Carrots and Sticks

The EU scrambles to rediscover its single voice while the US keeps dividing and conquering

The Greek island of Kastellorizo seemed an odd setting for Polish Foreign Minister Wlodzimierz Cimoszewiczs's comments on Poland's new role in the world: "This is a fresh responsibility for my country, but we are ready to share it." The US plans to divide Iraq into three zones and take charge with a "stabilization force" in one of them while the other two will fall under the protective wings of Britain and... Poland?

Well, yes. Basically for two reasons. First, there's a deeper relationship between Poland and Iraq than might appear at first glance. During the Cold War, nearly all the countries of the Warsaw Pact had tighter connections with the Arab world than the west did. Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, Polish Foreign Minister in 1995 and 1996, tells Der Tagesspiegel, "Tens of thousands of Polish doctors, engineers, builders and other specialists worked in Iraq in the 70s and 80s." Between the two Gulf Wars, communications between Iraq and the US often went through the Polish embassy in Baghdad. So the Poles know the Iraqis quite well, probably better than the US and British do.

The second reason is that, while other European countries like France and Germany were trying to throw the brakes on the US drive into war, Poland not only backed the Bush administration but also sent in 200 elite soldiers once the war got started. Overseeing a multinational force in their own zone in Iraq is, to a great extent, the US's reward to Poland. The list of other countries so far invited to join Polish forces only confirms this: Bulgaria, Denmark, Ukraine, maybe even Albania.

But not France or Germany, not Belgium or Luxembourg. These countries - the "gang of four," as some papers have called them - not only opposed the war but met earlier this week to discuss a European military force the Americans view suspiciously as a potential rival to Nato (the Times of London has a sort of mini-FAQ on the Euro army and, in Slate, June Thomas rounds up reaction to it in the internationael press).

The war drove deep divisions not only between what US Defense Secretary infamously called "Old Europe" and the US but also through Europe, but once it was over, all the rifts were supposed to be mended. They haven't yet and that's why the foreign ministers of the 25 present and future member countries of the European Union took their cruise through the Aegean.

Even EU countries that supported the war would like to see the UN approve US plans for post-Saddam Iraq before they're implemented, but of course, the US will most likely do whatever it wants regardless of what the UN or anybody else thinks. The foreign ministers' decision to have EU foreign policy figurehead Javier Solana write up a collective security strategy by next month is an attempt to come up with an entity powerful enough to get America to think at least twice before acting unilaterally. And to come up with it fast.

But with a viable Euro army realistically years down the road and political divisions within the EU alive and kicking, thanks in part to prodding from the US as exemplified by its parceling out of authority over Iraq, Europe's greatest hope for mattering much at all in the new New World Order may lie in the language the Bush administration understands best: economics. As the world's largest economy faces mounting deficits and the second largest, Japan, still hasn't found a way out of its downward deflationary spiral, the euro has been soaring in value. Odd as it may seem, the new currency, as George Monbiot argues in the Guardian, could well be the only counterforce to US imperial ambitions.

Elsewhere

On Tuesday, Glenn Lowry and Peter-Klaus Schuster, the directors of Museum of Modern Art in New York and the New National Gallery in Berlin, together unveiled plans for an ambitious exhibition: "MoMa in Berlin." From February 18 through September 19, 2004, two hundred "masterworks" from one of the world's great collections will be on view in a building designed by the architect MoMA's founders originally wanted to win over for their own museum, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.

Michèle C. Cone reviews a show of Christian Schad's work in New York for Artnet Magazine, Peter Schjeldahl writes up Adolf Wölfi, "among the greatest of outsider artists," in the New Yorker, and in ArtMargins, Sven Spieker talks to Ekaterina Djogot, who's co-curating the exhibition Berlin-Moscow, opening in September.