Transatlantic rows over Iraq and a host of other issues evoke the kind of raucous
celebrity slanging match normally reserved for tabloid headlines blaring across
the grocery store check-out counter: “Can this Marriage Be Saved???”
Having stared Transatlantic divorce in the face, however, officials on both sides
of the Atlantic are now scrambling to patch things up in the wake of U.S. and
British military success in Iraq. But resentments linger. As the military phase
of the campaign gives way to the challenges of Iraq’s political and economic
rehabilitation, how do Europeans and Americans pick up the pieces of their broader
relationship?
ere were such bitter divisions in the first place. Iraq may have ignited the blowout,
but differences on that issue alone do not explain the emotional or broad-based
nature of Transatlantic recrimination and bitterness. That is because much of
the debate both within and between Europe and America has been less about Iraq
itself and more about what the Bush administration’s approach to Iraq may
say about the future behavior of the world’s only superpower. And in this
debate, personalities, policies, catalytic events, and deeper structural changes
of world politics all play a role.
There has been no lack of personalities grating on each other like chalk on a
blackboard. U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s steady stream of gratuitous
public insults of European allies needlessly alienated broad segments of European
opinion at a time when Washington was seeking support from European capitals for
its policies. President Bush’s regular invocation of providential blessing,
coupled with his self-righteous, finger-jabbing, “with us or against us”
rhetoric, diverted foreign friends from concern about Baghdad to concern about
Washington.
Europe, of course, has no shortage of quirky personalities. French President Jacques
Chirac, having won a second term with a comfortable majority, has shifted into
a phase of “hyper-Gaullism” that appears bent on moving beyond mere
criticism of America to a true strategy of containment. Mr. Chirac has found an
ally in German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, who eked out reelection by cynically
courting pacifists and East German communists at the expense of a half century
of friendship with the United States.
Without Mr. Schröder, Chirac would have remained a somewhat lonely voice.
But Mr. Schröder abandoned Germany’s traditional role of mediating
between Paris and Washington and tied German fortunes to Gallic ambition. This
shift in Germany’s position then made it easier for President Vladimir Putin
of Russia to join a new axis of dissent less focused on blocking Saddam Hussein
than on containing President Bush.
But highlighting the perhaps less-than-noble motives of French or German leaders
does not explain U.S. failure to isolate them, why the United States could not
get a majority in the UN Security Council for a second resolution on Iraq, or
why the United States itself is so isolated today. The Bush administration simply
did not make the case for preemptive military intervention on its particular timetable.
Washington not only failed to persuade Russia, it failed to persuade or bribe
another critical ally, Turkey, and even failed to persuade, bribe or bully six
undecided Security Council members into voting for the resolution.
These failures, however, do not excuse the hollow posturing of many European nations.
Those who argued that imminent war was not the answer were obliged to set forth
an alternative plan for truly coercive inspections, backed by the United Nations.
Such a plan could have involved more capable inspectors supported by troops on
the ground, extended “no-ßy” and “no-drive” zones, the
ability to destroy facilities being sanitized or capabilities being moved –
a whole variety of intermediate options short of preemptive war yet offering a
tough, focused way for the United Nations to disarm Iraq.
Although the Bush administration rejected out of hand some efforts in this vein,
neither the Germans nor the French chose to set forth such proposals in serious
detail. And when the French declared that they would veto any second resolution,
even if there was a Security Council majority for it, the game was over.
Policy differences over a host of other issues beyond Iraq have exacerbated matters.
European concerns have been fueled by the Bush administration’s refusal
to participate in international agreements ranging from the International Criminal
Court and the Kyoto Protocol on climate change to a worldwide ban on antipersonnel
land mines, a global treaty to protect bio-diversity, a verification mechanism
for the Biological Weapons Control Treaty, and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.
Europeans are critical of the Bush administration’s treatment of suspected
terrorist fighters being held at Guantanamo Bay naval station in Cuba, its pullout
from the Antiballistic Missile Treaty, its neglect of the Arab-Israeli peace process,
and its embrace of preemptive military action as a foreign policy doctrine.
Americans often retort that their European friends seem eager to lecture Americans
about U.S. failings but unwilling to spend the money necessary to make European
troops effective, are too absorbed with the details of deeper and wider European
integration to recognize the dangers posed by terrorists wielding weapons of mass
destruction, are eager to trumpet their “noble” multilateralist instincts
in contrast to America’s “base” unilateralism (except when it
comes to international rules that do not support EU preferences), and have failed
to advance economic reforms that could sustain European prosperity or anchor world
growth in the New Economy. Some, such as former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger,
accuse Europeans of using antagonism towards the United States as a way of defining
their own identity.
These quarrels on international issues are exacerbated by a series of Transatlantic
spats over such traditionally domestic issues as food safety, the death penalty,
data privacy, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and a range of other civil
liberties.
In and of themselves, such squabbles are also nothing new. But increasingly, these
disputes are being viewed through different foreign policy lenses, each framed
by a separate catalytic event. For most Europeans the catalytic event framing
much of their foreign and security policy remains the fall of the Berlin Wall
on November 9, 1989 and the ensuing collapse of the Soviet Union and European
communism.
When the people on the streets of Central and Eastern Europe brought down the
Iron Curtain with their collective cry, “We want to return to Europe,”
they unleashed an earthquake that is still shaking the continent and its institutions.
It has given Europeans an historic opportunity to build a continent that is truly
whole, free and at peace with itself. It is a goal that Americans share. But it
continues to absorb, almost overwhelm European energy and attention.
For most Americans, November 9 also played a catalytic role, and informed much
of U.S. foreign policy in the ensuing decade. But in American public consciousness
the horrific events of September 11, 2001 have transformed November 9, 1989 into
a bookend to an era of transition to a new and newly dangerous century. September
11 has unleashed a very fundamental debate about the nature and purpose of America’s
role in the world.
In many ways, the current debate is analogous to the period of the late 1940s,
when America had won a war but not defined its postwar role. In that period, the
notion of containment emerged as an organizing principle for American foreign
policy. In many ways, the events of November 9, 1989 represented the logical conclusion
to that policy. Today, the debate is how the threat of terrorism, joined to the
proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, should lead the United States to
reframe its foreign and security policy.
In such an open debate, some basic propositions – mainstays of U.S. foreign
policy for 60 years – are being reexamined. And here some differences with
the containment debate of the late 1940s are instructive for Transatlantic relations.
Then, Americans believed that one part of Europe was the front line and another
part of Europe posed grave dangers. As a consequence, the core of U.S. foreign
policy was rooted in European stability. Today, Americans believe they themselves
are on the front line, and the danger emanates from beyond Europe. Europe, as
a consequence, having already been won, is seen increasingly by some in the Bush
administration more as a platform than a partner in its new global campaign.
All these factors feed into structural dynamics that are now shaping relations
between Europe and the United States. Taken together, November 9 and September
11 convey a single message: the future health of Transatlantic relations will
be defined less by the degree of U.S. engagement in Europe and more by the ability
of the United States and Europe to cope with the promises and dangers of globalization.
The greatest security threats to the United States and Europe today stem from
problems that defy borders: terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass
destruction, pandemics and environmental scarcities. They stem from challenges
that have traditionally been marginal but contentious in the Transatlantic security
dialogue: peacekeeping outside the traditional NATO area; post-conßict reconstruction
and rehabilitation; rogue states, failed states and states hijacked by groups
or networks. And they come from places, such as Africa and Southwest and Central
Asia, that the Transatlantic agenda has often ignored.
Few great goals in this world can be achieved without America. But America can
achieve few of them alone. In this era of shadowy networks and bio-terrorists,
failed states and recession, the only way we can share our burdens, extend our
inßuence, and achieve our goals will often be by banding together with others,
particularly our core allies. We cannot handle the world entirely on our own,
making every problem our problem and then sending our warriors to conduct our
foreign policy.
U.S. military capabilities are vast. But fire power is not staying power. We can
win wars without allies, but we can only secure peace with allies. It is decidedly
in American interests to seek a more effective global partnership with a Europe
that can act in real-time on pressing international matters. We must develop ways
to work better together in fast-breaking crises; manage our differences before
they impair our ability to cooperate; and improve joint efforts to address emerging
threats and global issues.
Are we ready for such a partnership? Will Americans have either the patience or
the inclination, and will Europeans have either the capacity or the will, to generate
the coherence of action that will be required? These are open questions that will
test leadership on both sides of the Atlantic. Our most immediate task, of course,
is reaching agreement on the role of the international community in Iraq. This
certainly will be difficult and contentious. But we must also frame our continuing
debate over Iraq with a wider perspective if we are to pick up the pieces of our
broader relationship.
We should start with three other areas of endeavor. The first is to generate a
new understanding of strategic stability. During the Cold War the two superpowers
preserved stability despite their animosity because they felt equally at risk.
They shared the view that the prospect of suicide would deter anyone from actually
using weapons of mass destruction, and they were willing to negotiate certain
rules of the road together and with other nations. Today, all three of these premises
have vanished. Other nuclear powers have emerged – and their rules of the
road are unclear. Terrorists are not detered by suicide, and they are not at the
negotiating table. They have nothing to protect and nothing to lose. In short,
Cold War deterrence will not work as it once did, and in some cases it will not
work at all.
A new conception of strategic stability must weave what have been separate strands
– the fight against terrorism, nuclear force posture, non-proliferation and
defense efforts – into a comprehensive defense against weapons of mass destruction,
as former U.S. Senator Sam Nunn has suggested. These strands must be considered
jointly, and discussion of the Bush administration’s doctrine of preemption
should be incorporated into a broader discussion of what is likely to constitute
security and stability in the new century.
A second, related initiative should be to develop “Transatlantic”
approaches to homeland security and societal protection. When the United States
was attacked, our allies immediately invoked the North Atlantic Treaty’s
mutual defense clause, in essence stating that the September 11 attack was an
attack on a common security space – a common “homeland.” It
is unlikely that a successful effort to strengthen homeland security can be conducted
in isolation from one’s allies.
A terrorist WMD attack on Europe would immediately affect American civilians,
American forces, and American interests. If such an attack involved contagious
disease, it could threaten the American homeland itself in a matter of hours.
In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, it has also become very clear that
controling borders, operating ports, or managing airports and train stations in
the age of globalization involves a delicate balance of identifying and intercepting
weapons and terrorists without excessively hindering the trade, legal migration,
travel and tourism upon which European and American prosperity increasingly depends.
How should we work together across the Atlantic on homeland defense in its many
components? The challenges Americans are encountering in crafting effective homeland
security responses – due to the broad nature of the threat, the multiplicity
of actors, and overlapping federal and state competencies – are even more
daunting across the Atlantic, given Europe’s multi-jurisdictional setting.
European preparedness efforts are not only of immediate relevance for the safety
of millions of people, they have a direct impact on NATO’s mission and on
the anti-terrorism campaign.
They will also inßuence U.S.-EU relations and bilateral ties to individual countries,
have important consequences for Transatlantic economic relations and intelligence
cooperation, raise prospects for new avenues of cooperation with Russia, and could
provide important comparisons for U.S. homeland security programs.
European experience can also be useful for Americans because the countries involved
are liberal democracies that, like the United States, are faced with the problems
of how to balance law enforcement and civil liberties and how to define the proper
role of the armed forces in societal protection at home. Finally, efforts to protect
the U.S. homeland against cyber-attacks can hardly be conducted in isolation from
key allies whose economies and information networks are so intertwined with ours.
A third initiative should be to develop new models of Transatlantic governance.
It is fashionable to suggest that Europeans and Americans are drifting apart,
no longer engaged with each other, as during the Cold War. Yet nothing could be
farther from the truth. Almost every single indicator of societal interaction
– whether it be ßows of money, services, investments, people or ideas –
underscores a startling fact: our societies are not drifting, they are colliding.
The decade of the 1990s – the decade when the supposed “glue”
of the Cold War dissolved – was one of the most intense periods of Transatlantic
integration in history. The advance of globalization is fastest and deepest between
the continents of Europe and North America.
Among the nations of the European Union, the policies of European integration
reach so deep that it is common to hear that European policies have become domestic
policies, and that EU countries have entered a new realm of “European domestic
policy.” This is very true, but it does not begin to capture the real dynamic
of what is happening. A similar, if largely unnoticed, process has been underway
for some time across the Atlantic. Our economies and societies have become so
intertwined that in a number of specific areas Europeans and Americans have transcended
“foreign” relations.
We have moved into a new arena of “Transatlantic domestic policy”
– a new frontier in which specific social and economic concerns and transnational
actors often jump formal borders, override national policies, and challenge traditional
forms of governance throughout the Atlantic world. The networks of interdependence
being created across the Atlantic have become so dense, in fact, that they have
attained a quality far different than those either continent has with any other.
We have only begun to understand the many dimensions of this phenomenon.
Many of the issues confronting European and American policy makers today are those
of “deep integration,” a new closeness that strikes at core issues
of domestic governance, and that is of a qualitatively different nature from the
“shallow integration” model of the Bretton Woods-GATT system established
at the end of World War II. Deep integration is generating new Transatlantic networks
and new connections. But because it reaches into traditionally domestic areas
it can also generate social dislocation, anxiety and friction, as on such issues
as food safety, competition policies, religious cults, privacy protection or the
death penalty. Such conßicts are unlikely to endanger the relationship, and are
more a symptom that our societies are interacting so closely that many issues
are debated as quasi-domestic controversies.
Such controversies less often reßect differences in values than different perspectives
on what tradeoffs are politically or socially acceptable when these values collide
with each other. On many of these issues, in fact, differences within the United
States and within Europe are more serious than those between Americans and Europeans.
At the same time, European and American scientists and entrepreneurs are pushing
the frontiers of human discovery in such fields as genetics, nanotechnology and
electronic commerce where there are neither global rules nor Transatlantic mechanisms
to sort out the complex legal, ethical and commercial tradeoffs posed by such
innovation.
Neither the framework for our relationship nor the way our governments are currently
organized adequately captures these new realities. There is a growing mismatch
between how leaders and specialists are trained and organized to manage Transatlantic
affairs, and what skills will be required to meet 21st century challenges. Opinion
shapers need to look more closely at the intersection between deep Atlantic integration
and traditional areas of domestic regulation.
There is considerable need to work more concertedly to identify “best practices”
for governance that could improve coordination and create safety valves for political
and social pressures resulting from deep integration. In democratic societies
controversial domestic issues are decided by elections or court rulings. Across
the Atlantic such quasi-domestic issues need to be managed through new forms of
Transatlantic regulatory and parliamentary consultation and coordination and more
innovative diplomacy that takes account of the growing role of private actors.
Iraq has been a loud wake-up call to the Transatlantic partnership. The question
facing us is whether we can respond to this tragedy by assuming the global obligations
our partnership demands – for history will ultimately judge us not only
in terms of how well or badly we managed a particular crisis, but also how well
we used such crises to shape our relationship for the future.
Daniel S. Hamilton is the Richard von WeizsŠcker Professor and Director of the Center for Transatlantic Relations at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University, and Executive Director of the American Consortium on EU Studies, the EU Center in Washington, DC. He previously served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs and as Associate Director of the U.S. State Department's Policy Planning Staff.
go to top
