Inside File: Bonn oversteps the mark

BRITAIN distrusts France and Germany. France distrusts Germany and Britain. The European Union is designed to bind and contain the German giant, which says it wants nothing more than to be bound and contained.

But why, then, did Germany offend its EU partners last month by holding a high-level meeting with the Iranian minister for intelligence, agreeing to increase co-operation on security matters? A German diplomat said this week that in the absence of a successful European Monetary Union, the motor of the EU should be a Common Foreign and Security Policy (not wishing to say, as some suspect, that the motor Germany has in mind is in fact the Deutschmark). British officials say that the Germany-Iran dialogue breaches the EU guidelines on a common foreign and security policy.

Diplomats of Germany - Iran's biggest European trading partner - say they have offered a satisfactory explanation that the co-operation with Iran is on purely 'humanitarian grounds'. British diplomats say that this explanation makes things, if anything, worse rather than better. The 'humanitarian' aspect appears to be a way out of a blackmailing arrangement by Tehran: German nationals were detained by the Iranians after German police refused to drop a case against Iranian agents held over the killing of Kurds in Germany.

German diplomats say the whole thing is now over and done with. Yet only last Thursday, a US envoy to the European Union criticised the EU for allowing some unnamed members to break ranks and open links with Iran. 'This is a real source of tension between us,' Stuart Eisenstat told an EU-US seminar. 'This is too close an echo of what happened with Iraq,' he added, in reference to Western support for Iraq in the run-up to the Gulf war.

One fear might have been that under a common EU security policy, Germany may have been privy to British - and through that, US - intelligence that it could have passed on to Iran.

But the twist in the tale is that Britain's distrust of Germany is such that Britain shares precious little intelligence with it. Like other big EU states, the two are in fact still in the business of spying on each other. 'There is still a Cold War hangover from the days when West Germany was heavily infiltrated by the East,' said one official. 'And they are Germans, after all.'

Another noted that 'there is a curious similarity between Iran and Germany. They're both too big, they both have a sense of mission in their geographical regions and a propensity towards frosty, scholarly intellects.' But he added: 'We're not really too worried about this. Since we don't tell them much anyway. And so long as the fuss we made reached the target.'

NOT everybody is enamoured of the concept of European Union. The mere word 'union' still rankles in the minds of Norwegians. They felt deeply patronised by the Union with Sweden, which linked them to the Crown of their bigger neighbour until the early part of this century. Among other things they were allowed no independent foreign policy. Now, as a potential entrant to union with the rest of Europe, there are of course other things Norway worries more about. Fish and oil, to name but two. But the concept of union is still anathema: 'We dislike the word probably more than you British dislike the word federalism,' said one Norwegian diplomat.

The following anecdote illustrates that resentment: when the Norwegian Foreign Minister, Johan Jorgen Holst, pulled off the biggest coup in recent diplomatic history by helping negotiate the peace between Israel and the PLO, he told Israeli diplomats that one of his biggest thrills was making secret telephone calls to the PLO from the Swedish government building which he happened to be visiting. Norway was finally getting back at the Swedes (who incidentally had sought and failed for years to broker peace for the Palestinians).

But his finest hour, he said, was at the signing of the deal in Oslo: it was at the same table at which Norway signed its declaration of independence in 1905 - dissolving the Union with Sweden.