The member-states of the EU have inherited from their past a set of widely divergent attitudes to problems in various parts of the world, writes Garret FitzGerald
It was never going to be easy for a Community comprising former colonial powers like Britain and France, former colonies like Ireland, the like-minded states of Scandinavia, the southern European countries with their Mediterranean orientation and concern about Islamic fundamentalism and Greece with its past history of conflict with Turkey to reach agreement on a range of problems.
But from the early 1970s the European Community has aspired to adopt common positions on certain issues on which a convergence of views has seemed possible.
Thus, in the mid-1980s the Community of 10 member-states adopted a common position opposing militarisation of Central America which was, at least by implication, critical of US policy in that area.
And, although in the 1960s and 1970s a majority of EC states had failed, like the US, to face up to the right of Palestinians to have their own state, these differences among EU members in relation to the Palestinian problem were resolved at Venice in 1980.
More recently, Europe has helped to secure US acceptance of the "road map to a settlement of the Palestine problem now espoused by the Quartet (i.e. the UN, Europe, the United States and Russia).
At least on the surface, European and US positions on this issue appear to have come somewhat closer, although the real test of the solidarity of this joint approach will come only when the Quartet starts to negotiate with Israel on this road map.
For many years the European Community has also been divided on the issue of European defence. Britain and other northern states have opposed any separate European defence initiative, but France and some southern countries, fearing that at some point the US might withdraw from Europe, have wanted to prepare for such an eventuality by taking steps in the direction of European defence.
Quite recently, however, the German Socialist government has changed its country's stance on this issue, moving towards the French position, while Spain and Italy have gone the other way, joining Britain on the pro-US side of the line.
There can be no doubt about the fact that the Iraq war has deeply divided the European Union and has revived traditional hostility between Britain and France.
Of course, behind this latter rift lies a deep historical antipathy, dating back to the conquest of Britain by the Norman French in 1066; the Hundred Years War of the 14th and 15th centuries; Louis XIV and Napoleon; colonial rivalry in the 19th century; and finally the de Gaulle-Churchill relationship in the second World War.
However, despite the Franco-British divide, and the wider split in Europe occasioned by the Iraq war, it would be a mistake to believe that the basic unity of the EU is threatened.
In a crisis like that over Iraq Britain is drawn at once to support its US ally but, as one British commentator has recently remarked, there is an invisible elastic which, while occasionally extending to permit pro-American excursions of this kind, eventually pulls Britain back again into the European orbit.
Tony Blair has clearly been most uncomfortable about the way the Iraq crisis worked out. Obviously he had hoped to restrain the US sufficiently within the system to persuade the French and Germans and Russians to give UN authority for an invasion of Iraq.
He is, of course, furious with France for having blocked this move, but I doubt if he was too pleased with the US when it blocked the compromise Chilean Resolution for a three-week delay, which I have reason to believe Blair had supported.
There are already signs that Britain, and its Italian and Spanish supporters on the Iraq issue, are concerned to recover some of the common ground with other EU states that they temporarily abandoned.
There is evidence of this in the continued close co-operation of Britain and France within the Brussels Convention where, of course, they have a common objective: the transfer of some of the European Commission's present power to the European Council of Heads of Government.
As for the Europe-US relationship, the fact is that the US assertion of global power, and its downgrading of the UN, are seen by most Europeans as a very unwelcome development. However, there are two schools of thought about how to handle it. Britain, together with Spain and Italy and some other countries, has seen the best way forward as co-operation with the US in an effort to moderate its actions.
But others believe that this strategy simply will not work, at least with the present administration in Washington, and these countries feel strengthened in this belief by recent events.
They believe that some European counterbalancing force needs to be established, although it is hard to see how such a force could be effective, given the disproportionate strength of the United States.
But, whatever course of action they envisage, all EU states now share a deep concern at the way the US has handled itself in recent times.
It would be a mistake for the US to believe that Europeans and their governments are happy with the manner of their victory in Iraq, or indeed with the way the US has been handling the early stages of the post-war period.
Although no country is going to say so publicly, the United States has won few friends by its ham-fisted diplomacy throughout this recent episode. And even those Europeans who did not support France's stance on the Iraq issue dislike the way Americans have demonised the French.
Fear of offending the surviving superpower is now the dominant feature of the aftermath of the Iraq war. This is not a healthy state of affairs. In the past the United States has succeeded in achieving many of its objectives because of a combination of European gratitude for past US support and an unwillingness to offend a friend.
But unless the United States manages to pull back from its present domineering stance it will risk eventually finding itself with few real friends in Europe, even among countries previously well disposed to it.