May 12, 2001, Saturday

SECTION: GENERAL NEWS

LENGTH: 931 words

HEADLINE: Anglosphere Beat: It's not the UN, it's the
EU, stupid

BYLINE: By JAMES C. BENNETT

DATELINE: WASHINGTON, May 12

BODY:
The House of Representatives this week struck back at
the United Nations in reaction to the loss of American
seats on the U.N. human rights and drug-control
commissions.

The action was the culmination of decades of U.S.
frustration with the United Nations, over reflexively
anti-American resolutions, corruption and waste in
U.N. operations, and the hypocrisy of nations such as
Cuba, China and Sudan, all gross violators of human
rights, retaining seats while the United States lost
its own.

The anger was genuine, bipartisan and effectively
spontaneous, passing despite requests from the Bush
administration to refrain from retaliation.

Although I agree in general with the House's critique
of the United Nations, I have to point out that it was
going after the wrong target. The administration is
beginning to settle into a realistic attitude toward
the world body, which could be summarized as: "It has
its uses, but those are quite limited, and while we
should support the United Nations when it's useful, in
general it's good not to expect too much from it or
waste too much energy on it. Certainly, we should
judge each U.N.-related issue on a case-by-case basis
and not take an attitude of supporting the United
Nations just because it is the United Nations."

It would not surprise me if this issue, and various
others that have been arising lately, led to the
United States adopting that same attitude (learned
through so much hard experience) toward the European
Union. It is the European Union, and the political
drives behind it, which were the real cause of the
debacle involving the U.N. Human Rights Commission.

The actual mechanics of the vote illustrate this
point.

U.N. members as a whole do not select the members of
these commissions; rather, the members are divided
into blocs, each of which can vie in an election for
membership. Washington and its EU allies vote
together, and historically the Europeans have given
the United States one of three seats, with two
European states claiming the other two. This year,
three European countries and the United States ran for
three seats set aside for Western countries, and the
vote results show that some countries voted as a bloc
for the three European members, leaving the United
States out.

The move was clearly part of a larger pattern of
European states working together to define a common
European foreign policy. However, since in reality
there are no deep-seated values or political positions
that all European nations (as opposed to their
political elites) hold in common that are distinctly
opposed to those of the United States, the common glue
that is being used to bind the Europeans is rivalry
with and hostility to Washington.

Of course, the distinction would be clearer if one
considered only the countries on the Continent, and
had the common-sense recognition that Britain and
Ireland were much closer to the United States and
Canada in values than the continentals. The fact that
Britain has stayed out of the single-currency system
to date illustrates this. A new wave of citizen
activism of a sort familiar to Americans, and
empowered by the Internet, has begun to circumscribe
the power of the political elite.

One activist created a site, the Candidlist, that has
caused an uproar in British politics merely by listing
parliamentary candidates' views on Europe in public,
attracting the attention of the local party
organizations that must approve candidates.

In this environment, what the House should really do,
rather than striking back at the United Nations, is
focus attention on the strain of anti-Americanism
growing in the European Union. In particular, it
should examine the historic bias of the State
Department in favor of European unification. Just as
State once viewed the United Nations with unqualified
enthusiasm, it still tends to automatically support
the trend toward centralization of power in Brussels.

The State Department even helps fund a pro-European
Web site, TIESweb, which bills itself as the "first
trans-Atlantic civil society portal" but is actually a
mouthpiece for the anti-American,
pro-European-integration views of the entrenched
cross-ocean media-government elite. The House (and for
that matter, the Bush administration) should certainly
question whether U.S. taxpayers should be subsidizing
the publication of such viewpoints.

Furthermore, American Europhiles have consistently
supported immersion of Britain into the EU, under the
mistaken pretext that it would then carry water for
Washington in Brussels. Yet the most likely result of
submersion of Britain into a European superstate would
be to strip Washington of one its most genuine allies
-- "genuine" in the sense that when it acts, it does
so because it sees the situation the same way the
United States does.

The White House has an opportunity to put past
mistakes right and take a more realistic stance toward
European integration. Rather than reflexively
supporting every move toward consolidating a European
superstate, it should judge each issue on a
case-by-case basis. The administration should make
clear that it is not pushing Britain into further
European integration, and that in fact the United
States might find it in its interest to see Britain
redefine and loosen its ties with Brussels.

As for those American diplomats who confuse their
personal enthusiasm for the European cause with
national policy, well, there are plenty of places in
Kyrgyzstan and Turkmenistan that are lacking in U.S.
consulates. There will always be a place for them in
Bishkek.