Transatlantic Relations

Challenge and Resilience

Donald Abelson, Stephen Brooks, Donald E. Abelson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9780367706937
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000564440
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: National Security
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book explains how and why the transatlantic relationship has remained resilient despite persistent differences in the preferences, approaches, and policies of key member states.

It covers topics ranging from the history of transatlantic relations, North Atlantic Treaty Organization and security issues, trade, human rights, and the cultural sinews of the relationship, to the impacts of COVID-19, climate change, think tanks, the rise of populism, public opinion, and the triangular relationship between the United States (US), Europe, and China. The book also conceptualizes resilience as a quality arising from myriad forms of interdependence. This interdependence helps shed light on the Atlantic partnership's capacity to withstand serious disagreements, such as those that occurred during the Reagan, George W. Bush, and Trump presidencies.

With a principal focus on the US and Europe, the contributors to the volume also employ Canadian case studies to provide a unique and useful corrective. This book will interest all intermediate and senior undergraduate as well as graduate courses on relations between the US and Europe, American foreign policy, and European Union foreign policy. A specialist readership that includes academic and think tank researchers, policy practitioners, and opinion leaders will also benefit from this timely volume.

Part ISensibility, Solidarity, and Stress

doi: 10.4324/9781003147565-2

1Transatlantic Sensibility and SolidarityThe Distinctive Factors of Interpersonal Connection and Shared Historical Experience

Alan K. Henrikson

DOI: 10.4324/9781003147565-3

Introduction: The Role of “Allies” and Their Generations in the Atlantic Partnership

The resilience of the United States of America (US) under its federal Constitution has been tested many times, most recently on 6 January 2021, by the incitement of mob action by President Donald J. Trump against the Capitol Building to prevent the US Congress from certifying the recent election—properly conducted—of the country’s next chief executive. With the inauguration of Joseph R. Biden, Jr., as the US president on 20 January came a notable change, certainly in tone and prospectively also in substance, in the relationship between the US and Europe. Speaking soon after his inauguration to other participants at a virtual Munich Security Conference (MSC), President Biden, who had attended MSC meetings in person many times before, and as a private citizen two years earlier had then promised, “We will be back,” now declared officially: “America is back.” Not only that, he also said, “The transatlantic alliance is back” (White House 2021a). Not surprisingly, given the disruption of the Trump years, Europeans could not be easily reassured (Erlanger 2021).

On what foundations are these assertions—personal ones by the current US president about the recovery of US political and Atlantic solidarity and, by implication, also the alliance’s resilience meeting future challenges—based? “The alliance” in this chapter is interpreted broadly, and in a somewhat unusual way, with a focus on the interpersonal relations of members of the Atlantic community, particularly its political leaders and their close associates as well as diplomatic agents and civil servants, and the bonds they have formed as “allies” in the process of conducting their nations’ affairs—in normal times and during crises. This highlighting of personal relationships does not minimize the importance of the structural relationships that exist between the North American countries—the US and Canada—and the countries of Europe, connected formally through common membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and also through explicit cooperative arrangements with the European Union (EU). These are the legal-political frameworks within which transatlantic policy decisions are made. Without them, agreements arrived at might be less binding. However, without the informal relationships of the political leaders, diplomats, and others who achieved the agreements, and may even have created the organizational structures within which the agreements were negotiated, the political connection that exists across the Atlantic surely would be weaker.

The intellectual and moral content of the connection itself is largely the product of history—the legacy of the European and North American past and the collective lineage of the many generations of participants in transatlantic exchange. This includes far more than an “elite”—that is, an identifiable group of influential individuals, either members of government or those with influence over governments, who in a somewhat exclusive way have “served as a bridge connecting the allies’ values and interests,” as University of Toronto historian Timothy Andrews Sayle (2019) has epitomized the idea (5). The values and interests of the Atlantic nations are socially profound. They are deeply embedded in, and engendered by, their general populations, significant portions of which have interacted transatlantically—as immigrants and refugees, businesspeople and professionals, military personnel and diplomats, students and tourists, and, increasingly, just as “netizens.” The basic policy positions taken by President Biden, for example, in support of “democracy,” are expressions of well-known and widely communicated social beliefs and cultural practices. They need not be especially “bridged” across the Atlantic by those at or very near the top. Nonetheless, there exists a commonality of outlook among those who are engaged, formally and informally, in transatlantic relations at the political level, and this matters—as do the connections they form through personal contact, conversation, and, especially, collaboration. “I know we make foreign policy out to be this great, great skill,” President Biden said during his trip to Europe for a series of meetings in June 2021. Actually, “all foreign policy is […] a logical extension of personal relationships” (White House 2021b). Such relationships in themselves, of course, do not constitute connections, which have a functional potential. Connections require more, including the building of trust, the development of mutual reliance, and also a reciprocal understanding of the other as an available resource—a possible “ally.”

There is, in addition to this intimate—interpersonal—factor that contributes to the cohesiveness of the transatlantic relationship, the factor of history, particularly that of shared generational experience (Henrikson 1998). “Allies,” considered not just as states, or as governments, but also as individual members of transatlantically affiliated national societies, are also, as persons situated chronologically, members of historical generations, formed by the events they have actively participated in, or just lived through. What President Biden and others refer to as the “transatlantic partnership,” the strength and resilience of which is the main subject of this volume, has not only a profound human dimension but also an experiential dimension. It is a product of people in their place and their time. Generations are not continuously formed. There are “breaks” between them, owing mainly to differences in the historical events that shaped them. Transitions occur. Successions are necessary. Partnerships are not eternal. The “transatlantic partnership,” like others, needs renewal.

American and Canadian Relationships With Europe: The Historical Background

Historically, the values and interests of North American and European countries, separated by 3,000 miles of ocean and situated on physically very different continents, have not always coincided. The Atlantic perspectives of the US, owing to its Revolution, and of Canada, which resisted involvement in that conflict, have differed markedly. As Brebner has written, the US “attained nationhood by rebellion against Great Britain” and Canada did so “by gradual growth within the British Empire.” As a result, “not only were their responses to the mother country usually sharply contrasted, but their understandings of each other were habitually warped” (Brebner 1945, xi). Although both were “North American,” their geopolitical horizons were different.

The US defined itself against Europe, with which it nonetheless still had to deal. “The great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is in extending our commercial relations to have with them as little political connection as possible,” President George Washington stated in his 1796 Farewell Address. He continued,

So far as we have already formed engagements, let them be fulfilled with perfect good faith. Here let us stop. Europe has a set of primary interests which to us have none; or a very remote relation. Hence she must be engaged in frequent controversies, the causes of which are essentially foreign to our concerns. Hence, therefore, it must be unwise in us to implicate ourselves by artificial ties in the ordinary vicissitudes of her politics, or the ordinary combinations and collisions of her friendships or enmities.

Washington 1796

There is a residue of this belief—the non-entanglement tradition—in US policy toward Europe to this day. Although not any longer in any sense “isolationist,” the US retains a unilateralist proclivity—a preference for ad hoc, goal-oriented, and temporary “coalitions of the willing,” rather than permanent organizational commitments.

By contrast, Canada, long dependent on Great Britain for its security as well as its identity, was, indirectly, a part of the European system through the extension of the balance of power to North America (Bourne 1967) and through its monarchical attachment. Canada was invaded by US forces during the War of 1812—an event not forgotten by Canadians and their political leaders. John A. Macdonald, in his Confederation speech of February 1865, acknowledged the precariousness of Canada’s position between Great Britain and the US, where the Civil War appeared likely to end with a decisive victory by the North. “If we are not blind to our present position,” Macdonald warned,

we must see the hazardous situation in which all the great interests of Canada stand in respect to the United States. I am not an alarmist. I do not believe in the prospect of immediate war. I believe that the common sense of the two nations will prevent war; still we cannot trust to probabilities.

Macdonald 1865

Although Canada still had a place in Britain’s imperial defenses, with the prospect of Confederation there needed to be “a united, a concerted, and uniform system of defense” for Canadians themselves. Macdonald, who would become the first prime minister of a British Dominion, then promised: “We will have one system of defense and be one people, acting together alike in peace and in war” (Macdonald 1865). For Canada, domestic political unity and imperial defense unity have not always coincided, which is a reason for its multilateralist tradition, which encompasses involvement in both the English-speaking Commonwealth and the Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie as well as the broader United Nations (UN) organization.

The structures of government that the US established with the Constitution of 1787 and that Canada established with the British North American Act of 1867 historically have been powerful forces of political coherence. So, too, have been the more recent structures formed in the Atlantic world following World War II: NATO and other post-war bodies, including the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) and the Organisation for European Economic Co-operation which, in 1961, with the inclusion of the US and Canada, became the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. From a practical start with the ECSC, the European Communities (EC) further evolved into the EU. All these entities were based on the World War II experience, a devastating ordeal, which no one wanted to risk ever repeating. That wish—to make war between Atlantic nations no longer possible, or even thinkable—was a common cause (Kissinger 2001, 25). In political-scientific terms, the Atlantic sphere could become, in the phrase of Karl W. Deutsch, a “pluralistic security-community” (Deutsch et al. 1957, 5–9, 200).

These institutions were brought about as a result of consultation and cooperation—through “jointness” of thought and action. For Americans, even beyond only those steeped in its military tradition, this has a particular resonance. President Washington in his Farewell Address, as a consideration that would appeal to the “sensibility,” as he termed it, of his countrymen in support of their national Union, stated: “You have in a common cause fought and triumphed together; the independence and liberty you possess are the work of joint counsels, and joint efforts of common dangers, sufferings and successes” (Washington 1796). The joint counsels and joint efforts of World War II, in the form of the inter-allied military, economic, and political coordination that occurred then, also have been influential, not only as a memory but also as a model (Rosen 1951). The pattern of Atlantic community formation in the following years thus was not completely novel. Leaders and officials from both North American countries as well as the allied countries in Europe were inspired by the example of wartime cooperation. Major personalities in Washington, DC, and Ottawa, as well as those in London, Paris, Brussels, and other European capitals, were involved in this replicative and creative process of collaboration.

The “Atlanticists”: The Founding Generation

Close personal ties were formed during the remarkable period of transatlantic construction. The best-known of the participants, in Secretary of State Dean Acheson’s phrase “present at the creation” (Acheson 1968), were no less “founding fathers”—of the transatlantic relationship—than were Benjamin Franklin and George Washington, along with Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and notable European figures including the Marquis de Lafayette, were of the American political community (Ferreiro 2007; Morris 1965, 1973). Also, there were remarkable “founding mothers,” including Abigail Adams, Sarah Livingston Jay, and Dolley Madison, who raised the nation (Roberts 2004). Among Canadians, Sir John A. Macdonald and other...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Sources of Resilience in the Transatlantic Relationship
• Part I Sensibility, Solidarity, and Stress
• Part II Issue Areas and Policies
• Part III Broader Determinants of Transatlantic Relations
• Index