by Philip Short
Four months later, in July, at Rambouillet, the tone had grown harsher. ‘In the years ahead, your country will pull away from Europe,’ he told Bush. ‘It’s inevitable. I have to take account of that to prepare for the future.’ The US President winced. ‘I want you to know,’ he replied, ‘that if Europe had any solution outside NATO, American opinion would immediately stop supporting both NATO and our presence in Europe’.
Two recent developments had upset the French leader. First, the Americans had begun speaking of making the CSCE the core of a new ‘Euro-Atlantic community that extends east from Vancouver to Vladivostok’, which brought back bad memories of Reagan’s attempts at Williamsburg to extend NATO protection to Japan. Second, under American pressure, NATO’s military command had agreed on the creation of a Rapid Reaction Force, which to Mitterrand was an attempt to forestall the creation of such a force by the Europeans. Shortly after his tetchy exchange with Bush, he laid out his concerns to Helmut Kohl:
The American presence is going to . . . enclose Europe in a structure that is totally dependent on Washington and stifle any desire for European defence . . . I am not going to send any divisions to defend the Kuriles islands [disputed between Japan and Russia]. Europe should not have agreed to capitulate like this in the middle of the battle. [It] amounts to accepting the status of an auxiliary force, like the foreign legion which imperial Rome, at the height of its power, used to levy from the countries it had subjugated.48
Mitterrand was less isolated than he seemed. Britain and Italy, the two European nations most determined to maintain the primary role of NATO, recognised the necessity for what was termed ‘the emerging European identity in defence matters’ lest one day budget pressures and changing priorities in Washington leave the Community unarmed. But Bush remained adamantly hostile. On October 23, after Kohl had agreed to upgrade the Franco-German Brigade to division strength, he wrote to Mitterrand in unusually sharp terms:
I am concerned to see that the proposal which you and Helmut have made is causing serious divisions within the Alliance . . . We have avoided criticising publicly your idea of a European force, even though we are strongly opposed to anything which could be perceived as a wish to replace or to duplicate NATO. I wish only to ask you to confirm that it is not your intention, even in the long term, to propose a substitute to the Alliance.49
Mitterrand sent a soft answer. He understood Bush’s predicament. ‘We can’t blame them [the Americans] too much for their attitude when they are the ones who are providing us with security,’ he told the Spanish Prime Minister, Felipe González.
In the end a diplomatic compromise was found. In Rome, on November 7 1991, the sixteen NATO Heads of State and government noted the ‘complementarity between . . . NATO and the Western European Union [and] between the Alliance and the European security and defence identity’ and declared that ‘multinational integrated European structures’ would play ‘a growing role . . . in strengthening the Allies’ capacity to work together for their common defence’. It was a contorted formulation, but everyone was satisfied. To Bush it meant that European defence would develop under NATO tutelage. To Mitterrand it opened a space in which Europe could build a defence force of its own alongside moves to closer political and economic cooperation.
With that issue behind them, the European leaders gathered on Sunday December 8 in the small Dutch town of Maastricht, on the Meuse River not far from the German border, where an Allied paratroop attack towards the end of the Second World War had furnished the subject matter for a classic war film, A Bridge Too Far.
The political trade-off at the heart of the Maastricht negotiations had been agreed between France and Germany two years earlier. Mitterrand would back German reunification provided Kohl would commit a united Germany to Europe. As the details were inked in, a second trade-off followed. Kohl wanted a federal Europe on the German model with greater powers for the European Parliament. Mitterrand did not. They struck a compromise: Germany would moderate its federal ambitions and France would accept the German vision of monetary union. That meant a modest extension of the parliament’s powers, an increase in the number of German MEPs, to take account of Germany’s increased population, as Kohl wished, with, as a consolation to Mitterrand, agreement that parliament should continue to be based in Strasbourg. In return the future European Central Bank, which would oversee the common currency, would be modelled on the Bundesbank and independent of political control.
But agreement between France and Germany was one thing. Translating that into a new European treaty which the other ten members of the Community would accept was quite another.
The holdout, as always, was Britain.
Over lunch at Downing Street on December 2, the Monday before the Maastricht summit, John Major explained his difficulties to Mitterrand. The Conservative Party was deeply divided in its attitude to Europe. Parliament would not accept the single currency. To save face, Major told him, he needed an opt-out clause, not just for Britain – which would make it embarrassingly clear that London was isolated – but available to all the EEC member states.
MITTERRAND: That would amount to saying that we haven’t made a final choice in favour of the single currency. Your position already carries risks for us. To have a generalised exemption clause would be going too far . . .
MAJOR: You have a Prime Minister in Great Britain who is more prepared to commit to Europe than you have ever had before! Don’t put me in a position where I have to say no.
MITTERRAND: I know. You have been courageous. We ought to help you. But not by abandoning what we are meeting for [next week] in Maastricht. The point here is this: are we going to make an economic and monetary union? If we give ourselves a probationary period, that just creates uncertainty. Not to fix a date [for the passage to a single currency] would not be a concession, it would mean renouncing [our goal] altogether.50
They agreed to disagree. Mitterrand understood his host’s position. ‘If one day I need a lawyer,’ he told Major, ‘I’ll ask you to act for me.’ But there was no way the differences could be papered over.
Next day Kohl flew to Paris. He told Mitterrand that for Germany it was essential that the commitment to the common currency be irreversible. Britain, on the pretext of the special status of sterling, might be allowed to opt out, but no one else. The Chancellor thought a similar concession might be necessary on the Social Charter. Major had warned that if he agreed to it, the Thatcherite members of his Cabinet would probably resign, putting his government’s survival at risk. The French President was reluctant. Not only would that mean that Britain could continue to adopt more flexible labour policies, with fewer protections for its workers, than the rest of the Community – making it potentially more attractive to multinational investors – but it would be another step away from the ‘ever closer union’ envisaged by the Single Act.
‘There’s a lot of nervousness in Europe,’ Kohl summed up. ‘We are going to have to go to work, François, and keep the ball between us for the 48 hours [the summit lasts]’.
And so they did.
At the opening session in Maastricht, on Monday morning, December 9, Mitterrand proposed that the timetable for the common currency be slightly amended. The Finance Ministers had suggested that it should be established by unanimous decision by the end of 1996 or, if that were not possible, by a majority vote before the end of 1998. Instead, Mitterrand said, the summit should fix an immoveable deadline so that the currency would automatically come into existence on January 1 1999. Kohl supported him. So did Jacques Delors and the Italian Prime Minister, Giulio Andreotti, whom he had sounded out the previous night.
At the time, it seemed no more than a marginal adjustment and it passed without debate. In fact it was the crucial decision of Maastricht. It meant that, whatever might happen in the meantime, within seven years, the Euro – or as it was then known, the Ecu (European Currency Unit) – would become a reality. The process had become unstoppable.
The rest of
the morning was spent on Britain’s demands for a generalised opt-out clause, which France and Germany refused. Major reserved his position. In the afternoon there was broad agreement on political cooperation and a common defence policy. It was agreed that EU citizens would be able to vote in local elections wherever they resided, and that cooperation on immigration, terrorism and drug-trafficking would be strengthened.
The other bone of contention remained the Social Charter. Every time Major raised objections, the Netherlands Prime Minister, Ruud Lubbers, who held the rotating presidency, proposed leaving the matter in abeyance, arguing that it should be dealt with ‘later’, by which he meant at a subsequent summit. ‘The Dutch presidency isn’t playing fair,’ Mitterrand complained to Kohl. Next morning they agreed over breakfast that if Lubbers continued to evade the issue, they would have to force his hand. The moment of truth came a few hours later. Mitterrand proposed that Britain should be allowed to opt out not only from the common currency but from the Social Charter as well. Major refused, insisting that any opt-out clause – whether for the currency or the Charter – must apply to all the member states, not to Britain alone. The French President said that in that case he would return to Paris: there was no point staying in Maastricht if Britain intended to block any possibility of an accord. Faced with the prospect of the summit collapsing, Lubbers changed sides. All that evening, he, Kohl and Delors took turns trying to convince Major that, unless he compromised, Britain would be held responsible for the summit’s failure. Shortly before 1 a.m. on Wednesday, December 11, the British Prime Minister yielded.
The Union Treaty was signed two months later and ratified by all twelve member states, although Denmark, where accession was initially rejected, required a currency opt-out similar to Britain’s before it was approved at the second attempt. It came into force on November 1 1993.fn5
In London, Mrs Thatcher denounced it as ‘a treaty too far’. Had she remained in power, it would no doubt never have been agreed. In Paris, Mitterrand called it ‘one of the most important developments of the last half-century’. The Euro, he declared, ‘will be the strongest [currency] in the world, stronger than the dollar, because it will be much more stable and will allow Europe to assert itself as the first economic power on the planet’. Wishful thinking? History has yet to render a final verdict. But it was an accurate reflection of the euphoria of the time.fn6 Whatever the travails of the common currency in the decades ahead, Maastricht opened the door to closer political, economic and fiscal harmony in the biggest industrialised region in the world.
As if German reunification, the Gulf War, the break-up of the Soviet empire and the establishment of the European Union were not enough to occupy the continent’s leaders, the traditional powder keg, the Balkans, was about to explode into a war which they had thought consigned to another age.
In the early spring of 1991, the leaders of Croatia, Serbia and Slovenia had met secretly to discuss dividing up Yugoslavia on ethnic lines. Mitterrand already had an inkling of what was afoot. A few months before, the Yugoslav President, Borisav Jović, a close ally of the Serbian leader, Slobodan Milošević, had warned him that ‘a fierce struggle’ was under way to split up the country. ‘It is not easy to delimit the territory between the different peoples,’ he said, ‘because we are all mixed together. There is a risk of civil war, [which would be] a tragedy for the Balkans and for Europe.’ In April, the Krajina, the Serb-populated eastern frontier land of Croatia, declared secession. ‘This is the beginning of the end,’ Mitterrand told Attali. Like most of his colleagues, he favoured the maintenance of a federal Yugoslav state. John Major, facing the IRA insurgency in Northern Ireland, and Felipe González, confronted by Basque separatism, agreed. If Yugoslavia split, it would set a precedent for every other nationalist movement in Europe.
The one dissenting voice was that of Helmut Kohl. Until the First World War, Slovenia and Croatia had been part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and thus under Germanic influence. When, at the end of June, the two countries declared independence, Kohl urged his partners to grant immediate recognition. The others refused and instead the EEC brokered a compromise. The Federal Government, now dominated by Milošević, agreed to suspend military operations against the breakaway republics in return for a three-month moratorium on independence during which negotiations would begin on a permanent settlement.
However the cessation of official hostilities did nothing to stop the fighting between the Croatian government and the Serb secessionists in the Krajina, who, notwithstanding Milošević’s promises, continued to receive clandestine support from their allies in Belgrade. Mitterrand, like his partners, faced a dilemma. Should they intervene to separate the belligerents? Or stand by and do nothing?
The French went through the motions of drawing up contingency plans for a European peacekeeping force. To be effective it would require the deployment of 10,000 French troops and similar numbers from the other major countries. Mitterrand was unenthusiastic and it soon became clear that the others were too. Britain, in particular, was opposed. ‘I am not sending my army anywhere,’ Major told him. His Foreign Secretary, Douglas Hurd, assured Dumas that ‘no British soldier will ever fight in Yugoslavia’. No one wanted to risk getting bogged down in the Balkan quagmire.
The diplomatic route was also doomed. Talks in The Hague, chaired by Lord Carrington, went nowhere.
But for Mitterrand there was a bigger problem. ‘The break-up of Yugoslavia is a drama,’ Dumas minuted him later that year. ‘That of the Community would be a catastrophe.’ The fear in Paris was that, at the very moment when Europe was preparing to proclaim its unity at Maastricht, France and Germany would find themselves on opposite sides in a European war. If the Germans backed the Croats and the French and the British, the Serbs, he told Kohl, only half in jest, they were heading for a replay of 1914. The Chancellor recognised the danger and agreed to delay any move to recognise Croatia until Maastricht was behind them.
On the other side of the Atlantic, the Americans watched with epicaricatic delectation the Europeans’ predicament. The Bush administration, purred the Secretary of State, James Baker, thought it natural ‘to let the European Community take responsibility for managing the crisis in the Balkans at a time when it wished to show that it was capable of acting as a united power’.
The problem, as the Community demonstrated over the coming months and years, was that it was capable of nothing of the sort. The comparison with the Gulf War was devastating. When Iraq invaded Kuwait, 3,000 miles away, Britain and France sent troops. When Serbian forces invaded Croatia, right in their own backyard, they sat on their hands. True, there was the small matter of oil being present in one case and not in the other. As Baker delicately put it, America’s ‘vital national interests were not at stake’ in Yugoslavia. It was true, too, that Croatia’s situation was much less clear-cut than that of Kuwait: its independence was opposed by the Serb minority within its own borders as well as by the Serbians in Belgrade. That alone made a Kuwait-style military intervention impossible, even had any of the outside powers been willing to contemplate it, which none was. However, the key difference lay elsewhere. In the Gulf War, America had provided leadership. In Yugoslavia, Washington was so wary of being drawn in that it blocked French and British attempts to get the UN Security Council to act lest that provide an opening for the Soviet Union to intervene. As a result the Europeans were left to cope on their own.
Not only were they unable to agree on a coordinated military response but diplomatically they were all over the place.
On December 23, less than a fortnight after the Twelve had agreed to establish the European Union and three days before the dissolution of the USSR, Kohl broke ranks and announced unilateral recognition of Croatia and Slovenia. Mitterrand had decided that there was no point fighting against it. The relationship between Paris and Bonn was more important than the war in the Balkans. On January 15 1992, Germany’s partners tamely followed the Chancellor’s lead.
&nb
sp; By then a ceasefire, the 15th in six months, brokered by the former US Secretary of State, Cyrus Vance, had finally taken hold in Croatia, opening the way for the UN to send peacekeepers. UNPROFOR, the United Nations Protection Force, would eventually include almost 40,000 men from several dozen countries, the largest contingents, ironically in view of their initial reluctance, being from France and Britain. That did not end the bloodshed. In the Krajina the Serbs pursued a systematic policy of ethnic cleansing. Television brought the horror of racial massacres into European living rooms. Increasingly, Serbia and its leader, Milošević, were perceived as the aggressors. Mitterrand rejected that argument. That winter he told the German newspaper, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung:
You ask me which is the aggressor and which is the victim? I am incapable of saying. What I know is that the history of Serbia and Croatia has been filled with dramas of this kind for a very long time already, notably during the last world war, when the Serbs had many people killed in Croat [concentration] camps. You know that Croatia was part of the Nazi bloc. Serbia was not. As soon as [Marshal] Tito died, the latent conflict between Serbs and Croats was bound to reappear. It has done so.51
Historically, he was right. Croatian fascists had killed some 400,000 Serbs in the early 1940s, compared with an estimated 12,000 Croats who died in the 1990s. Croat atrocities had been so bestial that the Gestapo complained to Himmler that they were harming the Nazi cause. The Serbs had fought with the Allies. Mitterrand remained haunted by memories of Serb prisoners at the PoW camp at Ziegenhain, ‘the most wretched, the poorest, the most badly beaten, and the only ones who resisted the Nazi divisions’.
But he was out of sync both with French public opinion and with the consensus emerging within the European Union. Milošević was not, as Mitterrand claimed, merely trying ‘to establish a clearly delimited frontier and some kind of direct or indirect control over the Serbian minorities’. His goal, as Kohl argued, was to re-establish Greater Serbia, embracing all the Serb lands, with Kosovo, Montenegro and the Voivodina as vassals. The recognition of Croatia opened the way for the other ex-Yugoslav republics to demand independence. The result was another, far more terrible conflict: the war between the Muslims and the Serbs in Bosnia-Herzegovina which, by the time it ended, would claim 200,000 lives.