Washington Post
July 29, 2008
Way back in 1991, when an otherwise forgettable foreign minister of Luxembourg infamously pronounced that sentence, it seemed to portend great things. “This is the hour of Europe”: That meant that in the post-Cold War world, Europeans, not Americans, would resolve the conflicts that were about to become the Bosnian war, and maybe a lot of other things, too. Yet he was wrong. Those Balkan conflicts were eventually “resolved,” up to a point, not by Europe but by the United States and NATO. European influence in Washington dwindled — and then dwindled further during the Bush administration, which mostly treated the very idea of “Europe” as a kind of pointless distraction. more