November 26, 2003	Wednesday	Shawwal 1, 1424

BERLIN, Nov 25: The United States, for decades after World War Two an ardent supporter of European integration, increasingly sees closer unity on the continent as a threat, Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt said on Tuesday.

Mr Verhofstadt wrote in a column in Germany’s Handelsblatt business daily that the United States saw the euro as a competitor to the dollar and European Union moves for more defence cooperation as a threat to Us global dominance.

He said the EU, taking in 10 new members next year, wanted a bigger voice on the world stage and to be treated as an equal partner, not a competitor, by the United States.

“The international emancipation of the EU is as unavoidable as it is desirable,” Mr Verhofstadt wrote. The Belgian premier was due to deliver a speech in Berlin on the EU later on Tuesday.

“I regret that the United States now all too often sees integration as orientated against its own interests,” he said.

“This distrust is a break with Us policy in the first four decades of European integration,” he said. “Up until the start of the 1990s, the United States encouraged Europe to integrate.”

“Washington was convinced that also served their own interests — and rightly so as we share the same values.”

The United States has repeatedly attacked plans announced in April by France, Germany, Belgium and Luxembourg — all fierce critics of the Us-led invasion of Iraq — to set up an EU military planning headquarters, independent of NATO.

“This distrust is unfounded. For us, European defence is no strategic step against the United States or NATO,” Mr Verhofstadt said, adding that Washington had for 20 years demanded that Europe did more for its own security.

“It opens the way to a new transatlantic relationship: equal partners, who defend the same values,” he said.

Mr Verhofstadt called on EU leaders to adopt at a summit in mid-December a draft constitution drawn up by a Convention headed by former French President Valery Giscard d’Estaing or risk creating a “two-speed” Europe, with those favouring closer integration moving ahead without more reserved nations.

Belgium, along with France and Germany, want the draft drawn up by the Convention adopted with as few changes as possible, but others, particularly Spain and Poland, want substantive changes to voting rules they see as reducing their influence.

In an interview with Germany’s Sueddeutsche Zeitung daily, Mr Verhofstadt said if some EU members continued to push for changes, then so would countries who favoured more integration.

“We cannot be forced to accept the compromise in the Convention and then allow further changes to our detriment. That would force us to give ground twice,” he said.—Reuters