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The Death of Multilateral Man

By Anne Applebaum
Posted Wednesday, Nov. 7, 2001, at 12:54 PM ET

George Bush is having a good war, as they used to say during the Blitz. So is Tony Blair, who arrives in Washington today. So is Jacques Chirac, who was in Washington Tuesday. Generally speaking, the past two months have been good ones for leaders of large nation-states with relatively significant military capabilities. For multilateral institutions, on the other hand—for the United Nations, for the European Union—they've been an unmitigated disaster. Where have they been? What on earth have they been doing?

Of the two, it is the EU whose prestige has suffered most since Sept. 11. This is because the EU had the greatest pretensions to strategic significance before Sept. 11. As recently as last summer, ESDI—the European Security and Defense Identity—was one of the hottest buzzwords in the acronym-friendly world of security policy. Europe (meaning EU members) had long intended to develop a common foreign and defense policy and had recently gotten more serious about it. Europeans had announced plans to develop their own Rapid Reaction Force and their own military planning capabilities. They even went so far as to appoint former NATO boss Javier Solana as spokesman for the EU's common foreign policy. Any time anything serious happened in the world, Europe was supposed to speak with Solana's voice.

In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, however, hardly anyone mentioned the ESDI, and no one was particularly interested in Javier Solana either. There were a few joint statements, but the American government immediately looked not to Solana but to Britain's Prime Minister Blair, France's President Chirac and Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, and Germany's Chancellor Gerhard Schröder. So did the general public. Even this week, when George Bush called for the broadening of the coalition in Afghanistan, the talk was of French commandos, perhaps, or British planes or German battlefield hospitals—but certainly not of EU forces.

Mostly, this is because there aren't any EU forces. Quite frankly, the ESDI has always sounded much grander and more important on paper than the reality merited. Yet ask any continental European diplomat about the mysterious disappearance of the EU, and you'll get another explanation as well: Tony Blair. When he took the lead on Sept. 11, declaring that "Britain"—and not "Europe"—stood "shoulder to shoulder" with America, he left other European leaders, as well as the EU itself, in the dust.

Enormous resentment resulted, reaching a ludicrous pitch last weekend, when a number of "lesser" European leaders rang up 10 Downing St. and demanded to be present at a meeting Blair had called to discuss military strategy. Originally, the British prime minister had invited only Schröder, Jospin, and Chirac, on the not unreasonable grounds that only Britain, Germany, and France had any military hardware worth sending to Afghanistan. Once they caught wind of the meeting, however, the Italian, Spanish, and Belgian prime ministers got on the phone and demanded to be included, as did the Dutch prime minister and even poor old Solana himself. "When you have Blair ticking off who is worthy to be in the military club and who is not, it does little to foster solidarity," harrumphed one diplomat in the Financial Times. British officials responded by expressing "concern" that countries involved in the military campaign may now find it impossible to meet on their own.

Since Sept. 11, the United Nations has been far less affected by this sort of jealous infighting. On the contrary, Kofi Annan has politely hovered in the background, mumbling soothing words about world peace. The General Assembly even gave Rudy Giuliani a standing ovation. I am not sure, however, that this innocuous response speaks very well for that institution either. The United Nations, an organization of the world's governments, ought to be the perfect forum for the fight against terrorism, a scourge that ultimately threatens them all. Yet the United Nations has been—and will continue to be—excluded from the fight against terrorism simply because everyone knows the United Nations has no ability to deal with security issues of any kind. For one, memories of the U.N. "peacekeeping" operation in Bosnia are still raw. (When emergencies occurred in the morning, U.N. commanders had no one to talk to, because U.N. employees had yet to arrive at their New York offices.)

Worse, the United Nations and its agencies persist in wasting their efforts on pointless and time-consuming activities, which then give the whole organization a bad name. Were you aware, for example, that 2001 just happens to be the United Nations Year for Dialogue Among Civilizations? I think we can all agree on the need for such a dialogue at the moment, but I am less certain whether a UNESCO conference titled "Dialogue of Civilisations: Key Priority for the 21st Century?" (note the question mark) or an exhibition of Romanian photographs in Andorra is precisely the best way to reconcile Osama Bin Laden to the existence of global capitalism.

True, there is some talk of putting postwar Afghanistan under a U.N. mandate, and the odd U.N. resolution may help things along. Deep down, however, we all know that America will ultimately have to take responsibility for postwar Afghanistan. And if, in future, the United States and Europe decide to create any permanent police or military institutions to fight terrorism, I suspect that they will be quietly organized outside the U.N. system. No one will want them to fall victim to the United Nations' peculiar institutional culture and deadening bureaucracy.

All of this has larger, quasi-philosophical implications as well. Only recently, we were all talking earnestly about the death of the nation-state and the growth of "transnational space," about the end of statesmanship and the powerlessness of government. Modern European countries were being dismissed as "19th-century inventions" that had no role to play in the 21st century. I'd even heard discussions of the coming of a "post-patriotic" or a "post-nationalist" world, in which we would all cease to consider ourselves citizens of separate countries, in which transnational institutions would gradually take over the management of the world's affairs, in which we would all morph into a new species of Multilateral Man.

Needless to say, all of that has fallen by the wayside. In the wake of Sept. 11, statesmanship is in, transnational space is out, Multilateral Man is dead—and the creaking, aging nation-state, with all its flaws, appears to be with us for the duration.

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I find Applebaum's line infuriating. It reminds me of the characterization by Jeanne Kirkpatrick, while Reagan's UN delegate, of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as "a letter to Santa Claus." The tactic is as follows: deploy all of the resources of the United States to undermine multilateral institutions, and then hold up their inevitable weakness as evidence that such organizations are useless.

The sad thing is that, had the U.S. not done everything under its power to block a viable international criminal court (beginning with its own prosecution for the mining of Nicaragua's harbors) that institution might have been a perfect venue for dealing with real problems of international terrorism. Without it, we have been "forced" to mobilize a military response under our own flag--with, so far, very pleasing results for the Bin Laden contingent.

--ADAS

(To find or answer this post, click here.)


Even before September 11, "we" certainly were not all talking about the end of the nation-state and the powerlessness of government. Many among those of "us" who were paying attention recognized the plans for a European defense force outside NATO as just one more step in the neverending struggle of the French to maintain status and influence beyond what they are entitled to. The equally timeless effort of Europe's privileged class of bureaucrats to maintain and even expand their status and influence beyond what they are entitled to is clearly behind efforts to increase the power of the EU, and always has been.

In time of crisis no one will fight for Europe, at the direction of people they have had no say in appointing. Europeans no less than anyone else will fight only if their own government tells them to.

--Joseph Britt

(To find or answer this post, click here.)


The notion of a pan-European military force was always a bit dippy, and mainly a political ploy to gain leverage for the principal European powers against continued U.S. preeminence that was made evident every time someone needed troops for this or that European agenda. But that hardly means that "multilateralism" is on the ropes. The EU is a powerful economic reality; NATO is a key alliance that may yet embrace North America, West Europe, East Europe and Russia; and the military and diplomatic imperatives that compel US "coalition-building" in the current crisis give lesser powers in Europe and elsewhere significant influence far out of proportion to their ability to contribute armed forces. As for the UN, its marginalization is ancient history.

--Publius

(To find or answer this post, click here.)

(11/8)

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