Evildoer: EU losing will to go to war, Kissinger charges

The reluctance of Europe's leaders to risk soldiers' lives in Afghanistan is rooted in the emergence of the European Union and the decline of nationalism and patriotism, former U.S. secretary of state Henry Kissinger argued in an essay published yesterday.

Mr. Kissinger, who once famously asked whom he should call if he needed to speak to Europe, said the EU's growing clout presents a transatlantic problem that won't go away when George W. Bush is no longer in the White House.

His argument, published in the International Herald Tribune, helps explain why Canada and the U.S. have struggled to get countries like Germany to commit more troops to Afghanistan's dangerous regions.

Canadian, U.S., British and Dutch soldiers are doing most of the fighting in the Taliban-infested south. France only recently agreed to commit 700 soldiers to the eastern area, which will free up American soldiers to come to the aid of Canadian troops in Kandahar.

"The nations of Europe, having been drained by two World Wars, have agreed to transfer significant aspects of their sovereignties to the European Union. Political loyalties associated with the nation-state have proved not to be automatically transferable, however," Mr. Kissinger argued in the essay.

Europe is, therefore, in a transition period, with nation-states weakening, even though the Brussels-based EU still lacks the authority or stature within Europe to emerge as a powerful international actor prepared to send troops to danger zones.

"The capacity of most European governments to ask their people for sacrifices has diminished dramatically," he believes.

He said the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which is playing the lead role in the Afghanistan conflict, is evolving into an "à la carte" alliance in which only certain NATO members are prepared to carry heavy burdens.

Mr. Kissinger made a similar argument in a recent Der Spiegel interview.

"The major events in European history were conducted by nation-states, which developed over several hundred years. There was never a question in the mind of European populations that the state was authorized to ask for sacrifices and that the citizens had a duty to carry it out," he said.

"Now, the structure of the nation-state has been given up to some considerable extent in Europe. And the capacity of governments to ask for sacrifices has diminished correspondingly."

He also told the German newsmagazine that Europe's politicians are using Mr. Bush's unpopularity as an excuse to avoid tough political decisions.

"Right now, many Europeans hide behind the unpopularity of President Bush."

Mr. Kissinger, a Nobel Prize laureate and secretary of state in the 1970s to former presidents Richard M. Nixon and Gerald Ford, said the decline of European nation-states is one of three simultaneous "revolutions" the next president will have to tackle.

The other two revolutions cited by Mr. Kissinger in his essay: radical Islam's challenge to traditional notions of national sovereignty, and the shift in the international centre of gravity away from the Atlantic to the Pacific and Indian Oceans, where China and India are the two key emerging international actors.

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Evildoer: EU losing will to go to war, Kissinger charges

Evildoer: EU losing will to go to war, Kissinger charges

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