The Road to a Real European Union

by Eyck Freymann

Der Spiegel, a leading German daily, has an interesting piece on the relationship between Barack Obama and President Nicolas Sarkozy of France. Sarkozy is facing political difficulties at home after losing a number of seats last week in regional elections. France is fascinated by Obama, and Sarkozy has long sought a personal friendship with him. The Spiegel article goes on:

By comparison to that, his dinner in the Obama's residential quarters looks to be a pretty modest affair. It's also symbolic of the disillusionment right now in trans-Atlantic relations. The Americans are disappointed that, even after the ratification of the Lisbon Treaty -- which was meant to give the European Union's common foreign policy more clout -- the individual European countries are continuing to pursue their own interests abroad. The question, former senior US diplomat and current Harvard professor Nicholas Burns argued in an interview with the New York Times, is whether Europe can "develop a collective European idea of global power? They talk about it a lot, but they don't do it."  

At the same time, the Europeans have been irritated by the cold shoulder Obama has shown them. The US president hardly seems to even pay attention to France's reintegration last year into NATO's structures. The Washington Post has even criticized Obama for this, noting that in contrast to his predecessors, he hasn't established close ties to a single European leader.''

European Union

It's no mystery why Obama is giving European leaders the cold shoulder. The US would rather negotiate with a unified European Union (which would for a number of reasons be generally friendly to the US) than to hammer out individual friendships with more than twenty countries, each with its own litany of domestic problems. The EU faces a number of challenges in centralizing its political and economic authority, but it seems inevitable that this will happen. The largest EU economy is Germany, with a GDP of $2.8 trillion, ranking sixth in the world. As a bloc, the union has a GDP of $14-15 trillion, in a tie with the US for world's largest economy. Together, the US and EU comprise 40% of the global economy. Freer trade, immigration, economic cooperation, etc. would benefit all involved.

NATO Alliance

Furthermore, most members of the EU are members of NATO, and therefore protected by the American nuclear umbrella. 

We can only speculate on the economic and political future of developing nations like China, India, and Brazil. Maybe their meteoric rises will continue indefinitely, and maybe high growth rates will cause their economies to overheat and collapse in speculation bubbles. The US should reach out to these countries--it's never good to keep all your eggs in one basket--but for the forseeable future this is our bloc. That's why we need the EU to get its act together. The NATO alliance brought Western countries together and won us the Cold War. The single best thing that could happen for America in Europe is the formation of a strong, centralized, unified, friendly European government.

When Obama refuses to dine with Sarkozy, he doesn't mean it personally. Just like any astute strategic thinker, he knows what side his diplomatic bread is buttered on. And it's not the side of individual relationships with Sarko and Brown and Merkel and Berlusconi and Zapatero. It's one relationship with this guy.