"Il faut pas enculer des Mouches?" - Jacques Chirac.*

Raumschiff Bruessel : (Spacestation Brussels)

Andreas Oldag & Hans-Martin Tillack

Argon, Berlin, 2003, ISBN: 3-87024-578-6

It is the Saturday afternoon before the war. The attack on Iraq is due next week, according to the newspaper headlines, which threaten that the US will begin hostilities, irrespective of the United Nations, its NATO allies and critics throughout the international community.

If the US goes it alone there can be only one conclusion, despite the Bush Administration's unabashed belligerence. US power is on the wane, already past its zenith.

With several hundred thousand troops and mountains of equipment being moved around the world, at first sight this seems absurd, but the Bush administration has been notably unsuccessful in marshalling the kind of support that enabled the first Gulf War armies to be described as Coalition Forces. This time there is no coalition.

This time, the US' 'client states', countries like Turkey, have baulked at getting dragged into the conflict.

The Russians, no longer a superpower, are deeply critical.

The French, never quite a superpower, despite Napoleonic ambition, but ever grandiose in international affairs and quite capable of mounting their own military interventions, are vitriolic.

The British, by hanging onto the Bush Presidency's coat-tails, are in danger of ousting their own government, rather than the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein.

A change of policy from 'we want to invade' to 'we achieved our aims without firing a shot' is far from improbable.

All this is over an issue where there is almost unanimous dislike for the Iraq regime. Hussein has no support, except the reluctant backing that comes from resistance to a demonstration of American military might and the antipathy of Iraq's neighbours to an unpredictable interventionist conflict on their own doorstep.

For half a century, the Cold War gave the US 'superpower' authority in a direct standoff with the USSR and an uneasy co-existence with China. The USA had unchallenged authority in word affairs and the loyal support of its allies for decade after decade of bluff and surrogate conflict. More and more countries joined the nuclear club without fundamentally shifting the terrifying doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD), until the USSR disintegrated following the Gorbachov years of glasnost and peristroika, which brought the opening of the Berlin Wall and heralded the wholly unexpected end of communism in Eastern Europe in 1989-90.

The liberation of Kuwait from occupation by the Iraqis in 1990/91 was one of the very few occasions since the D-Day landings in 1944, when large scale US military intervention has succeeded in achieving the majority of its objectives. A little over a decade ago, American power was perceived to be at its peak.

Otherwise, the US's military role internationally has rarely been characterised by success.

Emerging as an international power only a little over a century ago, territory had never been a problem for the expanding USA. The West was won, Luisiana purchased and Alaska bought. The United States was notably antipathetic to overseas excursions, until war in the Philipines and the extension of US power across the Pacific brought the tendency to adventure and subsequently triggered US involvement in World War 2, followed by the brutal war in Korea and the conflict of attrition in Vietnam. The Monroe doctrine had claimed US hegemony over the Americas, but achieved little as a succession of corrupt and unsuccessful governments undermined the prosperity and well-being of peoples in country after country south of the Mexican border, a sorry state of affairs that continues to this day. War against Cuba could be provoked by a newspaper baron, Randolf Hurst, yet a reinvasion half a century later at the Bay of Pigs brought the world to the brink of World War Three and achieved nothing. With the new Gulf War looking more and more like a rash adventure it is worth asking how much damage has already been done to US credibility?

One of the first principles of imperial power is to wield influence based on military might without actually putting troops to the test. Even an overwhelming victory in Iraq would bring the Bush government little real gain, while creating a raft of new problems in the form of redefined relationships in the middle east. Does the Bush administration really want to spend what is left of their term of office negotiating with leaders from a dozen small countries, while trying to establish a new status quo with the leaders of three or four large ones. What might Hillary Clinton inherit as a mantel of imperial power? Sackcloth and ashes?

Not very impressive, the Bush administration, but what of the emerging presence of Europe, 'Old Europe' as Bush's placemen so eloquently muttered, estranging themselves even further from their oldest ally - France.

Looking at the new Europe and the role of the Brussels at the centre of the European Union, German journalists, Andreas Oldag & Hans-Martin Tillack are experienced European Union correspondents who have collaborated to produce a book so simplistic, it demonstrates in itself, the profound ignorance the anticipated readership have about their system of government beyond the natinal level. In a volume devoid of references and attributions, lacking an index (which can surely nowadays be compiled by a student with a list of keywords and word processor in a couple of days), Oldag and Tillack paint an overwhelming negative picture of the European Union administration in Brussels and its political masters, in particular Commission president Prodi, Council of Ministers Foreign Affairs specialist Solana and Commissioner for the Administration Neil Kinnock. The story they tell is a hotpotch of issues that anyone who has read a newspaper regularly would have picked up over the last ten years. Building an impression of a bloated bureaucracy at the outset, Oldag and Tillack then describe the scope of the EU's remit, confirming that the 40,000 or so strong administration is really a rather small team to cover its responsibilities for a swathe of regulations, funding decisions and political programmes. The book skirts complex issues like the remit for European administration and skims through massive questions such as the expansion of the EU in Eastern Europe with the admission of Poland and its smaller neighbours. Anectodal and superficial, the most creaky cliches about national rivalry and point scoring are matched by a long list of 'scandals' involving low level corruption, regulatory failure and bureaucratic compromise. What is ignored, much to the detriment of Oldag and Tillack's view of the EU, is that a very high proportion of EU activities are actually carried out at local level across the continent and involve collaborations across borders and language barriers by literally thousands of public and commercial organisations. Bringing a powerful self regulatory mechanism by encouraging international institutional collaboration, that this system of subsidiarity functions is a sign of success in itself. Given the growth of banditry in eastern europe since the end of communism, perhaps Oldag and Tillack should be surprised that the levels of corruption within EU programmes are not far higher. Seen from the participants' perspective, the European Union is an astonishingly successful motor for social change, achieving more in a decade for countries like Ireland, Portugal and Greece, than the previous half century of wholly independent government. While politicians seek the limelight and governments are reputed to be reluctant to sacrifice sovereignty, in practice the Union has set in place a massive raft of legislation and administrative codes which are accepted with the same respect, for better or worse, that people give their national law.

At the level of public understanding, however, the European Union must have failed if journalists imagine thay harping on issues like corruption and incompentence among officials are the real story.

What Oldag and Tillack have to say about constitutional issues is nominal. The contrast with any US debate, where any freshly qualified lawyer will have a decent grounding about the Constitution and its every amendment is quite profound. Whereas the USA has a highly formalised system of government, well documented in its development and philosophy, clear about the boundaries of responsibility between its institutions and therefore a potentially subtle area for political speculation and debate, the new centre of European power and administration is presented as foggy, imprecise and its political structures a maze of deft improvisation and intransigence. The first job of political analysis is to sustain a convincing distinction between the politics of faction and personality on one side and the administrative framework and structural dynamics on the other. At least with respect to the potental for a European Constitution, Oldag and Tillack do not seem to have thought this through.

The performance of Europe's biggest businesses makes any problems in the Brussels bureaucracy look like chicken feed. With attention focussed on the looming war, Deutsche Telekom's results for 2002 made public a loss of Euros24,600,000,000, or about $27,000,000,000 on revenues of Euro53,700,000,000, about two and a half times the german contribution to the cofferes in Brussels. Carrying debt of Euros61,100,000,000, most of the Telekom loss was explained as write downs. Were those assets backing the debt? Telekom are one of those firms that really do talk telephone numbers. Their share-price rose, as bargain hunters assumed the worst is over. They could be right.

This was also the week when Gerhard Schroeder switched the direction of government policy away from the traditions of the Social Market, with a Euro15billion lifeline to the construction industry, accompanied by a cut in welfare payments to Germay's growing army of unemployed, while in Belgrade, the Serbian Prime Minister was assassinated. A comparison with the administrative tangles of the Austro-Hungarian Empire towards the end of the nineteenth century might be more appropriate starting point to think about the European Union, than tales of woe from Oldag and Tillack's largely German sources in Brussels.

jc.