CENTRE FOR EUROPEAN REFORM
background brief
‘Old’ and ‘New’ Europeans united: public attitudes towards the Iraq war and US foreign policy By John Springford At the end of January 2003, a journalist asked US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld why Europe was not supporting US policy on Iraq. Rumsfeld’s defiant reply sent shockwaves across the Atlantic: “You’re thinking of Europe as Germany and France. I don’t. I think that’s old Europe. If you look at the entire NATO Europe today, the centre of gravity is shifting to the east and there are a lot of new members. The vast numbers of other countries in Europe, they’re not with France and Germany, they’re with 1 Foreign press the United States.”1 corps meeting, Washington,
Rumsfeld implied that Europe could be divided into two parts: an ‘Old Europe’ of core EU member January 22nd states which are anti-American and seek to create a European foreign policy that could challenge the 2003. US; and a ‘New Europe’ of countries peripheral to the EU which have strong links to the US and NATO. The governments of 18 European countries seemed to confirm this division the following week by publishing two letters of support for the enforcement of UN Security Council Resolution 1441. Is there a clear and lasting division between new and old Europe at the level of public opinion? This paper looks at public opinion polls conducted in the EU-15 countries and ten new members that will join the EU in 2004, to see which countries’ populations supported the Iraq war before and after it took place. The paper also assesses European attitudes towards the US more generally. Can European citizens be split into two camps in the same way that their governments were in 2003? If the EU is to develop a credible common foreign policy, it is worth finding out.
Before the war Opinion polls offer only a partial guide to public opinion. Slightly different questions can produce wildly different answers. The two polls shown below bear this out: in the Pew Global Attitudes survey, the number of respondents answering that ‘the US should not invade Iraq’ was far lower than in Gallup International’s poll.
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