THE IHT EXPLORES CRACKS IN EUROPEAN UNITY:

President Jacques Chirac’s warning to the new Europeans of EU and NATO enlargement that they cannot side too much with America and fit his definition of membership in the family of Europe has exposed, with an outburst of pure rage, a profound, long-term contradiction that could tear the EU apart. . . .

The violence of the remarks acknowledged openly for the first time one of the basic reasons that Iraq has become such an existential issue for France, and in its manner, Germany.

Confronting the United States, and marking out a line where European-Atlantic coalescence must stop, involves an attempt to re-establish their leadership in a Europe whose institutional future points toward the French and Germans being submerged by a new wave of entrants refusing to define Europe’s raison d’être in a foreign and security policy automatically opposed to the United States. . . .

Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder referred, a trace obliquely, last week to the conflict, saying that the Iraq question really meant protecting “European sovereignty,” and that the actions taken now would determine the development of Europe over the next 10 to 15 years. But with its shared borders and history of savaging Eastern Europe, the Germans are in no position to use the menacing and near-condescending language that came from the French president.

Basically, Chirac told the candidates: You must think as France and Germany do. With near total support for his positions in France, Chirac, thought-police style, set up as an obligation for the emerging half of the continent the unanimity at home that Liberation, the left-wing newspaper said over the weekend, “has something suffocating about it.”

Indeed. Open up that thing and let in some air.

UPDATE: Now Chirac is offering “The Freedom to be Silent.”