Is that an argument against trying the same tactics today in Iraq? No. Egypt may not have experienced a
Wirtschaftswunder
under British rule. But nor did it experience an economic disaster, which the fiscal irresponsibility of successive Egyptian rulers might well have caused. The question we need to ask is what Egyptian incomes would have been in the absence of British-guaranteed foreign investment. More important, perhaps, Egypt proved an invaluable strategic asset during the two world wars. It was from Egypt that the British were able to wage war on the pro-German Ottoman Empire during World War I. It was from Libya into Egypt that first the Italians and then the Germans marched in their bid to secure the southern Mediterranean in World War II. With good cause, historians regard the British victory at the second battle of El Alamein, just fifty miles west of Alexandria, as one of the turning points of the war against the Axis. For similar strategic reasons, the United States simply cannot afford to walk away from post-Saddam Iraq; the last thing it needs is another Iran, an oil-rich country governed by Islamic fundamentalists, or a Middle Eastern version of Yugoslavia, descending into internecine war. No matter how much foreign critics and American voters may pine for an early American exit, in truth the only credible option is to hang on and try to make a success of economic and institutional reform.
Let us therefore be specific about what can be learned from Britain’s experience in Egypt. First, there must be limits on how much power can be entrusted to the interim Iraqi government, to say nothing of any elected National Assembly. Control of the country’s military, fiscal and monetary policies needs to remain, at least for the foreseeable future, partly in American hands. This will not be easy. Repeatedly, during their time in Egypt, the British had to resist the efforts of the country’s nominal rulers to go it alone. In 1884, 1888, 1891 and again in 1919 the British effectively sacked recalcitrant Egyptian ministers. In both world wars they had to use force to get their way, deposing the khedive in 1914 and surrounding the palace of his successor with tanks in 1942. Anti-British forces fought back.
In 1924 the British-appointed commander of the Egyptian army, Sir Lee Stack, was assassinated.
Secondly, the United States needs to commit significant sums to the postwar reconstruction of the Iraqi economy, just as the City of London helped stabilize Egyptian finances in the 1880s. In the medium term, Iraq can hope to attract foreign investment and to finance some of its own recovery from exploiting its oil reserves. But confidence needs to be kindled; Iraq needs something equivalent to the big loans floated by the Rothschild bank in the 1880s and 1890s that were used to stabilize Egyptian finances. The trouble is that Iraq’s existing foreign debts are daunting: $120 billion to foreign governments, multilateral lenders and commercial banks, to say nothing of up to $125 billion in reparations claims arising from Saddam’s wars of aggression. This is why the International Monetary Fund, the modern equivalent of the Rothschilds, needs to be involved, and soon, in overhauling Iraq’s finances.
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Without substantial debt forgiveness, the country’s econom will be criled.
But the third and most important lesson is a diplomatic one. Like Gladstone, Bush was not so giddy with military success as to disregard international opinion about Iraq’s future. Just as Gladstone sought to reach agreement with France and Germany about the timing of Britain’s withdrawal from Egypt, so Bush returned to the United Nations to secure a lifting of the sanctions on Iraq and to offer the UN a limited role in postwar reconstruction—not least to take on some of the unglamorous work of peacekeeping that the American military so dislikes. Like Gladstone, Bush needed to give his foreign protectorate at least a semblance of international legitimacy, especially if he wanted the assistance of foreign troops. In the real world of international relations, as the Victorians knew better than some modern analysts of American foreign policy, there is no straight choice between unilaterism and multilateralism. Even after they had invaded Egypt, the British could not disentangle themselves from the interests of the other European powers. The French continued to be represented on the Caisse de la Dette Publique, set up to administer Egyptian finances after the 1876 default. Up until 1914 Egypt still owed formal allegiance to Ottoman Turkey, which came increasingly under German influence. In the same way, the future of Iraq simply cannot be decided without the involvement of the European powers today, and that would be true even if
the United States were willing to shoulder all the costs of peacekeeping. For these reasons, President Bush and other U.S. officials have no real option but to keep on promising the imminent withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq. Still, as the British showed in Egypt, it is possible to make a great many promises to leave a country, over quite a long period of time, without actually having to go.
Benjamin Disraeli once called a conservative government “an organized hypocrisy.” Perhaps the best thing we can hope for is that the same will one day be said of “liberated” Iraq. A formal return to Iraqi self-government clearly had to be announced in 2004. But there also needed to be continuing limitations on the country’s sovereignty in order to ensure economic recovery, internal political stability and the future security of those countries Iraq once menaced.
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Ambassador Negroponte must be prepared to be Iraq’s Lord Cromer, viceroy in all but name for decades. And if no American wants the job after 2005, we may be reasonably sure that under the right terms and conditions a European will volunteer.
In an important but underreported speech he gave in June 2003, the former leader of the British Liberal Democrat Party, Paddy Ashdown, reflected on the “principles of peacemaking” he had learned in his capacity as high representative in Bosnia and Herzegovina (a post created by the Dayton peace accords). His seven principles were as follows:
There is wisdom in all seven of Ashdown’s principles, above all the last one. It is nevertheless significant that such sentiments could be expressed more easily by a Briton running an international protectorate in a European country than by an American running a provisional authority in a Middle Eastern one. No less noteworthy was Ashdown’s eighth and final principle:
8. [To give] peace-building … a political destination. For Iraq, that may be a democratic and prosperous state in a peaceful and secure Middle East. For Bosnia, it is Europe.
It is time now to consider just how plausible a “political destination” Europe actually is, not just for Bosnia but also for all the actual and potential members of the European Union. For if any counterweight currently exists in the world to the power of the United States, it is the European Union.
Chapter 7
“Impire”: Europe Between Brussels and Byzantium
A EUROPEAN DREAM NOW BECOMES REALITY.
International Herald Tribune headline, 2001
COUNTERWEIGHT?
There is a plausible role for the European Union as the partner of an American empire: the peacekeeper that follows in the wake of the peacemaker. The war in Iraq, however, raised the possibility of a diametrically different role for Europe: as a potential imperial rival to the United States. This is a role that Europe’s political leaders would much prefer to play. The French president Jacques Chirac is said by a former adviser to want “a multipolar world in which Europe is the counterweight to American political and military power.” The former German chancellor Helmut Schmidt has declared that his country and France “share a common interest in not delivering ourselves into the hegemony of our mighty ally, the United States.”
1
In a speech in October 2002, the EU commissioner for external affairs Chris Patten explicitly called for Europe to become “a serious player … a serious counterweight and counterpart to the United States.”
2
And the Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi declared on the eve of taking over the EU presidency in July 2003 that “Europe will only be able to look at the United States as something other than a subordinate if it becomes a great Europe.”
3
Even that most subtle of British commentators Timothy Garton Ash has lately found himself yearning for a more globally
assertive Europe. “America,” he argued in the
New York Times
in April 2002, “has too much power for anyone’s good, including its own.”
4
In economic terms, China may conceivably catch up with the United States at some point in the next forty years. But for the present only the European Union comes close to matching U.S. output. The solution— presumably for everyone’s good, but certainly for Europe’s—must therefore be for the EU to become more politically powerful, to punch its economic weight. Such sentiments have been expressed with increasing frequency since the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq.
In the eyes of many commentators, that was precisely the aim of the new Treaty Establishing the Constitution of the European Union, drafted by the former French president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing’s European Convention and submitted in June 2003 to the European Council in Thessa-loniki. Consider what the treaty has to say on the subject of Europe’s military power. Article I-11, clause 4, explicitly declares: “The Union shall have competence to define and implement a common foreign and security policy, including the progressive framing of a common defense policy.” Article I40, clause 3, states “that Member States shall make civilian and military capabilities available to the Union for the implementation of the common security and defense policy” and that they shall also “undertake progressively to improve their military capabilities.”
5
While British Euroskeptics have focused, predictably, on the cryptofederalist aspects of the draft treaty, some American commentators have seen it as the latest manifestation of Europe’s “anti-American” tendency. “There is only one rationale for such a proposal at this time,” according to the journalist Andrew Sullivan, and that is “to check U.S. power.” When Giscard d’Estaing himself says that he wants the EU to be “respected and listened to as a political power that will speak as an equal with the largest powers on the planet,” that does seem a plausible inference.
6
Of course, this kind of talk elicits nothing more than derision in some quarters. In his popular polemic on the subject, Robert Kagan has heaped scorn on the “relative weakness” of Europeans, in contrast to the martial vigor of Americans. “Europe’s military weakness,” Kagan argues, “has produced a perfectly understandable aversion to the exercise of military power. Indeed, it has produced a powerful European interest in inhabiting a world where strength doesn’t matter…. [But] Europe’s rejection of power pol-
itics, [and] its devaluing of military force as a tool of international relations, have depended on the presence of American military forces on European soil.”
7
One could in fact go further than .Kagan. It is not just the searing experiences of two world wars that have turned Europeans from Mars to Venus. It is also the fact that in relative terms their continent is much less important than it was in the nineteenth century. Its share of world population is half what it was in 1820. Its share of world output is down to a fifth, compared with over a third in 1870. And this relative decline seems almost certain to continue in the foreseeable future. To many Americans, Europe’s principal significance these days is not as a strategic rival but as a tourist destination.
8
Yet Kagan’s insistence on Europe’s weakness remains something of a minority view in the American academy. A substantial number of commentators have followed the lead of Samuel Huntington in seeing European integration as “the single most important move” away from the “unipolar” world of the post—cold war hiatus toward a “truly multipolar” twenty-first century.
9
Charles Kupchan predicts that “Europe will soon catch up with America … because it is coming together, amassing the impressive resources and intellectual capital already possessed by its constituent states. Europe’s political union is in the midst of altering the global landscape.” According to Kupchan, “a collective Europe” is “next in line” to challenge American power.
10
Drawing an intriguing analogy with the ancient world, he portrays the EU as “an emerging pole, dividing the West into American and European halves.”
11