LONDON -- It is an old American saying that "the pioneer is the one who gets the arrow in his back." So when President Jacques Chirac of France recently proposed a "pioneering" project to bring France and Germany still closer together at the political level and, as he put it, to "move further and faster ahead," there was an understandable feeling of unease among his fellow Europeans.

Pioneering, it was felt, could be a dangerous business. Wiser European leaders should follow more cautiously, always trying to balance the aim of uniting Europe into an effective bloc with the aim of preserving strong national identities. Besides, there was a strong suspicion that if France and Germany tried to advance to new and more adventurous levels of cooperation, it would immediately create not a united Europe, but a two-tier Europe, deeply damaging to the European Union.

Nowhere were these anxieties more strongly felt than in London, where the Labor government is agonizingly torn between the desire to be, on the one hand, "at the heart of Europe," and on the other hand not to get on the wrong side of public opinion, which is highly skeptical of further European integration, on both the financial and defense fronts.