The Crisis of Legitimacy: America and the World by Robert Kagan, on the relationship between Europe and the US in a post-Cold War world, is instructive reading:

It is difficult not to conclude, therefore, that when Europeans and American critics call the war in Iraq unilateral, they do not really mean that the United States lacked broad international support. They mean instead that the United States lacked broad support in Europe , and more specifically, in France and Germany . The Bush administration was "unilateralist" not because it lost the support of Beijing , Brasília, Kuala Lumpur , Moscow , and dozens of other capitals but because it lost the support of Paris and Berlin .

In the end, what Washington 's critics really resented was that it would not and could not be constrained, even by its closest friends. From the perspective of Berlin and Paris , the United States was unilateralist because no European power had any real influence over it. From this perspective, even with a hundred nations and three-quarters of Europe on its side, the United States might still have lacked legitimacy. Today's debate over multilateralism and legitimacy is thus not only about principles of law, or even about the supreme authority of the UN; it is also about a transatlantic struggle for influence. It is Europe 's response to the unipolar predicament.

Kagan concludes that Europe is standing up to the US -- but that it may be a very dangerous tactic.

M E-L posted this on November 19, 2004
It is filed under International Affairs

It is also indexed with the following tags: France | United Kingdom | Europe | United Nations |