The New York Times

Sunday, June 20, 1999

EUROPE, WITHOUT AMERICA TO LEAN ON

By Tony Judt

First we had a "virtual war", now come the instant lessons. Commentators and politicians have been tumbling

over themselves to draw far-reaching conclusions from

Kosovo "We" won a famous victory. Bombing works. Germany is back in the saddle, led by "War Chancellor" Gerhard Schroder. It is a new beginning for NATO. Europe will emerge with a united military posture. The Western alliance will be radically rethought. It is the end of NATO.

Much of this is nonsense. Victory?

Bombing may have brought Slobodan Milosevic to the negotiating table, but since NATO had forsworn any attempt to seize his territory by force -and its leaders were desperate for a quick resolution - he is still in power.

And the Serbian problem is still with us - asking anyone in Montenegro, Vojvodisa or Macedonia.

NATO, on the other hand, really is in a predicament: Europeans don't have the military capacity to engage in

war, while the Americans lack the will to do so. For most of the lifetime of today's politicians, this hardly

mattered; "war" meant defense against a putative Soviet aggression. In this scenario the American nuclear umbrella was both necessary and sufficient. Defense spending in Western Europe fell to historical lows. Membership in NATO was painless and beneficial.

The West Germans had no choice but to accept American leadership, the British grew to like the idea, and the

French (who rejected American military command but got the benefit of NATO anyway) had a free ride.

Two things have changed. The benefits of the American nuclear umbrella are less obvious without a real and

present Soviet threat. And the United States no longer provides leadership.

This last point is crucial, and seriously underestimated over here, whereas in Europe today it is the subject of intense discussion. Previous American Presidents, from Harry Truman to George Bush, shared their European

counterparts' understanding that the point of NATO, in the words of its first Secretary General, Lord Ismay, is to "keep the Americans in, the Russians out and the Germans down."

But are the Americans still "in"? Watching laser-targeted missiles and bombs land on trains and embassies, hearing President Clinton promise not to engage ground troops and noting his refusal to risk the loss of a single helicopter, Europeans have grown skeptical. The Europeans were humiliated by their own failure to respond to the Bosnian massacres; now the image of the United States has

been severely dented by its zero-risk tactics in Kosovo. Bill Clinton and his much derided foreign policy team will pass, but the problem will remain. The fundamental psychological premises of the Western alliance have been

shaken, and something must change.

But what?

Europeans spend, on average, less than two-thirds as much as the United States on defense (as a proportion of

their gross domestic product). This buys a limited supply of weapons and soldiers. In Kosovo, the British, French, Germans and Italians will furnish about 33,000 troops (13,000 from Britain alone), the United States no more than 7,000. What the Europeans lack is big planes, advanced missiles and the capacity to transport and supply their armies speedily and for long periods.

For this to change - for the Europeans to be free of their dependence on the United States in anything beyond police actions - two things need to happen. They need to increase defense spending by at least 50 percent

and combine their defense industries and military procurement, planing and command structures. And they

need to do all of this under the aegis of "Europe," without actually abandoning or eviscerating NATO itself.

But this is unlikely to happen. Europeans have grown accustomed to spending little on defense, and since

the end of the cold war they have been promised a "peace dividend," meaning thhey would now be able to spend even less. The rules of the new Euro game require that member countries continue to cut deficits and contain public spending. Tax increases to pay for military hardware, or a significant diversion of government spending from welfare to defense, are politically unthinkable.

As for transnational cooperation, this, too, has its limits. So far no European state has proved remotely

sympathetic to the idea of reorganizing defense industries across bound-aries - too many jobs and too much national pride are at stake. Note, too, that "European" forces are not keeping the peace in Bosnia and Kosovo; British, French, German and Italian soldiers are under a (temporarily) unified command.

And each state has its own motives and interests. Tony Blair has taken an admirably firm stand against war

crimes in the Balkans, but his recent moral leadership of Europe is a conscious compensation for Britain's absence from the institutions and forums where European economic policy is now made. It also helps him make his case at home for closer British involvement in European affairs.

"War Chancellor" Schroder has been able to keep Germany in the Balkans only because of the highly charged implications of ethnic cleansing and Germany's obligation to combat it. Future leaders may have a harder time convincing the German people of the case for military engagement.

As for the French, their enthusiasm for a "multipolar" world bespeaks a continuing suspicion of "Anglo-American" policies and leadership; it will not translate into a willingness to merge their resources and identity into a European defense force.

If the West European powers have money to spare, there are better ways to spend it. The last 10 years have

been devoted to a self-serving obsession with furthering institutional integration within the European Union.

What is needed, now more than ever, is the rapid expansion of the basic institutions of the European Union

into Eastern and Southeastern Europe. A democratic Serbia won't happen without the prospect of European Union membership. Macedonia, Romania and the Baltics would be more stable inside Europe than outside it.

Such a strategy of rapid European inclusion would mean transferring east-ward some of the money that the Union now pays out to its own prosperous citizens But that beats spending the same money on better weapons systems.

Meanwhile, NATO is in trouble, yes.

But the urgent lesson of Kosovo is the need to replace the protectionist, in-ward-looking economic union of prosperous Western Europe with a genuine all-European political project. And such a project has one distinct advantage for Europeans and Americans alike: since it doesn't require American leadership, the lack of it right now won't matter.

(Tony Judt is director of the Remarque Institute at New York University.)