Europe, America, Bush

Transatlantic Relations in the Twenty-First Century

John Peterson, Mark A. Pollack

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• eBook ISBN: 9781134392179
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica

Europe, America, Bush is the first study of underlying elements of continuity in the transatlantic relationship, as well as new and powerful forces for change.

It offers a definitive assessment of whether, and how much, the election of George W. Bush, the events of 11 September, and conflict over Iraq mark genuine and lasting change in transatlantic relations.

American and European experts assess transatlantic relations on matters of foreign and security policy, economic diplomacy, justice and internal security cooperation, environmental policy and relations with Russia, the Balkans and the Middle East. This is essential reading for all students with an interest in this key relationship in world affairs.

1 Introduction

Europe, America, Bush

John Peterson and Mark A. Pollack

The defining feature of transatlantic relations in the post-war period has been mutual dependence between the United States (US) and western Europe. Under the conditions of the Cold War, their interdependence in the security realm was particularly salient, with both sides responding to powerful incentives to cooperate and avoid discord in the face of a monolithic Soviet threat. Economic interdependence intensified over time, but economic conflict and cooperation were generally second-order concerns. The term ‘transatlantic’ was rarely used to describe European–American relations because the Atlantic Alliance – the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) – was the primary channel for the most important exchanges.

It is often forgotten that the Cold War ended almost simultaneously with the final stages of a dramatic effort by the member states of (what became) the European Union (EU) to enhance their economic solidarity and power by creating a single European market. Subsequently, the EU emerged as the United States’ most important partner in terms of trade and investment. Before but especially after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, economic and political reform in central and eastern Europe became an urgent and shared western concern. The US under the Clinton administration thus found itself with new incentives to broaden and intensify economic and foreign policy cooperation, and to seek new channels of diplomatic exchange with a Europe increasingly seeking to be a united, single partner by acting through the EU. A formal US–EU dialogue had been sought by the Bush (Senior) administration and agreed via the Transatlantic Declaration in 1990. But it was upgraded under Bill Clinton and given significantly more policy substance through the 1995 New Transatlantic Agenda (NTA).

The EU remained very much a work in progress, especially in foreign or security policy, as revealed by its humiliation as an aspiring peacemaker in the former Yugoslavia. Still, Europe and America seemed closer than ever before to something like a strategic partnership by the late 1990s (see Featherstone and Ginsberg 1996; Peterson 1996; Smith 1998; Monar 1998). Even sceptics admitted that ‘the potential for the EU and the United States to raise their relationship to a new level of cooperation remained’ as the decade ended (Allen 2002: 45).

The year 2001, however, witnessed two landmark events, each with potential to augur a substantial change in the tenor and substance of transatlantic relations. First, after a long and bitterly contested electoral dispute, George W. Bush was inaugurated as US President. The Bush administration included a number of well-respected diplomats with extensive transatlantic experience, including the US Trade Representative, Robert Zoellick, who had been a main architect of the Transatlantic Declaration (Featherstone and Ginsberg 1996: 89). Nevertheless, the new administration showed itself to be sharply at odds with both the Clinton administration and its European allies on issues such as missile defence, climate change, relations with Russia, and the Balkans.

Second, on 11 September 2001 (9/11) the policy focus of transatlantic relations – and international relations more generally – was transformed by the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, and the subsequent declaration of a war on terror by the Bush administration. The initial effect of the attacks was to unite the US and Europe in a common struggle against terrorism as well as in other international endeavours, such as the successful launch of a new round of world trade talks under the auspices of the World Trade Organisation (WTO). Yet the forceful American campaign against terrorism, together with European anxieties about US unilateralism and assertions of an ‘axis of evil’ linking so-called rogue states, provoked further and powerful transatlantic tensions. These tensions culminated in one of the most serious transatlantic ruptures seen since the Suez crisis of 1956 – over the Anglo-American attack on Iraq in 2003 – even if the rupture between the US and Europe obscured even more serious divisions within Europe. The war ended with a decisive ‘allied’ victory, even if winning the post-war peace looked an even more formidable challenge than winning the war. In any event, attention quickly turned to healing the transatlantic split, even if (perhaps because) grave questions remained about how much and how permanent was the damage done by the war to the US–European alliance.

This book has a simple (if ambitious) purpose: to identify both what changed in transatlantic relations after the 2000 US election, 9/11 and Iraq; and what remained the same. Rather than accept truisms such as the idea that ‘the transatlantic alliance is finished’, we have asked our authors to identify areas where the underlying interests and strategies of the US and Europe remain fundamentally unchanged, and those where the election of George W. Bush, 9/11 and the war in Iraq have provoked genuine, durable changes in transatlantic relations. The chapters that follow offer analysis of a broad cross-section of issue-areas. Revealingly, ‘Europe’ is most often considered to be the EU in most chapters, but not exclusively and not because of any injunction from editors to authors. More generally, by taking a hard look at hard evidence, this book aims to make it possible for its readers to judge for themselves whether the transatlantic relationship is now brittle or remains durable, and ultimately whether it will move in the direction of convergence or divergence as a consequence of the dramatic events of the past several years.

We begin here with a brief overview of transatlantic relations as they evolved up until 2000. We then focus on the relationship between Europe and the George W. Bush administration, before confronting how and how much the events of 9/11 and war with Iraq altered the relationship. Our conclusion previews the chapters that follow.

The transatlantic alliance: the story so far

The post-war history of relations between Europe and America has been analysed extensively elsewhere (see Featherstone and Ginsberg 1996; Peterson 1996: 35–54; Lundestad 1997; Pollack and Shaffer 2001b: 7–17). Here it suffices to consider Lundestad’s (1997) three main claims about the evolution of the relationship. First, US support has been crucial to the post-war success of European integration. Second, this support has often been rooted in rather naïve ideas about replicating a ‘United States of Europe’ modelled on the US. Third, American support for European unity has remained broadly consistent over time.

In the early post-war period, with the US in a position of political and economic dominance, the Marshall Plan transferred around 5 per cent of American gross domestic product (GDP) to Europe in aid – an entirely unimaginable act today. The Marshall Plan was less an act of altruistic generosity than an anti-Communist measure designed to keep socialist ideas from spreading in Europe. US support for European unity was similarly calculated and purposeful: substantial financial backing in the late 1940s for the fledgling political group, the European Movement, came from the US Central Intelligence Agency (Aldrich 2001). Yet, whatever American motives, it mattered that Marshall Plan aid came with the condition that mechanisms be created to promote cooperation between its recipients. These mechanisms (mainly the Organisation for European Economic Cooperation) did not amount to much. However, the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), launched in 1951 with firm American political support, did.

The ECSC was designed with the narrow purpose of combining the war-making industries of Germany and France, thus making it impossible for them ever again to wage war on one another. Few could have foreseen that the ECSC would put Europe on a path, if by no means a straight one, towards locking in cooperative intergovernmental agreements with supra-national rules and institutions. The European Economic Community (EEC), born in 1957 to extend the common market for coal and steel to most other products, at first seemed a modest step along this path. It seemed entirely moribund at multiple points in the 1960s and 70s. But a series of heroic, but often barely-noticed judgements by its supra-national European Court of Justice (see Weiler 1999) laid the groundwork for a major relaunch of the ‘European project’ via the Single European Act and single market programme in the 1980s. Arguably, these in turn led to the launch of the euro by the late 1990s, by which time the EEC had morphed into the EU.

A curious side effect of European economic integration was the gradual equipping of the EU with the external policy accoutrements usually associated exclusively with nation-states. Logically, Europe could not have a common market without a common commercial policy, so the EEC was given one soon after its creation. But decolonisation in Africa and elsewhere, and French requests for German help in managing it, meant that ‘Europe’ quickly became a donor of aid to the less-developed world. By 1970, with the war in Vietnam violating many European sensibilities, EEC member states began to look for scope to coordinate their foreign policies and speak with a single voice, especially to speak truth (or at least dissent) to power (the US). In the 1980s, the single market programme and the expansion of Community competences to, especially, environmental policy and border controls had powerful consequences for the EU’s relations with the non-European world, and not least the US. Ultimately, the 1992 Maastricht Treaty gave the EU, in theory at least, something no other international organisation had ever aspired to have: a ‘common foreign and security policy’. The Union even began work on a defence policy in 1998.

Especially during the Cold War, most US policymakers took a ‘NATO-first’ view of Europe: NATO, of which the US was a member, was the key forum for the most important transatlantic exchanges. For every attempt to boost the role of what eventually became the EU, such as Kennedy’s 1962 ‘Declaration of Interdependence’, one could find instances when US administrations – especially those of Nixon and Reagan – showed disdain or neglect towards the EU. Yet, especially when the Cold War ended, suddenly and amidst rapid and wrenching geopolitical change, the instinctive US view that a politically united Europe was desirable re-emerged. Even the most committed American Eurosceptics could but show grudging respect for the EU’s success in creating the euro and exporting its model of democracy and capitalism to the former Soviet bloc.

American policy has both determined and been determined by the process of European integration. There is no question that US support was crucial to the earliest post-war attempts at European institution-building. Many Europeans would deny that the US has had much of an impact on the most recent steps forward in European integration, such as the internal market project, the euro, or enlargement. But that America had the power to shape, and indeed did shape, all of these policies is difficult to deny. The perceived political need to cure the US of its phobia about a ‘fortress Europe’ helped ensure that the internal market did not raise external barriers to the EU’s market. The US maintained its position of passive support, at least, for economic and monetary union (EMU) even when it seemed a drag on global growth (Henning and Padoan 2000: 12–17), and even intervened to support the euro during a US election campaign when its weakness became a global concern in 2000. The American push to enlarge NATO by 1999 set a political precedent for the EU’s eastern enlargement in 2004.

At the same time, US policy has been shaped by the emergence of the EU as regional power and potential global partner. The Union’s emergence as a unified economic bloc, as well as America’s most important trading and investment partner, meant a bilateral negotiation on trade liberalisation effectively ended up being ‘exported’ to the multilateral level via the Uruguay Round, yielding an overall agreement that was breathtakingly radical and barely acceptable in US domestic political terms. Increasing transatlantic economic interdependence manifested itself in a growing number of trade and regulatory disputes over issues such as bananas, hormone-treated beef, genetically modified foods, and the tax treatment of US exports, management of which required direct diplomatic contact between the US and EU.

Meanwhile, closer EU cooperation on matters of foreign policy, while exposing (often brutally) the gap between European rhetoric and action, together with the thawing of the Soviet bloc further convinced both the Bush (Senior) and Clinton administrations that US–EU relations needed to be upgraded. The 1990 Transatlantic Declaration mandated regular US–EU summits at the highest political level and the 1995 NTA sought to make them more substantive. Even if neither was a major success in terms of concrete policy achievements, American policy towards Europe became considerably more EU-focused in the 1990s.

The Clinton administration – while by no means uncritical of the EU (see Holbrooke 1999) – liked to claim that it was more supportive of European integration than any since Kennedy’s. By the time that Clinton left office, the US dealt with the EU – as opposed to its individual member states or NATO Europe – on a far broader array of issues, ranging from market regulation to environmental protection to police cooperation, than it did when it assumed office. The days when European hands in the State Department would, in preparation for a visit from the European Commission, ask each other, ‘What in the world are we going to talk about with them?’, were certainly over. What was unclear was whether the election of George W. Bush in 2000 marked the death of the idea that the US and EU could become strategic partners.

Europe and George W. Bush

In June 2000, Bill Clinton was awarded the Charlemagne Prize, an honour bestowed annually on a leading figure who has worked for the unification of Europe. Clinton was the first American President to win the award. In December 2000, when the identity of Clinton’s successor as US president had just recently become clear, Chris Patten, the EU Commissioner for External Affairs, declared ‘Europe will miss Bill Clinton. He has been a good friend to this continent’ (quoted in Everts 2002: 9).

Patten probably never foresaw how prescient his remark would sometimes seem in the first years of the presidency of George W. Bush. The new administration’s foreign policy team included, alongside moderates such as Colin Powell, a group of more hawkish or ideological officials, including Vice President Richard Cheney, Deputy Secretary of Defence Paul Wolfowitz, Defence Policy Board Chairman Richard Perle, and Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage. As the Republicans had not held the White House for eight years, very few had much appreciation of the EU’s recent emergence as a global actor. Bush’s Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, had last served in the Ford and Reagan administrations. As such, perhaps it was to be expected that his first major address on European security after his appointment, to the New York Council of Foreign Relations, did not mention the EU once.

Bush and his team made it clear that theirs would be a ‘realist’ foreign policy based on cool calculation of US interests, a significant military build-up, and little or no interest in multilateral agreements. Bush’s National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice (2000), was resolute that the new administration would eschew ‘romanticism’, presumably of the kind that had been the basis of Clinton’s foreign policy. Academic opinion dismissed a ‘realist’ foreign policy, based on ‘simple solutions to policy dilemmas’, as ‘misguided’ (Legro and Moravcsik 2001), but that made Rice’s signals no less disturbing to Europeans: ‘multilateral agreements and institutions should not be ends in themselves … American values are universal … Military readiness will have to take center stage’ (Rice 2000: 47–51).

The first point of strain between Europe and the Bush administration was over missile defence, which Clinton had tried to keep on a back burner. In contrast, Bush announced that his administration would press ahead with full testing of a comprehensive missile defence system, thus abrogating the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which many governments (especially in Europe) viewed as a cornerstone of arms control. A second clash was over the Kyoto Protocol: the Bush administration announced that it was pulling out of international negotiations on the reduction of emissions that were suspected of causing global warming. The timing of the announcement, on the eve of a visit by German Chancellor (and strong supporter of the Kyoto process), Gerhard Schröder, suggested disdain for Europe and European views. A third source of friction was the International Criminal Court. The Bush administration refused to accept the jurisdiction of the court – universally supported by EU member governments – or the idea that any American might be judged by it. Later, of course, it would explicitly threaten to cancel US aid to Yugoslavia unless its government turned over Slobodan Milosevic for prosecution by the International Criminal Tribunal (ICT) in The Hague, in a particularly blatant case of double standards (Hassner 2002: 46).

In economic relations, the Bush administration at least seemed to want to strike a better tone after the bitterness of the bananas and beef hormones disputes and collapse of the Seattle WTO summit in the latter part of the Clinton era. The appointment of Robert Zoellick, a senior State Department official for European affairs during the Bush (Senior) administration, as US Trade Representative was warmly welcomed in Europe. Zoellick visited the European Parliament in May 2001 and expressed the new administration’s interest in launching a new WTO trade round, while telling MEPs: ‘Make no mistake, we are back at the table of free trade’.¹ Yet, the administration also began to signal that it would endorse highly protectionist measures to assist its beleaguered agricultural and steel industries. When new duties on foreign steel and a new farm bill were...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Preface and acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Introduction: Europe, America, Bush
• 2 Foreign and defence policy cooperation
• 3 Trade and economic relations
• 4 Justice and internal security
• 5 Transatlantic environmental relations
• 6 US and European perspectives on Russia
• 7 The US and Europe in the Balkans
• 8 The Middle East: focus of discord?
• 9 Unilateral America, multilateral Europe?
• 10 Conclusion: the end of transatlantic partnership?
• Bibliography
• Index