ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1995, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, December 15, 1995 TAG: 9512150087
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-13 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: PARIS
TYPE: ANALYSIS
SOURCE: TYLER MARSHALL AND SCOTT KRAFT LOS ANGELES TIMES
THEY CALLED the war "a European problem," but in practice, Europeans still define their interests in national, not regional, terms.
One day last September, as American negotiator Richard Holbrooke raced from capital to capital and headline to headline in the quest for peace in the Balkans, his European counterpart was in the thick of it too, being driven through the dangerous streets of Sarajevo.
But the car carrying Carl Bildt, Europe's chief diplomatic mediator, ran into a little trouble at a U.N. checkpoint. Stopped by a detail of well-meaning French soldiers, the former Swedish premier was detained for half an hour, apparently because no one knew who he was.
The man who rescued him: Holbrooke.
As that misunderstanding and the praise lavished on the United States at the peace treaty signing in Paris on Thursday suggest, Europe's grand hopes of resolving the war have been buried beneath the skillful - and timely - diplomacy of those upstarts from across the Atlantic.
Six years after communism collapsed into the dust of the Berlin Wall, and just as Europe's richest nations appear on the verge of becoming a powerful, united political and even military force, the Old World still needs America.
``Even a child knows that this agreement was made not in Paris or London or Geneva, but in an obscure air base in America's Midwest,'' said Michael Williams, a British senior fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London and former spokesman for the U.N. Protection Force.
That is a hard reality, tough for Europeans to swallow and difficult for many Americans to accept. But it lies at the heart of the question being posed these days by Americans watching U.S. soldiers depart for Bosnia, 4,500 miles away: Why us?
The answer lies, in part, in the dominance of American military power, unchallenged in the wake of the Soviet Union's collapse, as well as America's position as a nation unencumbered by the political baggage of European history, which adds a certain moral authority to American diplomacy.
``What Americans have in a nutshell is political will and muscle,'' Williams said. ``And it pains me to say this, but that's been singularly absent in Europe from the beginning.''
David Owen, a former British foreign secretary, tried in vain for nearly three years to broker a peace deal in the Balkans, only to watch the American, Holbrooke, step in last summer and drive the process to Dayton, Ohio, and finally to Paris.
``When the most powerful country in the world decides to lead the negotiations and adopt a realistic posture, it's just a different ballgame,'' Owen said.
But perhaps more than anything, the American role has to do with the failure, thus far at least, of the 15-member European Union's dream of political unity and the power that would have accompanied it.
The lack of a common cause among the Europeans was even evident at the treaty signing Thursday. French President Jacques Chirac, whose government had grumbled that the Dayton accords ``looked a lot like what Europe proposed 18 months ago,'' spoke of a ``gradual harmonization'' of the positions of France, Russia and the United States on Bosnia.
Chirac spoke of ``European values,'' but his larger vision ended there. It was France, he pointed out, that had lost 56 soldiers in the U.N. peacekeeping mission and France that would do all it could to help the peace survive.
``I now hail the decisive contribution made by U.S. diplomacy,'' he said. While all three Balkans leaders thanked Chirac for being host for the signing, they each lavished praise on the United States.
``Let us not forget, first and foremost, the United States and President Clinton,'' said Croatian President Franjo Tudjman.
For Europe, the search for a role in resolving the war in the Balkans - which it still calls ``a European problem'' - has been long and frustrating. France and Britain were on the verge of pulling out of the U.N. force in the spring, and a foreign policy disaster was looming. Clinton's decision to become more active coincided with the election of Chirac, who adopted a new, let's-settle-this attitude toward Bosnia and called for more firepower.
Whether British, Italian, Dutch or French, Europeans still tend to define their interests in national, not regional, terms. Chirac's unilateral decision this year to conduct nuclear tests, and his anger at the criticism of some of his fellow Europeans, is one example.
Europeans have certainly come a long way since the Great Powers went to war in 1914 after a Serb shot the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand. But history casts a long shadow over the region, and as Yugoslavia began to unravel, so did European solidarity. Early on, Britain and France tended to sympathize with their old Serbian allies, and the Germans backed Croatia. The United States, for its part, sympathized with the Bosnian Muslims.
The war in the Balkans, probably more than any other event, has shown how far Europe has to travel before it can defuse such flash points on its own. And that is a bitter conclusion for those who believed Europe was on the brink of becoming a major unified political force, and an economic and political power that would rival the United States.
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