World View/Paul Gillespie: 'Enlargement will change the European Union much more than either its elites or peoples expect," according to the European Commissioner in charge of the process, Mr Gunter Verheugen. 'Enlargement will change the European Union much more than either its elites or peoples expect," according to the European Commissioner in charge of the process, Mr Gunter Verheugen.
At a briefing in Brussels this week he displayed a formidable political grasp of these continental changes and their effect on international affairs.
Enlargement will qualitatively change western European attitudes to neighbouring states such as Ukraine, Moldova and Belarus, as well as to Russia, with which the EU will need to develop constructive co-operation, even integration in certain respects. The Baltic and Balkan states are in the final perspective of EU enlargement.
He does not believe the dispute over Iraq which has split the EU and the candidate states will endure. Rather will the new states welcome the development of a stronger and more coherent EU foreign and security policy precisely to escape from the "extremely strong pressure" exerted on them by the Bush administration and conservative NGOs supporting it to sign up to the two statements supporting the Anglo-US position on Iraq last month.
Verheugen says the US "overplayed its cards on this issue, just as they did in pressurising the EU to accept Turkish membership at the Copenhagen summit last year". Turkey and a Cyprus settlement are seen in Brussels as diplomatic casualties of overweening US diplomacy in support of Iraq, as Quentin Peel argued in a revealing article in the Financial Times on Tuesday. Verheugen steadfastly believes in Turkey's EU vocation, so long as political reform proceeds in time for a political assessment next year.
These states were threatened with difficulties in the US Congress over joining NATO if they refused to sign. He recalled how they were similarly pressurised by the US to reject the International Criminal Court last year, despite the adoption of a common EU position in favour; Brussels made it clear that candidate states are expected to support the EU where there is such a policy.
There is no common EU position on Iraq. It is therefore "crazy" to say candidate states which signed these statements are US agents or stalking horses in an enlarged EU. "Are they expected to be more European than the Europeans?" Verheugen asked. They have closer relations with the US than most EU member-states because their people believe the US was responsible for their liberation from the Soviet empire - not détente, Gorbachev or the Pope.
This does not mean they will uncritically support the US as the EU constructs a stronger and more unified common foreign and defence policy which may clash with Washington on multilateral governance, the United Nations or pre-emptive interventions.
They are likely to support integrationist methods more than the inter-governmental ones favoured by the large states in the Convention on the Future of Europe and the forthcoming constitutional treaty.
Several of the candidates have already indicated uneasiness with the Anglo-American approach to Iraq. Thus there is not likely to be a double fracture by which divisions over Iraq and inter-governmentalism coincide to the advantage of this view. In any case, many of the European allies so loudly proclaimed by the Bush administration are ideological, based on contingent political alignments rather than enduring interests. Italian, Spanish and Danish public opinion remains strongly opposed to US policy on Iraq, despite Aznar, Berlusconi and Rasmussen.
The same applies in most central and European states, with Slovenia now formally withdrawing its support and refusing the US military transit facilities in the week its people voted to accept EU and NATO membership. But they are allowing US overflights of humanitarian aid and refugees.
Asked if this strong interventionist diplomacy heralds a more activist US policy to oppose and head off the development of a stronger EU international role, Verheugen says he prefers to believe the official American voices which still support a stronger and more united Europe.
But on both sides of the Atlantic there are those who take a zero-sum approach in which a pro-American position is defined as anti-European and vice versa. That, too, would be crazy and would spell "the end of the Atlantic relationship", he said.
He echoed other senior sources in Brussels, including business ones, who have this week expressed growing concern at unilateral protectionist moves in Washington, including the Republican House leader who called for a repudiation of WTO rules. The large US trade and current account deficits make it economically vulnerable to an international loss of trust; but US-EU trade and investment flows remain by far the largest in the world.
In New York and Washington, too, there is growing criticism of the neo-conservative unilateralists who dominate the Bush administration. Charles Kapchun, a former Clinton National Security official who chairs the US-European research programme at the Council of Foreign Relations argues in a new book, The End of the American Era, that American pique at European dissent, provocations and encouragements of internal European divisions are signs of weakness, not strength.
Summarising Kapchun's position in the New York Review of Books, the historian Tony Judt of New York University says: "Real power is influence and example, backed up by understated reminders of military force. When a great power has to buy its allies, bribe its friends and blackmail its critics, something is amiss".
Kapchun believes an integrated and prosperous Europe "could well emerge as a formidable entity on a new geopolitical map of the world". Another US writer, Michael Lind, in his book, Made in Texas: George W. Bush and the Southern Takeover of American Politics (extracted in the current Prospect magazine), argues: "The dispute over the conduct of the conflict in Iraq is not . . . primarily one between Europe and America. It is a battle between southern and western conservatives, allied with some north-eastern intellectuals, and 'Euramerica' - Europe plus the north-east, midwest and west coast of the US. The former group is trying to dismantle the post-1945 Rooseveltian world system - built around the UN, NATO and so on - an order never accepted in the south and west."
US socialists say anti-Americanism is the anti-imperialism of fools. What is at stake here, as Judt reminds us, is the shape of the coming century - will it be an American one? He recalls a remark of Raymond Aron's: "The 20th century could have been the German century."