Global Policy Forum

By Adrian Hamilton

However the frantic last rounds of diplomacy work out – a second resolution or an American invasion of Iraq without it – there are going to be a terrible lot of pieces of international relations to pick up.

The UN itself is the most obvious victim, and the clearest target of Washington's rage should it fail to support US actions. But then take a look at Nato, completely marginalised in this conflict, or the European Union and the Arab League, which have revealed themselves to be not just irrelevant but entirely incapable of taking unified positions.

You can go too far in dismissing these international organisations. In some ways what has been most remarkable about the prelude to this war has not been the weakness of the rest of the world compared to the United States, but the fact that so many have stood up to it. Turkey is the most obvious example of a country that, contrary to all initial predictions, has eschewed the blandishments and threats of the Bush administration. But then so have Mexico and Syria, never mind France and Germany.

That is not to say that they won't fall into line eventually. There comes a point when fear of America's wrath must tip the balance even if bribes do not. You have to be pretty tough as a government, not to say suicidal, to mark yourself as America's enemy in these times. But the point that Washington has been so slow to grasp (if, indeed, it has grasped it) is how deeply unpopular this war is with the public, not just in Europe and the Middle East but through most of Asia and Latin America.

Foreign governments such as Mexico and Germany are talking more than national self-interest. They are reflecting the views of their own electorates. You can assume what you will from the support given to the US by Spain, Italy and Bulgaria, but if you take the indicators that matter in democratic societies, the opinion polls, there is a consistent majority of two-thirds and more throughout Europe and most of the rest of the world against this war.

In so far as that majority is expressing a resistance to the unilateral exercise of American power, this must have its effect on the way that multilateral organisations, especially the regional associations such as the Arab League and the European Union, develop over the coming years.

In the short term, of course, it bodes no good at all for international institutions such as the UN. The Bush administration has said – and it means it – that failure to support America will result in the marginalisation of the United Nations in US eyes. But then it has to be asked whether the Security Council structure, with its inner council of nuclear-power permanent members and rotating countries without the power of veto, makes much sense in the post-Cold War world. If it doesn't support America, it is castigated as irrelevant. If it does, then it is treated by Washington as little more than a rubber stamp for its policies.

The UN will survive because there is no global alternative for a mass of specific problems from refugees to policies on water sharing, and because it is useful as a means of legitimising actions and picking up the pieces after the event. Post-war reconstruction is still more easily effected through the UN than aside from it. But for the time being there is neither the consensus nor the will of Kofi Annan or its own officials to make it a means of imposing world order.

Even that cannot be said for Nato. Turkey's objections to the Iraq invasion are a terrible blow to the Washington-Ankara alliance that has always lain at its centre. And if that doesn't kill it off, then Donald Rumsfeld's distinction of "old Europe" and "new Europe" will certainly do so. As a military alliance, Nato lost its raison d'íªtre once the Berlin Wall fell. Yet as a political union to lock in the newly liberated countries of the former Soviet Union, it cannot work if the new are set against the old.

Not that the EU or any other organisation is in a position to replace it. How do you get Britain back together with France now that Blair has set himself so firmly on the Americans' side and France has so energetically sought to set itself up as leader of Europe in conjunction with Germany and alliance with Moscow? Europe's voters may be of one accord on Iraq, but their leaders are irreparably split over it. There is no common European defence force; still less is there a common European foreign policy, nor is there likely to be one in the foreseeable future.

But then you can say of Europe, as you can of the Arab League or the African Union or Asean, where else can it go unless it is eventually forward? America is the only hyperpower, but it is not a power, still less under President Bush, that wishes to run the world so much as to bestride it. An awful lot of high-flown academic theory has been woven round the differences between Europe and America. The rather more obvious point has been missed. Europe takes a different view of this crisis from Washington because most of Europe lives next to the Islamic world, just as most African and Asian nations do. The US does not.

The Iraqi crisis has posed, with a terrible clarity, the problem of power in the world. But in putting the United States so obviously at odds with most of the rest of the globe, it may yet bring its own counter-revolution.

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