The End of the Year of Europe
NO grand design has produced more frenetic choreography than did our Year of Europe. The trouble was that most of the footwork it elicited was evasive. We wanted to give a new political impetus to the Western Alliance with a so-called Atlantic Declaration — a resounding statement of common positive goals to give perspective to the necessary containment of Communist aggression. We thought that the new generation that had grown up since the end of the Second World War needed to see its leaders dedicate themselves to purposes beyond the prudent management of technical decisions if governments were not to lose their legitimacy and the Alliance its cohesion. But our allies were preoccupied; they used our initiative for an Atlantic Declaration as the anvil for forging their own emergent institutions. They were less interested in a new basis for Atlantic unity, some considering it an interruption — perhaps even intentional — of their dominant preoccupation. I am not saying that we were right and our allies all wrong. As in most tragedies, each side was right from its perspective and both pursued worthy causes.
It was certainly a year in which the democracies exhibited symptoms of collective paralysis. Richard Nixon was a prisoner of Watergate; Georges Pompidou was dying; the erosion of Willy Brandt’s authority was more evident by the day; Edward Heath, zealous for his European relationships, was increasingly absorbed by domestic crisis. No leader managed to combine authority with the act of grace that could have enabled them all to disenthrall themselves from the obsession with the tactical. European and American purposes were, at a minimum, out of phase with each other.
In all this Michel Jobert, the French Foreign Minister, was the impresario of elegant obfuscation. I have described in Chapter V how he induced us to bypass the European Community, leaving it to France to shape the European consensus, and then switched course to insist that discussions on the Year of Europe should be conducted exclusively by the Community, which he had meanwhile organized against our proposal. The cleverest device was a time-consuming and humiliating procedure that to all practical purposes forced Europe to define its identity if not in opposition to us, then in sharp distinction. It was in Copenhagen in July 1973, without warning or prior consultation with us, that the European leaders decided that until a Community view had emerged, no member would deal individually with us on what was after all an American initiative. Each would report our approaches to the others without responding; the European foreign ministers would then develop a draft declaration. Only when it was completed would it be shown to us by Danish Foreign Minister Knut Borge Andersen, in the chair at the foreign ministers’ meetings of the Nine on the basis of the semiannual rotation. This estimable gentleman would not have the power to negotiate. He could listen to our comments and transmit them to his colleagues. They in turn would receive his report, discuss it, and deliver themselves of the new dispensation, which would then undergo the same process.
Instead of revitalizing consultation, we were invited to a bureaucratic exercise that stifled it. We were being asked to negotiate with a minister who had no authority while those who did have authority would not talk to us. We had hoped to fashion a new commitment to shared purposes, a new vision of a common future. Instead, the proposed procedure for an Atlantic dialogue turned out to be more rigid than even encounters with Soviet negotiators, who with all their stiffness and inhibitions generally had more of a brief than simply to listen.
The scenario envisaged by our allies for the President’s proposed trip to Europe was equally incongruous. On security matters, the President could meet at NATO perhaps — though not yet certainly — his fellow heads of government. On political and economic issues, the President was supposed to meet with the Danish Prime Minister, whose country was chairing the Council of Ministers, and, provided the French agreed, with the foreign ministers of the other countries. But European heads of government would stay away from the forum embodying their unity.
All this made perfect sense if fostering the internal arrangements of the European Community were the sole priority of Western policy. But if there was any merit in our concept that transatlantic ties needed a new moral compass course, the legalism of the Europeans defeated its purpose. By the time a declaration of common goals emerged from so formalistic a procedure, it would be robbed of all inspiration and meaning.
The problem came to the surface in an exchange between Sir Alec Douglas-Home and me. “But how can we make a reality of the European entity if we don’t speak together?” said the venerable British Foreign Secretary. “Who else can we use as our representative rather than the Chairman of the Council, who is appointed every six months?” That was not what bothered us. We objected not to dealing with the Chairman of the Council but to the refusal of all the other members to deal with us. I told him:
We welcome a common European position and we support the idea of European unity. However, if the price for this is that we cannot talk with our traditional European friends, then over time this could create a massive change in our relations.
The question was why Europe should deal so formalistically with its closest ally, shutting off the bilateral channels of consultation elaborated over two decades and more. Our allies did not handle their diplomacy with any other part of the world in this manner. Indeed, the odd — let us be frank, infuriating — aspect of the dialogue was that the very leaders who found such ingenious formulas for avoiding the American President were at the same time pressing us to attend a collective summit with Leonid Brezhnev to conclude the European Security Conference. On that occasion, all of them intended to meet with their counterparts from Eastern Europe and especially the Soviet Union, without putting forward their Chairman as the sole spokesman.
At other times, we might have pulled out of the enterprise. But we had a residual hope and were in something of a dilemma. Indeed, weakness can tempt governments into a persistence they would never risk in happier times. With Watergate we were not eager to advertise any loss of Presidential authority, and beyond that debacle there was the ironic problem that we could terminate our initiative now only at the cost of being accused of undermining European unity. All our allies, having geared their cumbersome Community machinery to the Atlantic dialogue, were eager to continue the process, for it was a useful foil against which to elaborate their European identity. No one wanted a crisis; and no one knew how to conclude the project without one. Suspended between success and failure, we waited, if not patiently, at least in relative silence.
In September 1973, after a summer hiatus, the Year of Europe twitched into life again. We heard that the Community members’ political directors (the equivalent of our Under Secretaries of State) would present a draft Atlantic declaration to the foreign ministers on September 10. We were not told officially, but rather on an unauthorized basis by old friends dedicated to Atlantic ties. And on September 8, our Ambassador in Paris, John Irwin, reported that Jobert thought that we would be satisfied with any draft document, however vacuous; endowing it with substance would be superfluous:
Since we [the United States] wanted a paper (i.e. a written declaration of principles), there would be a paper to which everyone, we and the Europeans, could agree. He recognized that we would prefer a paper with some substance in it but implied that he thought we would settle for the paper for its own sake.
Where Jobert turned out to be wrong was in the extremity of his cynicism: Contrary to his prediction, we were not ready to sign a meaningless document; we would rather abort the project.
On September 25 Foreign Minister Andersen at last presented Europe’s response to my speech of five months earlier. It was a feeble document; it evoked a dialogue of the deaf. The atmosphere was not improved by the fact that the document we had been waiting for all these months had been leaked to the New York Times just before. After Andersen had read a prepared statement and presented the Community’s text, with no power to negotiate it, there was not much I could say. Andersen, a man deeply devoted to the Atlantic Alliance, was mortifie
d at having to conduct an essentially confrontational diplomacy with Denmark’s powerful ally. But he had been given no latitude by his colleagues, and Denmark’s influence within Europe was not such that he could essay a solitary initiative.
Andersen had been instructed to propose that any future negotiations on the draft declaration take place at the political director level. So as to run no risk that an alternative might emerge, he was to suggest a meeting almost immediately. This amounted to abandoning one of the chief purposes of the Year of Europe. No document symbolizing a new era could possibly emerge from such a process. In European foreign offices the political directors are civil servants; they cannot make political decisions. Any topic assigned to them is certain to receive careful, professional scrutiny; acts of vision and imagination they must leave to their political masters. The proposed dialogue was therefore at a minimum very time-consuming, since every new idea or disagreement would have to be passed to a higher level where it would undergo the same laborious process that produced the document in the first place. An exchange between Andersen and me defined the transatlantic gap:
KISSINGER: Our problem is that from July 23 to September 19 there had been no consultation at all. You present us with a document and within a week you want to meet with the political directors. We are proceeding in an area which is of utmost importance but there are no continuing consultations.
ANDERSEN: You must understand how difficult it is for the Nine to achieve what we have.
KISSINGER: Yes, it is a considerable achievement for Europe but not for Atlantic relations.
Nor was the draft produced by the European Community worth all the effort that was about to be bestowed on it. It was little more than a summary of two other documents: the declaration of the European Community summit of the previous October and the principles adopted by the Tokyo round of international trade negotiations. It stressed the separate identities of the European Community and the United States; the United States was specifically asked to recognize the European Community as a “distinct entity” in world affairs, a wounding proposition that implied we might otherwise oppose what owed so much to American initiatives. There was no mention of “interdependence.” The draft failed even to refer to the idea of Atlantic “partnership,” much less to the need to broaden or strengthen it. The proposed declaration was neither innovative nor elevated; it amounted to little more than an American endorsement of what the Europeans had decided at their own summit nearly a year earlier about their own internal arrangements.
I summed up my reaction to German Foreign Minister Walter Scheel the same day:
We felt that, more than 20 years after NATO was created, we needed a new vision of where we were going. We wanted to unite people on both sides of the Atlantic to join together to do something useful. The procedure should be less of an adversary negotiation.
Normally, this sort of bickering could have been overcome at a summit meeting. But the reluctance of our allies to meet with the wounded President was palpable. No allied leader saw any benefit in meeting Nixon while Watergate revelations were cascading into the media. Several thought it would weaken their domestic positions. A Freudian revelation of this occurred in Scheel’s reply to my observation that the process might drag on beyond the first of the year: “We would favor a meeting this year. This would be better for psychological reasons, since we will be in the chair next year” — meaning that Brandt would not wish to preside during a Nixon visit. (In fairness, Scheel may have thought it unwise for a German Chancellor to act as spokesman for Europe in the concluding phase of the Atlantic dialogue — a problem that would have been easily avoided, however, had the other heads of government consented to join him.)
For his part, Jobert was blocking tangible progress lest Europe’s identity be subordinated to Atlantic partnership. On the other hand, he did not want a demonstrative failure either, for that might have weakened our commitment to the defense of Europe. And so when I lunched with him the next day, September 26, he did his utmost to keep matters suspended between these two poles. We went through our entire repertory. There was the incongruously jovial repartee. I admired Jobert’s intelligence and sardonic wit; he envied the discretion granted to me by Nixon. “I will speak in English,” opened Jobert, “although it is difficult for me.” “You do not need to know much English to say ‘no,’ ” I replied. There was the almost paranoid assault on our motives. In talking to the other Europeans we were really seeking to wreck a united Europe, Jobert insisted; Britain undoubtedly had given us a text of the Community declaration when it was still in draft form. (It was not clear why this would have been a crime; it also happened not to be true. In any event, if Heath’s dedication to Europe did not satisfy Jobert, there was not much help for either of them.)
This was preliminary to a malicious interpretation of Nixon’s motives in proposing a European trip: “About the President’s visit, what do you think? Are there domestic problems which would indicate that he could not come, or do you really want him to come?” I replied sharply:
Whether or not the President goes depends on two things. First, is that of substance. He does not want to go just to tour capitals. There would be no point in that. Secondly, under no circumstances will he sign a document with persons who are not at his level. He will not meet multilaterally with people below his level.
Jobert had a capital idea to deal with the last problem. Why not defer the whole exercise by a year and conclude it in the second half of 1974, when Pompidou would be in the chair? This, of course, would promote French leadership in Europe. How it would solve the problem that I had mentioned — the impossibility of our President’s meeting with a delegation of foreign ministers led by only one head of government — Jobert did not vouchsafe to me.
Yet, just when it appeared that the merry-go-round would never end, Jobert made the most constructive gesture of any European minister in the Atlantic dialogue. He tabled a draft declaration for the Atlantic Alliance that was as thoughtful as the declaration of the European Community had been grudging. Drafted largely by the splendid French Ambassador to NATO, François de Rose, it was an eloquent affirmation of the importance of strengthening the common defense. It had serviceable language about the need to adapt strategy to changing situations and about the relationship of nuclear to conventional forces. It was an excellent statement of the goals of the Alliance, not the least of its virtues being an explicit admonition that a period of relaxation of tensions made the Alliance more rather than less necessary.
What was missing was any political dimension. The reference to coordinated foreign policy toward the East was as ambiguous as the French practice in this field. The need for Europe to increase its defense effort was not mentioned. We thought it essential because Congress had just passed the so-called Jackson-Nunn amendment, which made burden-sharing a major American objective; ignoring the problem might resurrect Congressional pressures to reduce our forces in Europe. But these were manageable blemishes surely removable in a serious negotiation.
However, it soon became clear that this was another variation of Jobert’s basic maneuver. On the Atlantic Alliance Declaration Jobert was so forthcoming and on the European Community one so ruthlessly obstinate because in his mind success in the Alliance and failure on Europe were two sides of the same coin. Jobert wanted America fully committed to defend Europe but he wished to reduce our political links to Europe to the greatest extent possible. It was vintage Gaullism. After all, de Gaulle and all of his disciples had held as an article of faith that Europe need pay no price for American military protection because the United States was defending Europe in its own interest; it could not afford to let Europe be occupied by the Soviets. In Jobert’s view, there was no harm — indeed, there might be some benefit — in periodically reasserting the need for the common defense. But this implied no obligatory political consultation. What would serve these goals better than a strong NATO declaration and a weak Community declaration? Hence the paradox that Jobert wa
s the assiduous supporter of the one and the indefatigable roadblock to the other.
But foreign policy is not an exercise in abstract logic; if it neglects psychological reality, it builds on sand. American public opinion would not hold still indefinitely for risking the lives of great numbers of American troops on a continent refusing to articulate the word “partnership” or “interdependence” or hedging on stating shared objectives. It was precisely to strengthen the American moral commitment that we had put forward the Year of Europe. Without a community of purpose with Europe, America’s role would be reduced to supplying combat forces; the psychological bond of Atlantic relations would disintegrate. The French analysis was rational; yet there is in the relations among nations a moral and psychological component that statesmen ignore at their peril.
By the end of September, enough had happened to give each party to the Atlantic dialogue an excuse to persevere. The advocates of a united Europe saw in it a means to further their goal. The smaller European nations were seeking a formula to strengthen both Atlantic ties and European unity. We finally had a text with which to work and we were loath to proclaim our disappointment. Admitting failure might whet Congressional appetites for troop withdrawals (the Senate had by then overwhelmingly passed a resolution recommending a 40 percent cut in our worldwide troop strength overseas); it could also accelerate solitary diplomatic initiatives toward Moscow by our allies.
So we soldiered on, not rejecting the political directors’ forum and still seeing the positive features of the French draft of the Atlantic Declaration. In a press conference of September 26, 1973, I put a hopeful face on things:
What we are confronting in the dialogue with the Europeans is the merging of several processes. There is the process of European integration. There is the process of the debate on security within NATO. And there is the redefinition of the Atlantic relationship which covers all these areas. . . .
Years of Upheaval Page 104