Europe Steps Up

BRUSSELS —  As Serbia’s gleeful propagandists sifted the carnage of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s blundering attack on a refugee convoy Wednesday, there seemed no chink of light in the gloomy fog of war engulfing Kosovo. Yet, light there may be, bringing hope of eventual inclusion for all the Balkan nations in the stabilizing prosperity machine of Europe. For Americans, it carries the intriguing prospect of a Europe taking its first tottering steps to a self-generated security maintained without the familiar security blanket of U.S. troops. There may at last be the prospect of a better future for that ethnic crucible where Catholic, Orthodox and Islamic faiths collide.

It began with U.S. special envoy Christopher Hill, who earlier this year was trying to keep the wheels from coming off that temporary settlement of last October, as NATO bombers were first threatening to strike Serbia. That deal--for a cease-fire monitored by a corps of 2,000 civilian observers while diplomats hammered out some autonomy for Kosovo--was proving impossible to pin down.

Hill said he was getting nowhere, because he had “no carrots to dangle” before the Serbs. He only had, as a distant stick, the threat of NATO airstrikes. The one carrot he could envisage, Hill stressed, was the prospect of all Balkan nations being absorbed into the prosperity machine of the European Union, while safeguarded by the security machine of NATO.

Last week, German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer presented his own version of Hill’s message, a plan for a “Stability Pact for South-East Europe.” It is based on a dramatic postwar offer to Yugoslavia, and all other Balkan countries, of eventual membership in both NATO and the European Union, as the incentive “to anchor them firmly in the Euro-Atlantic structures.”

The German plan calls for a top-level international conference on the Balkans, designed to bring in the Russians, whose President Boris N. Yeltsin has called for just such a meeting on the wider Balkan crisis. It also proposes a separate “donor and reconstruction conference” to sort out costs, priorities and responsibilities in rebuilding the region. Moscow’s special ambassador for Yugoslavia, Viktor S. Chernomyrdin, cautiously embraced the German plan Thursday, saying it was “worth supporting.”

German officials noted this “learns one key lesson” from the failure of Western aid in Russia, insisting on a fixed system of rewards and punishments for Balkan countries that accept or refuse the EU and NATO-imposed rules. The plan demands “clear signals: participation paves the way into the Euro-Atlantic structures, nonparticipation blocks it off.”

Last week, NATO foreign ministers, meeting in Brussels, heralded the German plan and stressed the key principle of “a comprehensive approach to the stabilization of the crisis region in Southeastern Europe and to the integration of the countries into the Euro-Atlantic community.”

But there are two overwhelming difficulties in the plan, whose vision of a Europeanized Balkans stands in stark contrast to the current realities of airstrikes and devastation in Yugoslavia. The first is that an independent Kosovo is ruled out: The plan upholds the inviolability of borders. The second hurdle is that Yugoslavia itself has to cooperate, and fewer and fewer EU and NATO leaders see Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic as an acceptable interlocutor.

The plan also seeks a long-term transformation of the Balkans toward a European social-capitalist model and calls for widespread privatization of industry and “strengthening competitive and internationally integrated private sectors.”

Fischer, author of the stability pact, told me he was thinking “in terms of 20 to 30 years” for it to unfold. But already in Brussels, EU commission officials and think tanks are working on the intermediate steps, to offer the Balkan nations associate status to the EU with free trade, access to EU aid and investment mechanisms. One scheme, devised by a top EU think tank, proposes a guarantee of monetary stability through joining the euro, the EU’s new single currency.

There are three intriguing features to these developments that hold out for Americans the happy prospect of breaking that sad 20th-century tradition in which Europe’s tribal wars are only resolved by U.S. intervention. It happened in 1917, in 1941, throughout the Cold War and now in Bosnia and Kosovo.

The United States has no serious national interest in the Balkans, except to preserve the reliability of the NATO alliance and prevent Europe’s crucible of wars from spilling bloodily over again. But if a mechanism could be found through which Europe had the confidence and ability to handle its own security brush fires, while preserving the essential NATO alliance, Americans might be spared the recurrent need to send the 7th Cavalry across the Atlantic to the rescue.

That may be happening now because of the catalyst of the Kosovo war. The Germans, who are using their current tenure of the rotating presidency of the 15-nation European Union to push the stability-pact scheme, are playing a pivotal role in the crisis. But they are also seizing it as an opportunity to escape from Germany’s long postwar diffidence in foreign policy and act as a normal European power again.

Only four years ago, the German constitutional court and its political debate were bogged down in furious controversy over whether Germany could ever send its troops abroad, even in a U.N. peacekeeping mission. Today, the Luftwaffe is bombing Belgrade alongside the U.S., British and French air forces. German troops are poised to take part in the eventual NATO-led stabilization force that is to go into Kosovo after the bombing forces the Serbs to withdraw.

The significance of this shift, for German and European politics, is enormous. Just as it took President Richard M. Nixon to go to China, it took Germany’s aging 1968 peace-and-love generation to order the Luftwaffe into action. The new Social Democratic chancellor, Gerhard Schroeder, and his defense minister, Rudolf Scharping, were once members of the pacifist left. Above all, the author of the stability pact, Fischer, comes from the pacifist Green Party and has stunned his Green supporters by becoming a hawk on Kosovo.

Even more important has been the shift in Washington. Between 1995 and ‘99, the Clinton administration made a series of important accommodations to promote the emergence of a European foreign policy, on the firm understanding that European acceptance of this would enhance, rather than replace, NATO as the core structure of the transatlantic relationship.

Washington moved to speed NATO membership for the Poles, Czechs and Hungarians, knowing this would dovetail with the EU’s own enlargement plans. The U.S. also accepted that NATO assets could be used for purely European operations, in which U.S. troops need not be required, under the formula that such European missions and forces would be “separable but not separate” from NATO.

What this meant was crucial NATO assets that belonged to the U.S.--spy satellites and AWACS planes--could be made available for purely European operations without any need for U.S. ground troops. It was a rational division of labor, and until the air war intervened, the first test was supposed to be the Kosovo peacekeeping operation.

This historic U.S. support of a distinct (if not separate) European defense identity would have had little meaning, except that the French and British governments also made a policy change as important as Washington’s. The Tony Blair government in Britain decided its long insistence that NATO and only NATO should be the central politico-military structure could be modified.

The French decided that NATO, in the wake of the Cold War, was changing enough, and giving European powers sufficient strategic space to protect their own interests, to allow France to move beyond its traditional suspicion of the alliance; it was more than a device for locking Europeans into U.S. hegemony.

In December 1998, the French and British governments came together at the St. Malo summit to codify the new approach. They concluded that the EU “must have the capacity for autonomous action, backed up by credible military forces, the means to decide to use them, and the readiness to do so . . . [which required] strengthened armed forces that can react rapidly to the new risks,”

This was, in effect, the new European defense charter, adopted by its two leading military powers (the only two with nuclear weapons), and it was formally welcomed by the other EU member states the following week at the EU’s Vienna summit. The seal of approval on this European defense identity is to come at the 50th anniversary NATO summit in Washington later this month.

If all this works, we could one day look back and see Kosovo’s agony as the springboard that put into place a rational plan to end the Balkan wars and also finally allowed the Europeans to run their own security without constant recourse to U.S. leadership. Since 1954, the economic giant of Europe has been a strategic dwarf because, in the words of Dutch Foreign Minister Jozeas van Aartsen, “Too many people have basked for too long in the apparent comfort of the knowledge that Washington would pull the chestnuts out of the fire if necessary.”

At last, the Europeans may be growing up and prepared to take the first tottering steps away from the American nurse, while still clinging to NATO. In the process, they may finally be in a position to heal the Balkan ulcer. Only Milosevic stands on the way.