Eamonn Fitzgerald's Rainy Day

Rainy Day visitors will need no reminding of where we stand on the call by J?Habermas and Jacques Derrida on 31 May to form a "core Europe" — the founding members of the EU plus Spain — to act as a counterweight to the USA. "Profoundly Atlanticist!" is the Rainy Day motto, which means an outright rejection of the Habermas-Derrida notion. In today's S?sche Zeitung, Paul Kennedy, Director of the International Security Studies at Yale University, adds his considerable weight to the debate and rebuffs the Habermas-Derrida proposal in no uncertain terms.

Titled "Taten statt Worte" ("Deeds instead of words"), Kennedy says that the Habermas-Derrida "core-Europe" initiative is condemned to failure because neither Great Britain nor Spain will play ball, ditto possibly Italy and the Netherlands, and certainly the majority of the middle- and East European states. The latter, incidentally, didn't even earn as much as a mention in the Habermas-Derrida paper of 31 May. So much for their vision of Europe.

To counter those visions that have no basis in reality, Kennedy makes six suggestions for the establishment of a stronger Europe that would have a cohesive identity and would then enjoy respect on the world stage. Here's a summary of the six;

1. Europe must improve its military capacity. That means abolishing conscription and spending more money on defence.

2. Europe must help drive the needed reform of the UN. This might mean bringing India, Brazil and South Africa into the Security Council and accepting that with Britain and France, Europe is over-represented in the body.

3. Europe must end its enormous financial aid to its farmers. The recent agreement between France and Germany to maintain the high level of EU agricultural subsidies is nothing short of scandalous because it exacerbates poverty and despair in the Third World.

4. Europe must increase its involvement in developing countries if it wants to be a role model for the rest of the world.

5. Europe must engage more with Africa, not only because of the colonial legacy, but because of its proximity to the continent. In the absence of serious European influence in Asia, Latin American and the Indian subcontinent, Africa is where Europe can play a key role.

6. Europe must get its economy moving again, and long term. Without a dynamic economy, the idea of being a "counterweight" is obsolete.

Along with sharp practical suggestions, Kennedy provides analysis that's equally unsparing:

"The fact is that the strategies of Derrida-Habermas and Chirac-Schr? are not very promising. The most dogged resistance to reform is not in the so-called "new Europe" or in the pro-American countries such as Great Britain, Spain and Poland but in the "core Europe" countries. They are the ones that cling to farm subsidies. They are the ones with the strongest structural and ideological reservations to the reforms that would make their economies competitive in a globalized world."

Kennedy concludes by saying that without serious changes that bore deep into daily life and practice, the Habermas-Derrida document that began this debate is, what should one say? Simply academic.