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| Europe |
| "Soft-Power" Europe: Boom Boom for You Yankee Clods, Bonbon-Dispersal for Us |
| 2005-01-18 |
| Via No Pasaran: BERLIN Suppose George Bush comes calling on the European Union at its Brussels headquarters a month from now and embraces the idea of an emergent EU that looks to itself like the world's first soft-power superpower? **SNIP** If Schröder says world mulipolarity cannot be Europe's forward vision - in Paris last week, Jacques Chirac's personal bugaboo, the presidential hopeful Nicolas Sarkozy, marked himself down as opposing it as a confrontational idea - then multipolarity's place as an emblematic banner for a European superpower would die forgotten as French excess. Should Schröder find this too much disloyalty to Chirac, or if Chirac did not subtly recant beforehand, perhaps on a quick trip to Washington (he is seriously conflicted about how much soft power Europe can acquire before China howls in laughter), then Bush would return home without a quid pro quo.(which would happen cos that's the way it is). **SNIP** The United States can't be interested in consecrating a Europe that could well turn out to be a Righteous Power, instructing, pontificating and limiting its responsibilities to what Robert Zoellick,(I like him already) Condoleezza Rice's future deputy secretary of state, said a year ago was Europe's predilection for endless negotiations in excellent hotels in pleasant locations. (And they say we don't pay attention to them) This Righteous Power aspect (the phrase is that of a former Bush White House official), sometimes comparing the supposed new nobility of Europe's purpose with the Americans' hard-power clangor, is obvious in many European descriptions of life as the gentle superpower. --SNIP--. In an article in which she acknowledges plenty of European incoherence, another German, Ulrike Guerot of the German Marshall Fund, all the same projects a dreamlike EU becoming "the real superpower" of the 21st century, "endowing humanity with a global consciousness" that emphasizes "global cooperation over the unilateral exercise of power". (And I've won the lotto -- in my delusion/dream) In truth, the Bush administration may be too exquisitely cynical to think anything palpable is required from Europe in response to the president's planned cuddly diction, convinced there is no new reason to suppose, all the talk aside, that the EU will soon be anything other than what it is now. That is a place, Guerot says, whose governments flee precise definitions of its future for fear of getting pinned down on how much has to be shelled out for building some credibility into the desired softness. . Are the costs of either effective hard or soft power beyond Europe's reach, as some in Washington dismissively think? . At the moment, French generals are complaining about the non-pertinence in a terrorism-driven era of Chirac's plan to spend €8 billion (the equivalent of about one-tenth of France's debt) on new submarine-launched nuclear missiles with a range sufficient to hit China - or US. And here, Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer returned from the tsunami area in Asia acknowledging that the Americans were "very much faster" getting aid to its victims because they had the proper transport aircraft - and that Germany might think of renting some as a stopgap in the future. |
| Posted by:anonymous2u |
| #4 Joschka Fischer returned from the tsunami area in Asia acknowledging that the Americans were "very much faster" getting aid to its victims because they had the proper transport aircraft - and that Germany might think of renting some as a stopgap in the future Let's see... the Germans rented cargo aircraft (Tikhonovs, I think) from Uzbekistan to get their gear to Afghanistan in 2002, and now are looking to rent ours as well. Why not? Helps reduce the trade deficit. Ramp it up. |
| Posted by: lex 2005-01-18 2:44:04 PM |
| #3 Right[eousness] does not make might. |
| Posted by: lex 2005-01-18 2:41:31 PM |
| #2 "Europe’s predilection for endless negotiations in excellent hotels in pleasant locations." Sounds like the UN. |
| Posted by: TomAnon 2005-01-18 2:26:51 PM |
| #1 For the life of them, it sounds like the "leadership" of the EU is something like the BBC comedy series "Keeping Up Appearances", writ large. With Chirac and Schröder being Hyacinth and Richard Bucket, respectively. |
| Posted by: Anonymoose 2005-01-18 1:06:14 PM |