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Is there a Trojan Horse in Europe?

By Dr. Evangelos Tempos

Strategic Analyst of the Hellenic Society for Strategic Studies (H.E.S.M.E.)

The recent negative outcome of the European Council in Brussels, on 12-13 December 2003, in the context of the outgoing Italian Presidency of the European Union, clarified a situation that had existed for a long time, but which no European capital dared to easily acknowledge, much less to remedy. The outcome of the European Council confirmed several predictions that spoke of the possible failure of the Intergovernmental Conference and the postponement of the adoption of a common constitution. The European Union is deeply divided. The problems that torment the EU are not only institutional or economic but also prominently political. The European Union was divided with unprecedented ease last April in the face of the US request-demand to join forces against Iraq. The then American move that resulted in the temporary (?) division of the European Union was not based, of course, on the operational inability of the USA to campaign against Iraq, but on the latter's futile attempt to legitimize an otherwise illegal war. At that time, eight states, either already members or future members, separated their positions and decided to join the USA against Iraq, creating a rift in the European Union and splitting the Common Foreign and Security Policy. Within these eight states were several of the future EU members that later either sent military forces to Iraq or offered various kinds of assistance to the USA.

It is evident that many of the future member states of the European Union, which until recently were located in the compact defensive geopolitical and geo-strategic space of the former USSR, are characterized by an extremely weak attitude towards the USA. Having an inferiority complex towards the United States and a permanent phobia and distrust towards Russia, a result of their long-standing contacts with the former USSR during the Cold War, they turn very easily to the USA for political, diplomatic, economic and military protection from their neighbor and until recently their oppressor. Their accession to the European Union follows their accession to NATO, knowing full well to whom they owe this favor. The US has largely undertaken the rearmament and the reconstruction and restructuring of its military forces and the economically weak states of the former Central and Eastern Europe, due to this new guardianship by the US, believe that they owe them a lot. As a result, they side with the interests of the US to a much greater extent than with those of the European Union and act as US representatives in the EU, weakening community cohesion. Given their membership in the EU, they consider the European Union to be a loose economic and commercial assembly of states, which is not interested in or is currently unable to acquire a strong foreign policy and much more, in their opinion, cannot offer them assistance in the event that they are once again confronted with the eternal, in their opinion, threat, Russia.

However, by supporting the US primarily and the EU secondarily in order to cash in on the aid they give them, they become the Trojan Horse that besieges the European Union, which they voluntarily want to join.