His career as Spain's foreign minister, NATO's secretary-general and now the European Union's spokesman on foreign and defense policy has taken Javier Solana to grand ceremonial banquets and glittering restaurants to dine with the good and the great of the world.
Solana's sophistication is matched only by his elegant seriousness and vast credibility. So it was not without meaning that this eminent statesman's eyes lit up as he settled into a corner table at a Washington cafe the other day and murmured, "I will have a cheeseburger."
Like most Europeans these days, Solana is careful about where and when he eats beef. He quickly reassured me that Europe's leaders are moving aggressively to contain the multiple disease scares that are shaking the Continent's agricultural and gastronomic industries. No cause for panic, he emphasized.
Solana was in town to brief the Bush administration on Europe's new rapid reaction force and to discuss missile defense and other heavyweight topics. But our excursion into the changing food habits of Europeans touched on what is felt by many Europeans as a more urgent international threat than invading armies.
Beef sales have plunged 40 percent in France and other countries since it became clear that Britain's mad cow disease had spread to humans and then to the Continent. Last week, a new round of slaughtering of animals was touched off across the United Kingdom by an outbreak of a new Asian strain of hoof-and-mouth disease.
I grant Solana's point: Europe's food shoppers and consumers are hardly an endangered species. The crossover into humans of mad cow disease is still statistically rare, with fewer than 100 confirmed cases. By midweek Britain's 25 million livestock included only two dozen or so cases of hoof-and-mouth disease, and Prime Minister Tony Blair's government responded with draconian measures.
But the farmers who are the heart of traditional Europe and the large agribusiness corporations that are central to modern Europe's economy and politics suddenly face an uncertain and bleak future. Incomes, cultural habits and political fortunes on both sides of the Atlantic will change if food panic continues to mount.
The building of agroindustrial empires that centralize food production, buying, processing and distribution has overwhelmed the indirect and direct protections that the local production and consumption of nourishment once offered nations.
A small example: Pigs from the Northumberland farm thought to be the point of origin of the British hoof-and-mouth outbreak were trucked 300 miles to be slaughtered in Essex. Why? Because, press reports indicate, between 1987 and 2000, two-thirds of Britain's slaughterhouses were closed down largely for reasons of economic efficiency, i.e., consolidation.
This type of anecdote will bring grimmer views about the impact of "globalization" and market expansion to Europeans. The new political battlegrounds of Europe will be the slaughterhouse and the supermarket. Food safety, not tax cuts and missile defenses, will make and break political careers there.
Agricultural anxiety will also reduce or even close some markets to the enormously lucrative exports of American farmers.
France's President Jacques Chirac and Prime Minister Lionel Jospin recently opened their duel for next year's presidential election with important and thoughtful speeches on food safety. In his Feb. 8 speech in Lyon, Chirac urged all nations to make the ethics and safety of biotechnology and agriculture a topic for diplomacy and treaties.
Britain is the epicenter of the tremors sent out by species-jumping contagion, genetically modified crops and biological cloning. Those tremors suddenly bring a (modest) element of uncertainty into the cakewalk that Blair's New Labor Party expects to have in the May 3 national election that the prime minister is about to call.
The hoof-and-mouth outbreak means that the dispirited and disorganized Conservative Party no longer gets all the blame for agricultural distress in Britain. And as elsewhere in Europe, those in power are seen as out of touch or even at fault for these seemingly mysterious eruptions.
In London on Tuesday the House of Commons debated and approved a ban on fox hunting while the threat of hoof-and-mouth disease was skipped over. Simon Hoggert of The Guardian compared the scene with Poe's "The Masque of the Red Death" "The countryside is gripped by a terrible plague. Inside the castle a magnificent ball continues, the aristocrats feasting ... oblivious to the mayhem which is about to bring their doom upon them." Hoggert admits to taking journalistic license with that imagery. But it is not totally devoid of a hard truth about globalization that Europe is absorbing into its political bloodstream.
Jim Hoagland is a columnist for Washington Post Writers Group.
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