There is no need to repeat here the nature of the Anglo-American special relationship, which is both broad and deep, historical and contemporary. It is enough to point out that none of the continental European countries has a particular affinity with the United States and Canada, or anything remotely comparable to Britain's dramatic modern historic intimacy with North America.

Beyond that, an even closer British association with North America could serve a broader, and very European, purpose. The British public's fear of loss of jurisdiction and socialist backsliding in a federal Europe is well founded--and Britain, by staying outside, could be the example that might prevent the EU as a whole from smothering all its fully subscribing members with centralized Euro-socialism.

When the possibility of an Atlantic option for Britain is broached, the cry goes up in British Eurofederalist circles that the United Kingdom would be dominated by the United States. The words "fifty-first state" are often uttered derisively, even though any such association would be a loose one--and as if there were not a much greater danger of Britain being intruded upon by the Europeans. In fact, Britain's sovereignty would be in much better condition than it now is. Canada, whose distinctiveness from the northern American states is fairly tenuous apart from Quebec, has lost no additional sovereignty after entering into the free-trade agreement, even though over 40 percent of Canada's GNP is derived from trade with the United States--more than four times the percentage of British GNP taken up by trade with the EU. More important, Canada suffers none of the jurisdictional intrusions that are routine in the British slouch to Eurofederalism.

The Lights Go On in Washington

One of the reasons so few Britons think in terms of an Atlantic option is that few people in the United States or Canada encourage them to do so. True, the leaders of the opposition in Canada last year urged a NAFTA invitation for Britain, but just as the British are stuck in some unhelpful intellectual patterns, so too are many Americans.

The United States has been a supporter of an "ever closer European Union", to use the parlance of the European treaties, since the Truman administration. The initial motivation for such a policy was clear: by promoting European cooperation and integration, the United States hoped to contain the Soviet threat and avoid having to intervene a third time in a European war. If European strategic unity as represented by NATO was good, then so must be its economic--and ultimately political--unity. The American conception of European integration was thus of a piece with that of its European founders and promoters, a parallel thought natural among allies joined together in the contest with Moscow. Indeed, as that contest endured, grew more intense, and spread throughout the world in the late 1950s and 1960s, U.S. enthusiasm for European cooperation and eventually the European Common Market and Community steadily increased. With it went an urge to propel Britain into Europe, essentially to strengthen West European backbones as Cold War allies.

Over the years, the practice of America pushing Britain toward Europe continued, and it has not been abandoned since the end of the Cold War. This is partly out of habit and understandable intellectual inertia. It may be, too, that the present U.S. administration has felt, rightly, that Britain would be a force for good government in Europe. With the Continentals mired in a bureaucratically induced slog of low-growth, high unemployment economics, it makes at least superficial sense to hope that post-Thatcherite Britain could teach them something about basic economic arithmetic, without the stigma of being importers of American capitalism. Tony Blair has hinted at this: a British Euro-capitalism.

In all of this, no argument offered by Americans or other foreigners on behalf of full British integration with Europe has had much to do with British national interests. And the least the U.S. government should do is stop trying to push Britain in a direction in which the British people show little inclination to go.

Happily, there is some evidence that more discerning Americans are now having second thoughts about the course Europe is pursuing. Prominent administration officials such as the Deputy Treasury Secretary Larry Summers have cautioned against the dangers of bringing in EMU without accompanying structural labor market and long-term fiscal reforms. The American experience put political union ahead of economic union, and many Americans--including senior legislators and members of the current administration--have indicated their belief that trying to do things in reverse order is hazardous.

At the same time, some senior American foreign policy experts are becoming concerned about the likely influence of a centralized Europe--or of a failed attempt at a centralized Europe--on the Western alliance and on the conduct of U.S. strategic policy. Europe's shabby and dangerous mistreatment of Turkey, the Middle East's most important country--in which the leading European powers cravenly hide behind the Greeks--is a case in point, and a warning of the kind of behavior that might characterize the new Europe. (It is, it should be noted, in stark contrast to the much more enlightened
U.S. and Canadian treatment of Mexico.)

Europe could become an American problem at an even deeper level. Martin Feldstein and others have expressed concern that the attempt to manage a monetary union and the subsequent development of a political union could lead to increased conflicts both within Europe and between Europe and the United States. Henry Kissinger has
suggested that the tensions inherent in the EMU gamble hold the potential for a stampede to the extremes of Left and Right, leading to the very instability that successive administrations have sought to prevent. Even if Europe succeeds in placing the cart of monetary union before the horse of a single labor and housing market, without sufficiently coherent political control--and there is little of that commodity currently evident--there is no reason to suppose that a united Europe would necessarily be more willing to share the burdens of global leadership.

Of course, it is conceivable that France and Germany, acting together, could rediscover a vocation for enlightened international policy making, but on recent form it would be imprudent to count on it. Kissinger and others are surely right to say that it is much more likely that the energies of those countries would be spent emancipating themselves from the leadership of the United States, dismantling history's most successful alliance system, and possibly engaging in aggressive competition with Washington for global leadership. For no one, and certainly no American, should underestimate the extent to which Eurofederalism is inspired by a resentment of the power and success of the United States--and, as some would have it, the "Anglo-Saxons"--over the last fifty years.

The European concern to "stand up" to America has undistinguished cultural and political antecedents. It figured prominently, for example, in the writings of Werner Daitz, the head of the Third Reich's Central Research Institute for National Economic Order and Large Area Economics, and of Vichyite apologists such as Drieu La Rochelle and Francis Delaisi. Obviously, current Euro-integrationists draw no inspiration from such distasteful precedents, but these
disreputable forms of anti-Americanism still lurk on the extremes of European politics and have the capacity to impinge on the center at times of tension and crisis. The main home for such sentiments remains France, where they are espoused by both pro- and anti-European forces--and, indeed, sometimes expressed at the very top. Thus, Georges-Marc Benamou in Le Dernier Mitterrand quotes the late French president as having said in his latter years:

"France does not know it, but we are at war with America. Yes, a permanent war, a vital war, an economic war, a war without death. Yes, they are very hard the Americans, they are voracious, they want undivided power over the world."

And at the EU summit in November 1995 in Madrid, President Chirac, himself ostensibly a conservative, extolled the alleged victory of "European values" over the ideology of world conservatism (led by the United States). The unhelpful, not to say neurotic, French response to the pre-eminence of the United States in the world is well illustrated by recent French antics in respect of Iraq.

Such attitudes are not peculiar to France, even if they are strongest there. In Germany, even the staunchly pro-American former Chancellor Kohl stated in a speech in Louvain in 1996 that he conceived of a world of three blocs: the United States, the Far East and the EU, and went on to urge that Europe should "assert itself" against the other two. His successors are unlikely to be friendlier or more enlightened.

And then there is Britain itself. Virtually the only political groups that speak with any enthusiasm of Eurofederalism in Britain today are the odd couple consisting of the old Left and the anti-American wing of the Tories. The detritus of the old Labour Party looks to Europe to re-impose on Britain pre-Thatcher levels of social spending, taxation and union-dominated industrial relations. The anti-American Tories are an unlikely mélange of Heathite corporatists, nostalgic
imperialists and those affecting a pseudo-aristocratic disdain for American "vulgarity." (For a recent and egregious example of the last of these, see Ian Gilmour in the London Review of Books, December 10, 1998. Lord Gilmour goes out of his way to express hostility to the views I expound in this essay.)