to lose any sleep over the torture of the living. More striking is the role of the neutrals. Under Ahern, Ireland furnished Shannon to the CIA for so many westbound flights that locals dubbed it Guantánamo Express. Social-Democratic Sweden, under its portly boss Göran Persson, now a corporate lobbyist, handed over two Egyptians seeking asylum to the CIA, who took them straight to torturers in Cairo. Under Berlusconi, Italy helped a large CIA team to kidnap another Egyptian in Milan, who was flown from the US airbase in Aviano, via Ramstein in Germany, for the same treatment in Cairo. Under Prodi, a government of Catholics and ex-Communists has sought to frustrate the judicial investigation of the kidnapping, while presiding over the expansion of Aviano. Switzerland proffered the overflight that took the victim to Ramstein, and protected the head of the CIA gang that seized him from arrest by the Italian judicial authorities. He now basks in Florida.
Further east, Poland did not transmit captives to their fate in the Middle East. It incarcerated them for treatment on the spot, in torture-chambers constructed for ‘high value detainees’ by the CIA at the Stare Kiejkuty intelligence base, Europe’s own Bagram—facilities unknown in the time of Jaruzselski’s martial law. In Romania, a military base north of Constanza performed the same services, under the superintendence of the country’s current president, the staunchly pro-Western Traian Băsescu. Over in Bosnia, six Algerians were illegally seized at American behest, and flown from Tuzla—beatings in the aircraft en route—to the US base at Incirlik in Turkey, and thence to Guantánamo, where they still crouch in their cages. Down in Macedonia, scene of Blair’s moving encounters with refugees from Kosovo, there was a combination of the two procedures. A German of Lebanese descent was kidnapped at the border; held, interrogated and beaten by the CIA in the country; then drugged and shipped to Kabul for more extended treatment. When it eventually became clear, after he went on hunger-strike, that his identity had been mistaken, he was flown blindfolded to a NATO-upgraded air-base in Albania, and deposited back in Germany.
There the Red-Green government had been well aware of what happened to him, one of its agents interrogating him in his oubliette in Kabul—Otto Schily, the Green minister of interior, was in the Afghan capital at the time—and accompanying his flight back to Albania. But it was no more concerned with his fate than with that of another of its residents, a Turk born in Germany, seized by the CIA in Pakistan and dispatched to the gulag in Guantánamo, where he too was interrogated by German agents. Both operations were under the control of today’s Social-Democratic foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, then in charge of the secret services, who not only covered for the torturing of the victim in Cuba, but even declined an American offer to release him. In a letter to the captive’s mother, Joschka Fischer, Green foreign minister at the time, explained that the government could do nothing for him. In ‘such a good land’, as a leading admirer has recently described it,17 Fischer and Steinmeier remain the most popular of politicians. The new interior minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, is more robust, publicly calling for assassination rather than rendition in dealing with deadly enemies of the state, in the Israeli manner.
Such is the record set out in Marty’s two detailed reports to the Council of Europe (nothing to do with the EU), each an exemplary document of meticulous detective work and moral passion. If this Swiss prosecutor from Ticino were representative of the continent, rather than a voice crying in the wilderness, there would be reason to be proud of it. He ends his second report by expressing the hope that his work will bring home ‘the legal and moral quagmire into which we have collectively sunk as a result of the US-led “war on terror”. Almost six years in, we seem no closer to pulling ourselves out of this quagmire’.18 Indeed. Not a single European government has conceded any guilt, while all continue imperturbably holding forth on human rights. We are in the world of Ibsen—Consul Bernick, Judge Brack and their like—updated for postmoderns: pillars of society, pimping for torture.
What has been delivered in these practices are not just the hooded or chained bodies, but the deliverers themselves: Europe surrendered to the United States. This rendition is the most taboo of all to mention. A rough approximation to it can be found in what remains in many ways the best account of the relationship between the two, Robert Kagan’s Paradise and Power, whose benignly contemptuous imagery of Mars and Venus—the Old World, relieved of military duties by the New, cultivating the arts and pleasures of a borrowed peace—has predictably riled Europeans. But even Kagan grants them too much, as if they really lived according to the precepts of Kant, while Americans were obliged to act on the truths of Hobbes. If a philosophical reference were wanted, more appropriate would have been La Boétie, whose Discours de la servitude volontaire could furnish a motto for the Union. But these are arcana. The one contemporary text to have captured the full flavour of the transatlantic relationship is, perhaps inevitably, a satire, Régis Debray’s plea for a United States of the West that would absorb Europe completely into the American imperium.19
Did it have to come to this? The paradox is that when Europe was less united, it was in many ways more independent. The leaders who ruled in the early stages of integration had all been formed in a world before the global hegemony of the United States, when the major European states were themselves imperial powers, whose foreign policies were self-determined. These were people who had lived through the disasters of the Second World War, but were not crushed by them. This was true not just of De Gaulle, but of figures like Adenauer and Mollet, of Eden and Heath, all of whom were quite prepared to ignore or defy America if their ambitions demanded it. Monnet, who did not accept their national assumptions and never clashed with the US, still shared their sense of a future in which Europeans could settle their own affairs, in another fashion. Down into the seventies, something of this spirit lived on even in Giscard and Schmidt, as Carter discovered. But with the neo-liberal turn of the eighties, and the arrival in power in the nineties of a post-war generation, it faded. The new economic doctrines cast doubt on the state as a political agent, and the new leaders had never known anything except the Pax Americana. The traditional springs of autonomy were gone.
By this time, on the other hand, the Community had doubled in size, acquired an international currency, and boasted a GDP exceeding that of the United States itself. Statistically, the conditions for an independent Europe existed as never before. But politically, they had been reversed. With the decay of federalism and the deflation of inter-governmentalism, the Union had weakened national, without creating a supranational, sovereignty, leaving rulers adrift in an ill-defined limbo between the two. With the eclipse of significant distinctions between Left and Right, other motives of an earlier independence have also waned. In the syrup of la pensée unique, little separates the market-friendly wisdom of one side of the Atlantic from the other, though as befits the derivative, the recipe is blander still in Europe than America, where political differences are less extinct. In such conditions, an enthusiast can find no higher praise for the Union than to compare it to ‘one of the most successful companies in global history’. Which firm confers this honour on Brussels? Why, the one in your wallet. ‘The EU is already closer to Visa than it is to a state’,20 declares New Labour’s infant prodigy. Europe exalted to the rank of a credit-card.
Transcendence of the nation-state, Marx believed, would be a task not for capital but for labour. A century later, as the Cold War set in, Kojève held that whichever camp accomplished it would emerge the victor from the conflict. The foundation of the European Community settled the issue for him. The West would win, and its triumph would bring history, understood as the realization of human freedom, to an end. Kojève’s prediction was accurate. His extrapolation, and its irony, remain in the balance. They have certainly not been disproved: he would have smiled at the image of a chit of plastic. The emergence of the Union can be regarded as the last great world-historical achievement of the bourgeoisie, proof that its creative powers were not exhausted by the fratricide of two world wars; and what has happened to it as a strange declension from what was hoped from it. Yet the long-run outcome of integration remains unforeseeable to all parties. Even without shocks, many a zig-zag has marked its path. With them, who knows what further mutations might occur.
1. Postwar, London 2005, p. 799.
2. Mark Leonard, Why Europe Will Run the 21st Century, London 2005, pp. 7, 85.
3. Why Europe Will Run the Twenty-First Century, p. 4.
4.