Instead, he declared, 'Now is the time to build Europe.' “

Ever since, France and Britain have lived by the different lessons they drew from Suez. In recent months Tony Blair has given warning again and again of the dangers of dividing Europe from the United States. Jacques Chirac, France's president, has insisted by contrast on the need for a “multipolar world”, code for an EU that can face down the United States.

Both views have their adherents in the rest of Europe. At the summit in the Azores last weekend, the leaders of Spain and Portugal spoke just as insistently as Messrs Bush and Blair about the need to maintain a transatlantic community. The countries of central Europe and the governments of Italy, the Netherlands and Denmark are also in the Atlanticist camp. France's yearning for a European declaration of independence from the United States seems to be shared by the German and Russian governments and most of the European left. In truth, however, attitudes are fuzzy and uncertain all over Europe. A great deal will depend on the course of the Iraq war and its aftermath.

If things go badly and Tony Blair is forced out of office - as Eden was in the 1950s - it is possible to imagine the current crisis as a “Suez in reverse” for Britain. The obvious conclusion for any new prime minister would be that Mr Blair's mistake was to ally himself too closely to the Americans in defiance of much of British public opinion and of the other main European powers. A new policy would downgrade Britain's “special relationship” with the United States and would be much warmer to the idea of a united European foreign policy.

Such an outcome would be a sweet vindication for France. But Mr Chirac's strategy may, in the long run, be even riskier than Mr Blair's. A successful war against Iraq risks leaving France looking both impotent and wrong-headed. It could also lead to a diminished status for the UN's Security Council, the major forum for the exercise of French global influence, and the shelving of the idea of a united European foreign policy.

In the end, it's America that matters

Even if the Anglo-American assault on Iraq does not go smoothly, it would have to be a really spectacular debacle to give birth to an EU foreign policy that was not only united but also consistent in its determination to be different from the United States. Such a policy would run completely counter to the instincts of the “new Europeans” of central Europe - and would be pretty hard to sell in much of western Europe. It is striking that, with the important exception of Germany, the strongest support for the French position over Iraq has come from outside the EU - from Russia and from the Arab and Islamic world. A French strategic alliance with Russia, even in the event that it proved durable, would alarm much of the rest of the EU.

And although Le Figaro, a right-wing French newspaper, has hailed Mr Chirac as “the white knight of peace, the champion of all the oppressed of the earth”, wiser counsels in Paris are warning their president against being intoxicated by such a vision. As Dominique Mosi of the French Institute for International Relations in Paris has written, “Applause on the streets of Khartoum or Tripoli should not constitute the measure of France's diplomatic success.” For France there is no substitute for the European Union; and for most of the EU there is no future in a prolonged confrontation with the United States. The Iraq crisis may produce a new mould for transatlantic relations. But it is unlikely to be of French design.

Commentary feature in which the writer says that the Iraq Crisis of 2003 may determine the future of European relations with the United States, and the development of a European foreign policy.

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