ABSTRACT
The US and coalition attack on Iraq came at a pivotal moment for the European Union. Already within sight of enlargement to twenty-five members, on 1 May 2004, it suffered the indignity of being divided into ‘old’ and ‘new Europe’ by the US Secretary of Defense. About to undertake the first missions of the longplanned European Security and Defence Policy it found the two existing Member States possessing significant military capability engaged in vitriolic public exchanges over Iraq. Having for years attempted to concert the foreign policies of Member States at the United Nations it was confronted with a situation where Britain and Spain on the one hand and France and Germany on the other squared up to each other at the Security Council. As millions of its citizens took to the streets in anti-war demonstrations, on a scale without precedent in the post-1945 period, it found itself incapable of responding either through an emergency meeting of the European Council or through the European Parliament. The experience has given rise to powerful and apparently contradictory reactions. On the one hand critics, including leading officials of the EU’s Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP), have been moved to near despair by the division and impotence displayed by the EU during the early months of 2003. On the other, the brutal demonstration of US hegemony in the invasion of Iraq has led commentators to construct the EU as some form of counterbalancing or alternative force in world politics-a force wedded to a multilateral approach and peaceful forms of democracy promotion.
