The dawning of a new Europe

By accident the war in Iraq has given Britain the opportunity to rethink and to recast its relationship with Europe. It has shown that an understanding between two nations provides and, since the mid-1950s, always has provided the emotional core of the European Union. This is an understanding between its two leading original members – France and Germany – to create a new power with a distinctive voice in world affairs.

For most of the last 45 years France and Germany have had the good sense to play second fiddle in world affairs to the United States of America and its close diplomatic and intelligence partner, the United Kingdom. But Chirac and Schröder, and their foreign ministers de Villepin and Fischer, have now committed a blunder of the first order. The USA and the UK have been joint sponsors of the hugely successful postwar international order they created in 1944 and 1945, even if their relationship has been largely tacit and not always cordial. By challenging the Anglo-American entente – which has been the key to the peace and prosperity of the postwar period – France and Germany have made themselves look shabby and unreliable.

It will take a few years before France and Germany are fully respectable again in Washington. Attitudes in London are more complex, but for the time being the notion of a common European foreign and defence policy is laughable. Even the most ardent Europhiles in Mr Blair’s government have to agree that, as far as Britain is concerned, the goalposts have moved. European federalism is more distant and less attractive.

Yet Giscard d’ Estaing’s Convention has thrown down another challenge. Just as wider international events have made increased European integration less acceptable, the Convention has tried to move the goalposts in the opposite direction, towards an immediate and all-embracing federalism.