U.S.-EUROPE: Recent Flaps Point to Larger Conflicts

By Jim Lobe Reprint | | Print |

Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Oct 31 1996 (IPS) - It was last May that a prominent newspaper columnist put forth a public warning.

Noting that commercial rivalries in the Third World between the United States and its closest European allies have long been an annoying but manageable problem, Jim Hoagland wrote in the Washington Post that the “conflict over trade has taken a dangerous new turn”.

While U.S. and European diplomats insist that no serious damage has been done, growing U.S. irritation about European assertiveness makes it clear that trans-Atlantic tensions are on the rise.

The State Department has thrown many of the recent punches. Spokesman Nicholas Burns has targeted France, where President Jacques Chirac appears determined to reclaim the mantle of Charles de Gaulle, whose outspoken independence often infuriated U.S. policymakers during the Vietnam War era.

But the European Union (EU) as a whole is also assailed as cynical, ungrateful, and downright uncooperative in Washington’s efforts to make the world safe against all manner of dictators, terrorists, and warmongers.

Burns complained about the EU’s decision this week to retaliate against a new U.S. law designed to discourage foreign investment in Cuba. Specifically, the ‘Helms-Burton bill’ would permit U.S. nationals to sue in federal court foreign companies and individuals who “traffick” in property seized by the government of President Fidel Castro following the 1959 Cuban Revolution.

“We don’t think it’s appropriate for the Europeans to take that step,” Burns told reporters Tuesday. “It would be very helpful of the Europeans…if they showed a little bit of concern for the victims of Fidel Castro,” he went on. “We live near Cuba. We understand the Cubans, I think, better than the Europeans do.”

The attack over the Helms-Burton bill, which swept through Congress in February after Cuban warplanes downed two aircraft piloted by anti-Castro activists, is only the latest in a series of trans-Atlantic spats.

The Europeans have objected to another law that imposes sanctions on foreign companies which invest more than 40 million dollars a year in the oil and gas sectors of Iran or Libya.

The EU has already lodged a formal complaint with the World Trade Organisation (WTO) over the anti-Cuba law and has said it will take similar action on the Iran-Libya bill. European countries do about 20 billion dollars’ worth of business with Iran and Libya each year and depend on oil and gas exports from those two countries much more than the United States.

Washington insists that its efforts against the rogues are not commercially driven but are part of the fight against international terrorism.

“I can only hope that some day soon, all countries will come to realise that you simply can’t do business with people by day who are killing your people by night,” Clinton said at the August signing ceremony.

This attitude of moral superiority echoes lawmakers and newspapers throughout the United States.

“The United States has global political interests that include anti-terrorist leadership, while Europe has regional and local interests and a bent for business,” wrote Stephen Rosenfeld in the Washington Post. “This is the source of the Atlantic divide on terrorism.”

Much the same attitude has characterised the debate over the efforts of some European countries, notably France, to ease the six-year-old U.N. economic embargo against Iraq, another of Washington’s “rogue states.”

Differences over Iraq sharpened at the end of August when President Saddam Hussein sent troops into the Kurdish north in support of one faction in an ongoing civil war and Washington retaliated by launching cruise-missile attacks on air-defence targets in southern Iraq. Denounced by France, the U.S. strike was greeted for the most part with unease in other European capitals, although London came out in strong support.

The “rift over rogues,” as World Policy Institute analyst Sherle Schenninger put it recently, has revived the U.S. stereotype of Europeans as “both morally bankrupt and spineless, too willing to dance with the devil for the sake of commercial interest, naively putting faith in dialogue and commerce when force is needed.”

On the other side, the conflict has reinforced European sterotypes of the United States as dangerously unilateralist, bullying, self-righteous, and ultimately hypocritical.

These perceptions are confirmed when it comes to human rights “rogues,” such as Nigeria and China. For the past year, Washington, which imports about 40 percent of Nigeria’s oil exports, has said it is ready to impose sweeping economic sanctions against the regime of Sani Abacha, but cannot get the Europeans to go along.

On China, the Third World’s largest and fastest growing market, Clinton has so far declined to hold bilateral summits in either Washington or Beijing, while the leaders of France and Germany have engaged themselves personally in the bid to win major contracts from the Chinese.

“While the United States challenges China to abide by international political and trade norms, European nations cash in on the tension between Beijing and Washington,” Hoagland of the Post complained in May.

But apart from the rogues, a number of recent diplomatic skirmishes — notably between France and the United States — pose new threats to trans-Atlantic harmony.

European concerns that the Israel-Palestinian peace process appears to be breaking down have translated into demands — highlighted by French President Jacques Chirac who visited the Middle East last week — that the EU be given a greater role in the diplomatic process. But this notion has been greeted with scorn by official Washington.

No one, Burns said this week, should be “under any illusion that the United States is going to be supplemented in these specific negotiations by anybody or even joined by anybody, any European country, or by the European Union. It’s not going to happen, because Israel and the Palestinians don’t want it to happen. It’s as simple as that.”

Burns’ remarks followed his scathing attack on Paris’ development minister who had publicly questioned whether Secretary of State Warren Christopher’s week-long swing through Africa this month might be politically motivated. Demanding a retraction (which he has not yet received), Burns suggested that the minister, Jacques Godfrain, had “been living under a rock.”

While these skirmishes hardly add up to a war, some analysts, such as European historian David Calleo of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies here, say economic rivalries, long suppressed by the Cold War, are now rising to the surface.

In an article in the World Policy Journal in which he argued that the Soviet threat had “guarded Western capitalism from its own self-destructive tendencies” Calleo noted that “economic relations among advanced capitalist countries are rather more fragile and precarious than we had grown accustomed to believe throughout the Cold War.”

“And, if economic relations are fragile, so — in the end — are political relations.”