Test Time For Europe's Fragile Unity

The Romans, Napoleon and Hitler tried brute force to create a durable European superstate. It took a frail French businessman armed only with political theory and a deep understanding of economic self-interest to succeed where the dictators failed.

The Frenchman was Jean Monnet, and his creation -- now called the European Union -- celebrates its 50th anniversary today. So lift a glass of cheer but keep your other hand on your wallet. As usual, Europeans have to celebrate the unlikely unity they have achieved by worrying about how it can be preserved.

It is prudent to keep the partying short and Monnet's prescriptions for unity in mind. The Kremlin's recent return to dealing with Europe through the politics of intimidation creates dangerous strains within the European Union and across the Atlantic. Russian President Vladimir Putin seems to welcome, if not seek, that result.

The strains within Europe over responding to the new Russian challenges are likely to worsen in the coming weeks; Britain is expected to request international arrest warrants for at least one Russian suspected of having poisoned Alexander Litvinenko with polonium-210 in London in November. Putin's government has consistently indicated that it will refuse to extradite the former KGB officer, Dmitry Kovtun, or anyone else involved in the notorious case.

U.S. officials have been told that Britain fully expects a Russian rejection -- leaving Prime Minister Tony Blair to face a nightmarish decision: Does he seek broad E.U. support for pressure on Russia to cooperate, or does he step back from a serious international crime committed on British soil?

Chances seem slim for a united European response to Putin's energy-rich Russia. This at least is the conclusion that emerges from a barely visible but intense diplomatic hubbub among Western governments over recent attacks by Putin and, more menacing, by his generals on U.S. plans to station a modest number of missile interceptors in Poland and the Czech Republic.

The Russian declarations teed up Germany's leftist Social Democrats to resume electioneering by questioning American motives at every turn. Party leaders rushed to echo Russian complaints about a lack of consultation -- despite a clear record of such consultations having been held. Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier warned in the Bundestag last week that the United States would be wrong to preemptively get countries to agree to the missile bases and suggested that it was Washington, not Moscow, that might be tempted to drive wedges between Europe and America.

Publicly, the Bush administration has worked to muffle the simmering missile controversy. When Putin blasted the planned deployments in Munich last month, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who was in the audience, quickly consulted with the White House and the State Department, then followed State's suggestion to publicly turn the other cheek. U.S. diplomats delivered stern lectures to Russian envoys in private.

But Washington has had to abandon hopes of handling the anti-missile deployments -- which the United States says are aimed at intercepting Iranian missiles -- as a bilateral matter between Washington and the two former Soviet satellites. To head off efforts to get the missile question debated by the European Union, the Bush administration has agreed to full discussion of the deployment at NATO and then in the NATO-Russia Council.

By Cold War standards, this deployment spat is small change. But it is a weather vane of how unresolved nationalistic conflicts still pit Russia against lands it once ruled.

This is where Jean Monnet comes back into the picture. Originally a merchant and a financier, Monnet also became an international civil servant devoted to keeping France and Germany from ever repeating the carnage of two world wars. Peace could be guaranteed only through a federation of European states "that would make them into a common economic unit," he wrote in 1943.

At war's end, French and German steel and coal production were placed under a European High Authority, which in time evolved into the Common Market, then the European Community and finally into the present 27-nation union.

The union has not done away with nationalism or economic protectionism -- see the current French presidential race for details. But the European Union has created significant limitations on how nationalism is expressed and manipulated, partly by making its costs so high and so visible. It has greatly reduced political and monetary instability in member states and is a positive force on its turbulent smaller neighbors.

Putin's Russia uses its status as an energy superpower to reanimate old nationalistic quarrels and to bully Europe. It would be smarter to find grounds for equitable joint projects with the West -- including missile defense -- and to spread the common prosperity that has kept Europe at peace for half a century. How better to honor Monnet and the other statesmen who had the vision to create concert out of conflict?

jimhoagland@washpost.com