The New Europe

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What is "Europe?" The answer remains to be seen, but "smaller than it seemed last year" is one quick response, given what is happening on the edges—the disintegration of the Soviet Union and open warring in Yugoslavia. In Europe’s center the future becomes less of a guessing game. Indeed the treaties on European monetary and political union (EMU and EPU) signed December 1991 at the Maastricht summit mark a stunning success in light of the "Europessimism" of the mid-1980s. A new federation, anchored by a single currency and a central bank, is thus mandated for the end of the decade.

But Europe remains a far cry from the "Europe whole and free," as President Bush liked to put it. In particular the eastward reach of the 12-nation European Community will be limited by the bloc’s west European preoccupations, and the EC itself will be strained by the reaching.

By the same token, no one on either side of the Atlantic has much idea how to reshape the American connection to Europe after the vanishing of the Soviet threat—or whether a reshaping is really necessary. Five years ago, or even three, warfare in Yugoslavia would have rushed to the top of the American foreign policy agenda. This time though, Washington, its gaze fixed on the Middle East, first stayed aloof and then left the crisis to the EC.

While it is clear that Americans cling to NATO as the only serious trans-Atlantic security connection and as the most explicit American engagement in Europe, it has become equally apparent that NATO is mismatched with Europe’s future security problems: more eruptions like that in Yugoslavia, not a Soviet invasion across the central German plain. And it is just as apparent that NATO in its current form will not serve as the basis for anything like America’s political role in Europe over the past forty years.

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