Beyond the brightly crackling hearth here at Mead manor, the world press is still sorting out what happened at Copenhagen yesterday. The UK Guardian has an unequivocal take: “Copenhagen Ends in Failure!” screams the headline. The New York Times is more cautious, noting that a deal was reached but that its provisions are less stringent than hoped and that its outlook seemed “murky.” The Brazilian newspaper O Globo (Portuguese language, free on-line registration required) was similarly ambiguous, noting that an agreement had been reached but that some poor countries opposed it.
Beijing’s government-identified People’s Daily News led on-line with a more parochial story, highlighting Premier Wen Jiabao’s defense of China’s record on Copenhagen. (The full text of this ever-glorious and shining oration is available for those who wish to consult it.) A little lower down it got to the summit itself, noting that Copenhagen had ended in an agreement. The Turks simply reported that UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon had proclaimed that “We have a deal.”
Back in Old Europe, Spiegel was in a black mood: “What a disaster,” the lead of its on-line English language editorial read. “The climate summit in Copenhagen has failed because of the hardball politicking of the United States, China and several other countries — and because people just can’t seem to fathom how catastrophic climate change will be. They probably won’t have long to wait before things become a bit clearer.” The anti-American ranting starts a few graphs down; the more Speigel looks at Obama, the more it thinks Bush.
The editorial in Le Monde, the left-of-center French daily newspaper that plays a role in French life close to that of the New York Times here, offered as usual some of the smartest commentary anywhere on what Copenhagen means. Europe, wrote Le Monde, “[A] été marginalisée face à une coalition qui témoigne de la répartition du pouvoir politique dans le monde d’aujourd’hui: les Etats-Unis, la Chine, l’Inde, le Brésil et l’Afrique du Sud.” For those of you whose memories of high school French if any are even weaker and more evanescent than mine, this means that Europe was marginalized by a coalition that demonstrates how political power is being redistributed in the contemporary world: the U.S., China, India, Brazil and South Africa.
That is a list of the five countries in the room when the final declaration of Copenhagen was hammered out; Europe wasn’t in the room.
Forget the environment for a bit; the Accord of Copenhagen is a catastrophe for European policy. On an issue that Europe has pushed for many years, one that in many ways encapsulates Europe’s distinctive view of where the world should be heading, Europe was irrelevant when the deal came to be made.
This completes a revolution in world affairs. One hundred years ago the great European powers were the only people in the room when most questions were decided. (The Americans and the Japanese were sometimes consulted; otherwise — nothing.) Now decisive steps are taken for good or bad, and Europe isn’t there.
Europe’s decline is real, but not quite as bad as it looks this morning. The European Union has a GDP larger than that of the United States; it has two of the world’s largest nuclear arsenals and two of the handful of countries who can project power outside their own immediate neighborhood; it has enormous cultural power; it has two of the five veto-wielding seats on the Security Council; it is heavily represented in votes and official positions at major world institutions like the IMF and the World Bank; the hope of joining it has inspired major reforms and policy changes in many of the countries on its frontiers. Its currency, the euro, is gaining respect around the world and is increasingly seen by central banks as a good place to park assets and diversify their dollar holdings.
That a bloc with this many assets was reduced to such a public and humiliating display of impotence on what it hoped would be a signature issue for Europe’s world role is more an indictment of European diplomacy and policy than a revelation of Europe’s essential irrelevance. By staking out an extreme position on climate change (however justified by the science that position may be), Europe essentially handed the diplomatic initiative to the United States as a country that could bridge the gap between Europe’s position and the positions of other economies and power centers around the world.
But that wasn’t all. The Copenhagen conference would have been an ideal moment for the two shiny brand new European institutions (the presidency and the foreign affairs coordinator) to take a bow on the world stage. Europe’s governments didn’t want that to happen. First they named low wattage non-entities to these posts lest the incumbents overshadow existing political leaders; then the ambitions and rivalries among the various heads of government within the EU further weakened Europe’s hand. The astonishingly ineffective and quixotic British prime minister George Brown was the worst offender; staring into a potentially disastrous election, he simply could not stay away from the spotlights.
After the portentous German novelist Günter Grass once warned that the “dark night of fascism was falling on America,” the American novelist Tom Wolfe riposted “Why is it that ‘the dark night of fascism’ is always falling on America — and always landing on Europe?” Change ‘fascism’ to ‘decline’ and you sum up a lot of the fashionable power-chat we have been hearing lately. The world has seen almost a decade now of non-stop, obsessive (and often gleeful and gloating) discussion of inexorable American decline. But the first take-away from the Copenhagen Kerfluffle has to be this: despite important underlying strengths that make it the envy of much of the world, Europe’s world role is in precipitous and even accelerating decline.
America is always in decline; Europe always falls. That appears to be Lesson One from the messy, inconclusive yet instructive Cluster of Copenhagen.