"Soft-Power" Europe: Boom Boom for You Yankee Clods, Bonbon-Dispersal for Us

John Vinocur reports on the "grand gesture" that "Europe's ultimate risk-taker, stabilizer, and military guarantor" (a.k.a Uncle Sam) may make towards the "soft-power" Europe (you know, the entity that endows "humanity with a global consciousness" and emphasizes "global cooperation over the unilateral exercise of power") during George W Bush's visit there next month.

…making nice, sounding understanding rather than contemptuous of Europe's soft ambitions, doesn't undermine the hard-power fact of the United States' continuing middle-term role as Europe's ultimate risk-taker, stabilizer and military guarantor.

But what's Europe supposed to be delivering in exchange?

The giveback is soft too, not troops for Iraq, but centering on Germany, where during a Bush stopover in Mainz, Gerhard Schröder would demonstrate pretty unequivocal opposition to the notion of a world based on multipolarity. That's the French scheme for a global future that includes Europe as a superpower, and turns it into a regional pole alongside China, the United States, Russia, India etc — creating, in the American view, artificial divisions, rigidities and the unlovely but obvious subtext of a United States isolated at a table of its so-called polar equals.

If Schröder says world mulipolarity cannot be Europe's forward vision — in Paris last week, Jacques Chirac's personal bugaboo, the presidential hopeful Nicolas Sarkozy, marked himself down as opposing it as a confrontational idea — then multipolarity's place as an emblematic banner for a European superpower would die forgotten as French excess. Should Schröder find this too much disloyalty to Chirac, or if Chirac did not subtly recant beforehand, perhaps on a quick trip to Washington (he is seriously conflicted about how much soft power Europe can acquire before China howls in laughter), then Bush would return home without a quid pro quo.

Not exactly the American way of doing business, and not an easy, empty-handed sell to the conservative presidential constituency. So there are uncertainties about the trade-off.

The fact is there are also a few reasonable American doubts about endorsing, however notional its status, a soft-power European superpower.

The United States can't be interested in consecrating a Europe that could well turn out to be a Righteous Power, instructing, pontificating and limiting its responsibilities to what Robert Zoellick, Condoleezza Rice's future deputy secretary of state, said a year ago was Europe's predilection for endless negotiations in excellent hotels in pleasant locations. This Righteous Power aspect (the phrase is that of a former Bush White House official), sometimes comparing the supposed new nobility of Europe's purpose with the Americans' hard-power clangor, is obvious in many European descriptions of life as the gentle superpower.

For Egon Bahr, once Willy Brandt's chief adviser, Europe should abandon the humiliation of the hopeless task of keeping up with the United States in military expenditure (he skipped referring to risk) and arrive at a refined burden-sharing process in which it was the Americans' job "to force" peace while Europe dealt with peace-maintenance. Boom boom for you clods, bonbon-dispersal for us.

In an article in which she acknowledges plenty of European incoherence, another German, Ulrike Guerot of the German Marshall Fund, all the same projects a dreamlike EU becoming "the real superpower" of the 21st century, "endowing humanity with a global consciousness" that emphasizes "global cooperation over the unilateral exercise of power."…