Joe Klein's European Listening Tour

Joe Klein is a staff writer for The New Yorker. He is traveling in Europe for the London Guardian, where a version of this article first appeared.

Today's itinerary: Seville, Spain

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After such intimacy with the Euristocracy, it is something of a shock to find myself dumped into the enormous cow pen with seven gazillion other journalists the following day. In such a situation, beggary prevails. The hacks seek out the flacks, trolling for tidbits. Chirac told Blair what? It is a bad day all round. England and America are eliminated from the World Cup (but we Yanks go out more heroically than the toothless triple-lions). Basque separatists—unemployed steelworkers?—set off car bombs. At least I get to spend an hour with Chris Patten, whom I first met in Hong Kong a decade ago. We find a place in the Spanish tourism booth, surrounded by colorful brochures and flamenco CDs, and drink coffee.

Patten is a curious figure—a Europhilic squish, Margaret Thatcher would say. But a robust, combative, and entertaining one. He does me the favor of not using the Henry Kissinger line that every other EU partisan has rehearsed for me during the week: "If I want to know what Europe thinks, whom do I call?" In part, perhaps, because Patten seems on a trajectory to become the person to call. He has made himself something of a target in America, defending the EU's funding of the Palestinian Authority and attacking, in a Washington Post column, the American columnists—George Will, Charles Krauthammer, and others—who have posited rampant European anti-Semitism. (Patten tried, but failed, to convince me that the Middle East conflict resembled Northern Ireland, a common British solecism: The IRA terrorists did not want to inhabit London; if only 0.001 percent of Palestinians are willing to strap bombs on their bellies in the belief that all the land, even Tel Aviv, is rightly theirs, then Israel has a very tenuous future indeed. But that's another story.)

Patten had done a very interesting bit in the European parliament a few weeks earlier. "President Bush has just raised defense spending by 14 percent—$48 billion—while reducing money for health, education, and social policy," he had said. "How many of you believe that you could comfortably run on such a platform in the next election? Can I see a show of hands?"

One hand (a French delegate, a former general). The point, Patten tells me, was realism. Europe should spend more on defense—on airlift capability, precision-guided munitions, and special forces—but it is not destined to become a military superpower. It is destined to be America's junior partner in the world. "America invented multilateralism after the second World War. It created all the multilateral institutions that it now seems to scorn," Patten says. "There is something absurd about not recognizing the importance of consultation, of multilateral structures, in a world growing smaller because of globalization."

What then, I ask, would be your ideal European foreign policy? Patten smiles and dodges. He cites the French intellectual Dominique Moisi: " 'The United States fights. The United Nation feeds. The European Union funds.' That's not quite accurate, of course. The United States funds and the European Union has done its share of fighting in Kosovo and Afghanistan." But Patten is clearly associating himself with this less than radical world vision—another example of how, when all is said and done, the EU is destined to disappoint those looking for melodrama.

The Seville declaration, issued by the 15 leaders, was more of the same. Immigration was the big issue and it was smothered in further study; reform of the EU was blocked (by France, primarily); enlargement was supported vehemently, if emptily. One can take this as a massive yawn or a quiet victory for civility. Nothing much should be done about immigration: It is an economic necessity in a region suffering demographic collapse. Reform and enlargement are the sorts of problems that are too difficult to be tackled short of a crisis, even by governments far more coherent than this rather remarkable partnership.

Did Klein just call the EU remarkable? Yes. Here you have 15 tiny, inbred societies, suffering all the genetic calamities—xenophobia, lassitude, rampant accordion-playing—that inbreeding creates, facing the possibility of irrelevance in a world of massive numbers: a billion Chinese, a billion Indians, 300 million Americans who live as if they were 3 billion. The European project is not an easy one (especially when it is encased in a structure where any single country, even Luxembourg, can veto any action). The project will grow more difficult very soon, as Eastern Europe is assimilated (or not), and the social-service systems of the existing 15 come under fierce demographic strain.

Europe has been a halting 50-year road, as easy to ridicule as the aesthetics of the euro banknote—but the euro stands, and last week was gaining strength against the dollar. The EU stands as well, an elitist salon undoubtedly, but a bolder and far more supple example of transnational possibilities than the U.N. has been, in a world where transnationality is no longer an option, despite what my government says. Hmm. You were expecting me to trash the European Union?

So was I.

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