The Federalists go to Brussels.

• Author: Patten, Christopher

Throughout the recent Bush presidency, Europeans wrung their hands, criticized his administrations unilateralism (a little modified in his second term) and told the world how much they would do if only there was a multilateralist in the White House. Oh, for the chance to be America's international chum.

So now we have in the White House the president of Europe's dreams; the president we all yearned to vote for; a president who is awesomely talented and expresses with intelligent eloquence the sentiments about the world that Europeans had come to think were our own monopoly. Visiting Europe, the president is mobbed not only by the public but by their elected leaders, whose bedraggled or dour images could do with being touched by a little of his capacious quantity of tinsel.

But foreign policy is about more than photo opportunities. Obama should of course be the agent of change in the U.S.-EU relationship. That is at least how Europeans talked about him. Yet, as his administration deals with some of the predicaments of intelligent global engagement, what response can President Obama expect from his European admirers?

Expectations, of course, must be grounded in the history and realities of the recent European experience--what Europe is and what it is not; what Europe has achieved and what it has not. The Continent has been shaped by the institutions and alliances established after the Second World War.

Postwar planning began in the State Department even while American, British and Russian forces were still fighting in Asia and Europe. American officials were prescient enough to recognize even then that their own country would be required to do the heavy lifting in peacetime. But they also assumed that they would need assistance, and that once they had helped Western Europe off its knees, they could expect its countries to share the burden of defending and advancing the cause of pluralist democracy and open markets.

The political and economic integration that led from the Coal and Steel Community to the European Union provided that infrastructure for the rebuilding and reshaping of the Continent. And in a sense, the EU was the price that its member states willingly paid for the security guarantees given by the United States through NATO. France and Germany were lashed together at the heart of the enterprise. Young Americans would not be sacrificed again on the battlefields that had resulted from the extremes of European nationalism.

The European Union is still, in a way, a work in progress, adjusting and adapting to a world where it makes sense for medium-size countries to pool some of their sovereignty in order to transform it. Together, these countries are more capable of dealing with common problems than they would be on their own--a point lost on many in Britain who still dream of a global role that was illusory even when Prime Ministers Winston Churchill and Anthony Eden thought...