‘A Europe that protects.’ This was Nicolas Sarkozy’s slogan during his presidential campaign. Europe was built to protect us forever from fratricidal war. This is now a given. Today, we expect it to protect us from the global storms of this new century, as fascinating as they are perilous.
This summer’s major crises have given the President of the European Council an opportunity to translate his words into deeds.
On 8 August, Russian troops crossed the Georgian border. It was the first time that an independent country had been invaded by a major neighbouring country since 1991, when Saddam Hussein sought to annex Kuwait. On 12 August, the President of the European Council was in Moscow, and then in Tbilisi. The Russians stopped 40 km from the Georgian capital. Two months later, they were back where they had started. In four days, the 27 European governments had managed to unite behind Nicolas Sarkozy in order to safeguard Georgia’s independence.
On 15 September, the collapse of Lehmann Brothers triggered the financial crisis. Less than a month later, Europe adopted its rescue plan, no less quickly than the Americans. In just one week, the energetic French President successively met Europe’s four largest financial powers, the 15 euro-zone countries and the 27 Heads of Government before going to meet George Bush at Camp David and then the Chinese in Beijing. A radical remedy has been used to beat the credit crisis, and a radical reform of financial capitalism is under way.
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A page of history is turning. After some 20 years in transition, the new international chessboard is finally taking shape. As in 1991, when the first Gulf War was the curtain-raiser for a new world, freed from Soviet communism and dominated now by just one superpower, the brief Russian/Georgian conflict has shed a raw light on a new landscape hitherto not fully apprehended.
The multipolar world is a reality. Historians will use pictures from the Olympic Games in Beijing to illustrate the extraordinary rise of the ‘Middle Kingdom’, but India and Brazil too are shaping up as global players, in the World Trade Organization and beyond it. Russia, meanwhile, is reasserting itself by resorting to methods of international politics which we thought had gone out with the Soviet Union. In a painful sort of symmetry, and despite its hugely increased budget, the USA is demonstrating the limitations of military might as it pays the price of its bizarre illogic in turning an effort to combat crazed Islamic fundamentalists into a ‘clash of civilisations’.
War – real, bloody war – has made a comeback. Admittedly the world has not actually been at peace since the end of the Cold War: apart from the whole succession of conflicts in the Balkans and the Middle East, there have been less televised, though much more murderous, struggles, including the civil war in the Congo, where the flames of hatred were fanned by neighbouring countries and more than five million people were killed at the beginning of the new millennium. Yet still we continued to drift along in a bubble of high-minded pacifism, firmly convinced that by stamping out the virus of aggression in the nations that had spawned two world wars we had done enough to ensure perpetual peace. War was an outdated, unfashionable activity, a relic of the past – now to be found only among the unfortunates of the developing world. And we were gradually getting over it there too, with the help of humanitarian aid and UN peacekeeping missions, whose casualty rates were roughly similar to that of a busy fire brigade. Seven years after the destruction of the Twin Towers, however, the threat of Al Qaeda still hangs over our capital cities. Dozens of British, Canadian and now French soldiers have fallen in Afghanistan, without preventing the Taliban from regaining substantial tracts of lost ground. The President of Iran is no longer content to threaten Israel with nuclear attack: he is developing missiles capable of targeting European town and cities, and using our airspace for strikes on the United States, thus placing Europe in the front line of America’s anti-nuclear defences. The Russian response has been to put European disarmament deals on ice. And now, in a shocking and grimly symbolic development, the Russians and Georgians have used their respective ‘peacekeeping’ contingents to wage open warfare!
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