There is a widespread belief that the principal losers from the conflict in Iraq are the countries of "Old Europe". It is they who have been proved wrong by events and it is they who are having to beg for "forgiveness".

This is a singularly short-sighted reading of the current situation. The war has caused deep divisions inside Europe. These fractures are more complex than analyses based on the eligibility or non-eligibility of particular leaders for invitations to President George W. Bush's Texan ranch might suggest. Three issues can be used to illustrate the point.

The first concerns the norms underpinning the international order as a whole. As recent developments in the United Nations Security Council have confirmed, Europeans will have to adjust to the realities that the coalition has created. There is, however, no mistaking the profound unease with which leaders and public opinion, in new as well as old Europe, regard a world in which the authority of the UN has been flouted, the non-discovery of weapons of mass destruction is shrugged off as a matter of indifference and the invasion of a sovereign state is justified retrospectively because it brought about regime change. However much coalition leaders may protest, the normative issue will not simply go away.

The second issue is the unipolar system. The Iraq war did not tell us anything that we did not already know about the awesome military power of the US. But it is one thing to acknowledge the fact that the world has only one superpower, quite another to claim that an international order in which this power can behave as if it is free of any checks or balances is desirable.

Some of those who have sought to defend a unipolar system have given the impression that their only serious opponents in Europe are French Gaullists. The notion of a unipolar system is, however, profoundly at odds with the principles and dynamics of the European integration process itself. Integration has always been about enabling the member states, all of which are small or medium-sized in global terms, to stand on their own feet.

No European leader wants perpetual confrontation between Europe and the US. They are natural partners because they share many common values. But partnership cannot be based on subordination. "The alliance leader right or wrong" is an even more rotten principle on which to base a foreign policy than "my country right or wrong".

The third issue is the "special relationship". Before the Iraq crisis, Britain's privileged position in Washington could still be seen as an asset in European Union politics. As the political and moral compromises of maintaining it have grown and the pay-off has remained so meagre, it has turned into more of a liability. An advocate who can advance Europe's collective interests in the US capital has his uses. A viceroy has no place in a community of sovereign states whose most important institution, the European Council, is a striking example of collective government by a club of equals.

The EU has undoubtedly been battered by the Iraq crisis. But for core Europe, represented in the monetary union and Schengen agreement on open borders, integration has long since passed the point of no return. France and Germany may still slow down the European construction if they do not carry through the economic reforms that both governments have acknowledged are necessary, or if they ignore the aspirations and rights of their smaller partners. The bruising reminders that the Iraq crisis has given them of their limited powers, not to mention their stake as founding members, mean that it should be relatively easy for them in the coming year to accept an EU constitution worthy of the name.

The present Italian and Spanish prime ministers are cooler towards the EU than their predecessors. The role of satrap in a system based on divide and rule is not only demeaning but also incompatible with the accumulated commitments that the two countries have made towards the Union; and unlikely to appeal for long to public opinion, which in both cases remains profoundly sceptical about the attractions of US hegemony.

As for the new entrants, it seems safe to assume that geography, if not sentiment, will draw most, if not all, of them increasingly towards the core. As a Polish minister remarked after the Brussels European Council last October: "We realise as well as anybody that France and Germany are at the heart of the enterprise."

It is, in fact, Britain's European policy, rather than France's or Germany's, that is manifestly in crisis. Adoption of the euro before the end of the decade has looked unlikely for some time. In recent weeks, as the war has taken its toll, interest in developing a credible common foreign and security policy appears to have evaporated and input into the convention on the future of Europe has become increasingly defensive.

The UK may claim, as so often before at significant moments in the EU's history, that it is the continent that is cut off. But, when the fog has cleared, the landscape seems all too likely to look wearisomely familiar.

The writer is chairman of Euro-Comment and founding director of the Centre for European Policy Studies in Brussels

© Copyright The Financial Times Ltd 2003