Le sommet de Bruxelles a-t-il enterré l’“Europe”? Mais comment enterrer ce qui n’existe pas?

Le sommet européen de Bruxelles fut instructif à plus d’un point de vue. William Pfaff, le chroniqueur, donne le point de vue de l’historien qu’il est également, et d’un historien parfaitement instruit des réalités européennes à la lumière de quelques pensées puissantes. (Celle de De Gaulle particulièrement, car Pfaff ne cache pas son admiration pour de Gaulle et se qualifie lui-même de “gaulliste américain”.)

Le chroniqueur trace donc avec sa plume d’historien les conclusions qu’on peut tirer du sommet de Bruxelles, où l’on vit les nations se déchirer, où il y eut tant de lamentations sur le sort malheureux de “l’esprit européen”. Pour Pfaff l’UE existe et rien ne la défera, notamment pas ces sommets à répétition qui chaque fois sont l’occasion d’envolées lyriques et plaintives. Mais rien, non plus, ne la transformera en ce qu’elle ne peut être. Le sommet de Bruxelles confirme que l’UE est un bloc économique, une association intégrée de l’économie de diverses nations, mais elle n’a pas changé et ne changera pas la diversité et la souveraineté des nations européennes. Rien de nouveau finalement, sauf, une fois de plus, pour les utopistes et les rêveurs. Et rien de mauvais, non plus, bien entendu…

«However the subordination of the European great powers to federal EU authority is the illusion that has never seriously been challenged, except by DeGaulle. I say “great powers” advisedly. England, France, Spain, Germany-Austria (legatees of the Holy Roman Empire), and the city-states of Italy are the principal makers of western civilization. They have always been autonomous powers.

»I find it very hard to imagine Britain or France really subordinating itself to a true European federal union. Economic integration has been no serious problem. It already exists, and works, whatever the quarrels over agricultural policy or “free and undistorted competition.”

»France has never needed to make an issue of political sovereignty because as the EU’s founder it has effectively been its leader until now, considering the EU a convenient extension (when needed) of French global influence.

»Germany has not presented a problem because German international sovereignty has for obvious reasons been considered by everyone, Germans included, to be limited. However it has been a half century since the war, and this slowly is beginning to change.

»Sovereignty has not been an issue in the EU since DeGaulle because federal union has remained an abstraction, not a serious possibility. DeGaulle vetoed Britain’ first attempt to join the EU in 1967 because he understood that there was no room in the EU for two (or more) fully sovereign great powers. And of course since Britain’s entry, its resistance to EU claims have been a constant irritant. Last weekend there was still another British opt-out from a European agreement, one on fundamental human rights that included a right to labor organization (an odd thing for a Labour government to object to, one might think).

»The ambition of the failed constitution, still a faint presence in the new treaty, to create a sovereign Europe conducting an independent foreign policy, is simply impossible to achieve, as the constitution’s rejection has demonstrated. It should be abandoned.

»The EU is a global economic power, as the world already recognizes. Its economic power can be put behind certain political goals, provided that 27 nations can agree on those goals. The existence of those 27 EU members guarantees that any controversial policy will be vetoed or blocked by majority vote.

»The only way Europe will exercise global political influence in the future will be in the way that it exercised such influence in the past, by individual or coalition action by sovereign European great powers. This happened in the Iraq case. It would happen again if there were an attack on Iran. It could happen in the Palestine-Israel case if some European governments wished to break with American policies. It is likely eventually to happen with respect to NATO in Afghanistan and some U.S. African interventions. But it is the only way.»

Mis en ligne le 28 juin 2007 à 05H34