NEWS ANALYSIS : Pact Shows Europe Still Looks to U.S.

One day in September, as the tireless American negotiator Richard Holbrooke raced from capital to capital and headline to headline in the quest for peace in the Balkans, his European counterpart was in the thick of it too, being driven through the dangerous streets of Sarajevo.

But the car carrying Carl Bildt, Europe’s chief diplomatic mediator, ran into a little trouble at a U.N. checkpoint. Stopped by a detail of well-meaning French soldiers, the former Swedish premier was detained for half an hour, apparently because no one knew who he was.

The man who rescued him: Holbrooke.

As that misunderstanding, and the praise lavished on the United States at the peace treaty signing in Paris on Thursday, suggest, Europe’s grand hopes of resolving the war in the former Yugoslav federation have been buried beneath the skillful--and timely--diplomacy of those upstarts from across the Atlantic.

Six years after communism collapsed into the dust of the Berlin Wall, and just as Europe’s richest nations appear on the verge of becoming a powerful, united political and military force, the Old World still needs the United States.

“Even a child knows that this agreement was made not in Paris or London or Geneva, but in an obscure air base in America’s Midwest,” said Michael Williams, a British senior fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London and former spokesman for the U.N. Protection Force.

“All credit to the United States for having made this extraordinary achievement,” he added, “which simply highlights the inadequacy of European diplomacy and the failure of Europe.”

That is a hard reality, tough for Europeans to swallow but also difficult for many Americans to accept. But it lies at the heart of the question being posed these days by Americans watching U.S. soldiers depart for Bosnia, 4,500 miles away: Why us?

The answer lies, in part, in the dominance of U.S. military power, unchallenged in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse, as well as the United States’ position as a nation unencumbered by the political baggage of European history, which adds a certain moral authority to U.S. diplomacy.

“What Americans have, in a nutshell, is political will and muscle,” Williams said. “And it pains me to say this, but that’s been singularly absent in Europe from the beginning.”

David Owen, a former British foreign secretary, tried in vain for nearly three years to broker a peace deal in the Balkans, only to watch the American, Holbrooke, step in last summer and drive the process to Dayton, Ohio, and finally, on Thursday, to Paris.

“When the most powerful country in the world decides to lead the negotiations and adopt a realistic posture, it’s just a different ballgame,” Owen said.

But perhaps more than anything, the U.S. role has to do with the failure, thus far at least, of the 15-member European Union’s dream of political unity and the power that would have accompanied it.

“It’s all been much worse than we thought,” admitted Michael Stuermer, a former advisor to German Chancellor Helmut Kohl who now runs the Ebenhausen Institute, a political think tank near Munich. “It was a total illusion that Europe would emerge as a political force.”

To be sure, the EU foreign ministers do confer, and they frequently decide on a common course, but rarely on issues that touch the sensitive subject of national security.

The lack of any common security policy means they have no army, no peace force to dispatch, no teeth to enforce their common will. In the Balkans, this has meant that the Europeans were, at key moments, ignored.

The lack of a common cause was even evident at the peace treaty signing Thursday.

French President Jacques Chirac, whose government had grumbled that the Dayton accords “looked a lot like what Europe proposed 18 months ago,” spoke of a “gradual harmonization” of the positions of France, Russia and the United States on Bosnia.

Chirac spoke of “European values,” but his larger vision ended there.

It was France, he pointed out, that had lost 56 soldiers in the U.N. peacekeeping mission and France that would do all it could to help the peace survive.

“France has spared no effort to defend the identity of Bosnia-Herzegovina,” Chirac said. “What is at stake here is our security and our values and also a certain conception of Europe.”

Watched by President Clinton as well as prime ministers John Major of Britain and Felipe Gonzalez of Spain, the current chairman of the European Union, Chirac also acknowledged the United States’ role.

“I now hail the decisive contribution made by U.S. diplomacy,” he said.

And writing in the Paris daily Le Figaro on Thursday, Jean-Francois Mancel, secretary-general of Chirac’s Rally for the Republic Party, seemed to define a new French view of France, adding a peculiar French spin to the peace treaty signing.

“This is not about thinking that we have the intervention capacity of the United States,” Mancel said. “But we can provide a margin of maneuverability, by our willing and independent initiatives, and make the voice of France heard.

“This peace treaty is not a triumph of pan-Americanism,” he added. “On the contrary, the Dayton accord is, thanks to Jacques Chirac, for us French and for the Europe of tomorrow, proof of our capacity to take our destiny in our own hands.”

But on Thursday, while all three Balkan leaders thanked Chirac for hosting the signing, they each lavished praise on the United States.

“Let us not forget, first and foremost, the United States and President Clinton,” Croatian President Franjo Tudjman said.

For Europe, the search for a role in resolving the war in the Balkans--which it still calls “a European problem”--has been long and frustrating.

France and Britain were on the verge of pulling out of the U.N. peacekeeping force in the spring, and a foreign policy disaster was looming.

Clinton’s decision to become more active coincided with the election of Chirac, who adopted a new, let’s-settle-this attitude toward Bosnia and called for more firepower.

After realizing that it could not make the peace, the EU last month decided that it would lead the push for reconstruction. But even that has run aground.

Failing, at their first meeting Dec. 4, to settle on a way to pay for the rebuilding, the EU’s foreign ministers could agree only to try again next month.

The European spectacle is a long way from the vision of those who waved the EU’s blue and gold flag on the streets of Prague and East Berlin during the anti-Commmunist revolutions of 1989. In interview after interview, the citizens of Central and Eastern Europe carrying those flags talked of their desire to be part of a free and unified Europe, ready to defend the values of social democratic society.

The belief that this vision could be quickly transferred to reality was shared by many Western Europeans and lies at the heart of the 1991 Maastricht Treaty, which committed EU member states to political as well as economic union by the end of the decade.

But the political side of the treaty was not carefully thought out.

More important, those leaders who pushed it through--mainly German Chancellor Helmut Kohl and then-President Francois Mitterrand of France--had moved too fast for the people of Europe.

Whether British, Italian, Dutch or French, Europeans still tend to define their interests in national, not regional, terms.

Chirac’s unilateral decision this year to conduct nuclear tests, and his anger at the criticism of some of his fellow Europeans, is only one example.

But the weakness of Europe, as a unified entity, was apparent even before the Maastricht Treaty was signed.

When war came to the Persian Gulf in 1991, Britain stood close to the United States. France participated, but played a less central role militarily, while the Germans decided not to go at all. At one point during the Gulf War, German factory workers refused to produce spare parts for British Tornado combat planes.

“We hid,” said Stuermer, the former Kohl advisor. “We sent a check. It’s ironic that the Germans, who have pushed harder than anyone for European unity, shot it down on this crucial occasion.”

Europeans have certainly come a long way since the Great Powers went to war in 1914 after a Serb shot the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand.

But history casts a long shadow over the region, and as Yugoslavia began to unravel, so did European solidarity.

Early on, Britain and France tended to sympathize with their old Serbian allies, and the Germans backed Croatia. The United States, for its part, sympathized with the Bosnian Muslims.

Even today, when Europe manages to agree on common actions, there often is residual tension.

In Paris and London, resentment still lingers about the way then-Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher of Germany effectively railroaded his EU counterparts into extending diplomatic recognition to Croatia in 1991--a move many believe was the final blow in the disintegration of the Yugoslav federation.

The subsequent war in the Balkans, probably more than any other single event, has shown how far Europe has to travel before it can defuse such flash points on its own. And that is a bitter conclusion for those who believed that Europe was on the brink of becoming a major unified political force and an economic and political power that would rival the United States.

In a front-page commentary earlier this week, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Germany’s premier daily newspaper, concluded: “It was a tragic miscalculation to believe that the divisive and overwhelmed Europeans could do without American leadership.”

Marshall reported from Zagreb, Croatia, and Kraft from Paris.