LONDON: “The European Union was not constructed to do peace and war.” So confessed Joschka Fischer, Germany’s Foreign Minister, last week.

Germans, especially, fear that the row over Iraq which has split Europe has left “the common foreign and security policy” of the EU in smithereens. But the truth, as Fischer said, is that there is nothing much to smash.

The Maastricht Treaty in 1992 ordained that a common policy must be created. Two years later the EU failed utterly to cope with the Bosnian disaster. Not much has improved since then. The day when Europe masters a sudden international crisis, or musters a Euro-army which frightens anyone, is very far away.

And yet this impotence is good news. Not just for crusty Eurosceptics, but also — paradoxically — for those who believe in a united Europe. What it means is that this spectacular European quarrel over George Bush’s war on Iraq and the role of the UN Security Council is not about anything the EU can collectively do. It is about what Britain or France can do — a very different matter. And the quarrel is not really about Iraq either. Instead, this is a row between nation-states about American power and whether the rest of the world should try to restrain it.

The rift in Europe is at first sight horrifying. The diplomatic bad language flying about has tabloid nastiness. France and Germany are supposed to be forming an anti-American “Axis” intended to dominate the enlarged EU. Russia’s support for France and Germany reminds excitable east Europeans of when they were squeezed by Hitler and Stalin.

On the other side, Britain counts mainly on Spain and Italy to support the war, if it comes, while another five EU member-states signed Blair’s famous “Letter of Eight” backing President Bush.

Enraged, President Chirac told the Ten that they had “missed a chance to keep their mouths shut” and even that France might punish them by blocking the enlargement process. It was an unforgivable remark and stupid, too. In the first place, his threat is empty: nothing can now stop the next wave of candidate states from joining and any move Chirac makes in that direction will lose him the support of Germany.

Second, the French President forgot that, for Poles and Czechs, America is the power which challenged and cowed the Soviet Union in the Cold War.

Clumsily, Britain is now trying to exploit Chirac’s blunder. Denis MacShane, Foreign Office Minister, has been dashing about eastern Europe. He accuses France and Germany of plotting a “second Yalta” to thrust those nations back behind a new curtain partitioning Europe into rich and poor. He urges a special EU ministerial meeting at which “we can unite to stop those forces which are seeking to divide Europe still further”.

But this tactic — Britain offering to lead a small nations” coalition against Germany and France — will only make that division worse. As a way of striking back against “poisonous” France, it may make the desperate Blair Cabinet feel better. In the long run, though, it is bound to fail.

If Bush is to act as global emperor, can the United Nations survive as a parliament which holds him to account? Now that would be a common European foreign policy worth having.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.