Declarations Of Pre-Caliphate European Cohesion Appear To Be Overstated

By
Omri Ceren
– June 18, 2007Posted in: Europe

According to Jonathan Spyer in this month’s MERIA Journal, they’ve been way overstated:

A paper produced in 2004 at a pro-Blair think tank in London suggested that ample opportunities for a constructive European role in Iraq existed, for example, in assistance in security reform, mediating with insurgents, and helping political parties to develop. “Existing challenges,” the writer concluded, “provide ample opportunity for the EU to apply its own experience and expertise to good effect.”… [but] these issues of policy have served to prevent a united European response on Iraq. The European response on Iraq offers the latest proof for the survival of specific and sometimes opposed foreign policy orientations among leading European states. British Atlanticism versus the French desire to balance U.S. power internationally remains the key divide. Despite the existence of bureaucratic bodies attesting to the existence of a Europe-wide foreign policy, the experience of Iraq from 2003 until now indicates that no such policy can be said to exist in a meaningful sense.

This is certainly a challenge to what’s usually taken as conventional wisdom. Most of the dominant foreign policy journals assume that Europe is a rising superpower – and that the EU needs to be treated with the deference reserved for a cohesive bloc. Many of the more theoretical academic journals assume that post-nationalism is either a pervasive ideology or a strongly emerging one across the Continent. Spyer strongly suggests that the foreign policy journals have been a little too quick in their conclusions – or a little too slow to see the effects that the liberation of Iraq had on intra-European relations. On the humanities side, recent scholarship – particularly in Critical Discourse Analysis [PDF] done by Ruth Wodak and her team – all but eviscerates the idea that Europe has moved or into a post-nationalist era.

So prospects for European coordination and consolidation remain a little less rosy than most glib analysis suggests. Now once Westminster Abbey and the Louvre are ransacked and the governments of Britain and France are forced to make way for at least localized sharia law – well, then you’ll certainly see a kind of trans-European culture begin to develop.

References:
* EUROPE AND IRAQ: TEST CASE FOR THE COMMON FOREIGN AND SECURITY POLICY [MERIA]
* ‘Debating the Constitution: on the representations of Europe/the EU in the press. [PDF] [Ruth Wodak et al]

Previously:
* The Nation: So What If Europe Demographically Collapses? Stop Being Such A Nativist!
* Europe Remembers the Holocaust
* Europe Remembers the Holocaust

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