Ambushed in Europe

They call it "summit hopping," and in Gothenburg last week it threatened to become a deadly sport. Amid more than 20,000 peaceful demonstrators who came to protest the conclaves of U.S. President George W. Bush and the 15 leaders of the European Union countries was a core of masked anarchists bent on wholesale destruction. The Swedish police tried an approach of dialogue and accommodation; it had little effect on the militants, who threw cobblestones, trashed stores and set fires in the city. Despite the bitter experience of what British Prime Minister Tony Blair called "an anarchists' traveling circus" in Seattle in 1999, Prague last September, Nice last December, Davos and Quebec City earlier this year, Swedish police weren't equipped with water cannon or tear gas. During the melee, three protesters were shot and wounded — one of them seriously — while dozens on both sides of the line were injured and more than 60 people arrested in what Swedish Prime Minister Göran Persson termed "a tragedy."

The worst of the excesses occurred on Friday night, well after Bush had left the city, forcing the E.U. leaders — already struggling against a sense among European citizens of their agenda's remoteness — to hole up for dinner in the fortified convention center instead of a restaurant in the city center. But Blair, like the other shaken leaders, was defiant in rejecting the violence and its intended effect. "Such protests must not and will not disrupt the proper workings of democratic organizations ... that are coming together precisely in order to help drive forward jobs, prosperity and security for our people," said the newly re-elected British leader. "It is very important that we don't concede an inch to these people."

The mayhem was a sobering coda to a long week of high-test diplomacy. Though the limits of talk were evident in the streets of Gothenburg, all the negotiating and speechmaking on the part of the European leaders and the U.S. President did add up to a genuine advance in the cause of extending the institutions of Europe further to the east. At the European Council meeting of E.U. leaders on Friday and Saturday, the Swedish government crowned its six-month E.U. presidency with a notable success. The Swedes quelled German reservations about naming a hard-and-fast date for when a first group of Central European countries would become part of the European Union. If both the current and the prospective members hold to their pledged efforts, negotiations for at least some of the first candidates — Poland, Hungary, Estonia, the Czech Republic, Slovenia and Cyprus — will be over by the end of 2002. And after ratification they will become members by the middle of 2004.

For his part, Bush dedicated a key speech in Warsaw to his idea of an inclusive definition of Europe, up to and embracing Russia. "Every European nation that struggles toward democracy and free markets and a strong civic culture must be welcomed into Europe's home," he told an enthusiastic crowd in the Polish capital. "No more Yaltas. No more Munichs." Along with Poland, the U.S. wants NATO's next tranche of new member countries to include the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania — "no red lines, no outside vetoes." As far as it applies to NATO, all that is debatable for the Europeans. But Bush's suggestion that the European Union itself expand further to the East was met frostily by Chris Patten, the E.U.'s foreign affairs commissioner. Patten pointed out that since the U.S. was not and never would be a candidate for European Union membership, its views on such matters were, as he said, "different." His British public school codicil: "I don't imagine for one moment that the U.S. intends to overlook this crucial fact."

In the course of the week, the cartoonish picture of the American President as a pollutin', executin' and highfalutin' Texan morphed into something more nuanced, if not necessarily more ideologically acceptable to Europeans. No doubt, Bush's syntax was more direct and informal than that of his European counterparts. In Brussels on Wednesday he waved his arms and told a press corps used to measured tones that his missile defense program was aimed to thwart "the threats that somebody who hates freedom or hates America or hates our allies or hates Europe will try to blow us up!" In Sweden the next day he made a classic Bush gaffe, referring to the continent of Africa as "a nation that suffers from incredible disease."

But Europeans had been led to expect worse, and at least at NATO, Bush seemed to have outstripped the low expectations set for him. He was variously described as friendly, engaged, competent, unpretentious, even humble. And in view of the rhetorical circumlocutions European leaders had to use later to explain why the Irish vote against the Treaty of Nice earlier this month won't impede the Union's noble goal of enlarging to encompass former Warsaw Pact nations (see accompanying story), Bush's positions at least had the laudable virtue of clarity.

On missile defense, for instance, the President made the point that while he will consult with his allies and the Russians over American plans, "people know I'm intent on doing what I think is right to make the world more peaceful." His open dismissal of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty as a relic of the cold war clashes with French President Jacques Chirac's view of that treaty as "a pillar" in preserving the strategic balance. Perhaps not surprisingly, the newest government leader in NATO and the E.U., conservative Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, said that Bush's explanation of his still nebulous missile-defense plan was "welcomed as a spur to further analysis" and was not rejected. But as the President moved on to discuss the same topic with Putin — the man whose reaction is more important than anyone else's in determining Europe's stance — it was clear that the debate will continue for months if not years: How much should a new strategic framework rely on technology? How much on new, binding treaties to undercut nuclear proliferation? Chirac and German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, along with Putin, are more comfortable with the latter; Bush is raring to get cracking on the hardware.

At Brussels' NATO headquarters, where America has always been the first among equals, Bush was on the closest thing to friendly turf that continental Europe has to offer. He lost that home-field advantage when he brought his 700-plus traveling party to Gothenburg. While the demonstrators protested against what some called the "toxic Texan" outside, he cordially locked horns with his host, Prime Minister Persson, and the European Commission team headed by President Romano Prodi. In Brussels Bush was peddling the still abstract concept of missile defense; in Gothenburg it was the Europeans' turn to hold the Americans' feet to the fire, this time over the far more detailed international agreement, signed in Kyoto in 1997, to reduce carbon emissions in the hope of heading off the alarming trend toward global warming.

According to a Bush Administration official, Thursday evening's so-called "bridging dinner" — meant to link the President's day-long meeting with top E.U. officials on Thursday with the following days' European Council, where government leaders of the 15 member states convened to consider the Union's own agenda — turned instead into what was for Bush a wearisome plunge into troubled waters. French President Chirac opened and concluded a "tour de table" of admonishment over the American position on global warming — a theme Bush had already discussed with E.U. officials over lunch. Bush's reaction at the end, according to one Administration official: "It was a long two hours."

Even if he had wanted to, Bush couldn't take the wait-and-see stance the Europeans did toward missile defense: Kyoto was a matter of either being in or being out. And Bush was definitely out, restating his well-rehearsed arguments that the accord wasn't "well-balanced" and that its targets didn't apply to developing countries like China and India, whose energy use is expected to soar as their economies expand. He added a few new things to the mix and said America was "ready to lead" on climate change — but with a "market-based" solution that allows economic growth. The Europeans were hardly swayed by those arguments, and by all accounts they pressed Bush hard on what they saw as the better way of the Kyoto Protocol — which they all pledged to ratify without U.S. involvement. The Americans will send a delegation to next month's international meeting in Bonn on implementing the accord, which German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer said would offer the Americans "not an occasion for blocking, but rather an opportunity for cooperation" on climate change. But the acute differences between the U.S. and Europe on how to tackle the problem of greenhouse gases won't be any slimmer then.

There was a touch of frost on the all-important trade front, too, since only a week earlier Bush had announced an investigation that could lead to protective restrictions on steel imports to the U.S. With that prospect in the offing, E.U. Trade Commissioner Pascal Lamy was not in the mood to embrace American ideas on working out ways to avoid turning to the World Trade Organization when the world's two biggest trading blocs have a dispute. Said Lamy of the move on steel: "It's bad news for everybody."

Perhaps the worse news, though, is the fact that diplomacy in this era of globalization and 24-hour news coverage isn't just "war by other means" as it was in Clausewitz's day; it is an apparently inevitable occasion for war on the streets. Nowadays, when global leaders meet to discuss even the notion of extending their prosperity to others, as they did in Gothenburg, they do so in the shadow of local violence. European and American leaders are on the same page when it comes to addressing the armed insurgency of ethnic Albanians in Macedonia, and they have endorsed a common approach to stopping the violence in the Middle East. But they haven't figured out what can be done to quell the anarchic forces that disdain their efforts; or indeed, on a different level, the unease, disengagement and mistrust of their citizens. Swedish Prime Minister Persson called the troublemakers of Gothenburg "criminals who just want to destroy." But he seems unconvinced that police alone will suffice. "If we fail to do something," he said, "they will have won." The very real differences between the United States and Europe pale against that uncertain prospect.