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Transatlantic Leadership: Defining tomorrow’s new Transatlantic game
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by
Franck Biancheri:
President of TIESWeb and Director for Studies and Strategy
of Europe 2020.
25/03/2004 |
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Transatlantic leadership
is no more. The Iraq crisis has completely
ruined the foundations of what used
to be Transatlantic leadership since
1945: an overall confidence of European
citizens and governments in US capacity
to lead them towards a common better
future.
Nevertheless the European
Union and the United States of America
still represent the only core group
which can directly influence most global
issues as well as the only large grouping
of democratic countries able to promote
democracy worldwide.
Therefore it is absolutely
vital to reshape, to reinvent Transatlantic
leadership in order to avoid two disastrous
consequences which today’s trends
seem to be generating:
- confrontation between two diverging
blocks which the EU on the one hand
and the US on the other hand may become
otherwise
- unability to develop a sufficiently
strong and consistant grouping of countries
able to steer the ‘globalized
world’ toward values such as democracy,
human rights, freedom and sustainability.
In
my opinion, these two risks are defining
the constraints of future EU/US relations,
or if we want to put it in another way
the rules of the new Transatlantic game:
. the Transatlantic relation needs now
to be defined in a global context where
each partner is also heavily involved
with other parts of the world. It is
not anymore the exclusive and symbiotic
relation of post WW II.
. the first common threat to both the
EU and the US is … bad Transatlantic
relation!
Transatlantic
relation is therefore first of all necessary
to avoid possible EU/US conflicts and
not only to address common outside threats
.
Any
attempt to ignore these two constraints,
even with the best ‘Transatlantic
goodwill’ possible, will just
increase the gap between Europeans and
Americans.
Meanwhile
these two constraints also define the
strategy we must pursue in order to
build this new EU/US relations. Three
main objectives emerge:
- our elites must be educated and trained
to have a good understanding of each
side of the Atlantic, not only in geo-strategic
terms but first of all in terms of public
opinions, which means: languages, cultures,
politics, social issues, … . Over
is the time when counting number of
missiles or soldiers was sufficient
to legitimate Transatlantic cooperation.
Again let’s keep in mind that
today’s biggest enemies of Transatlantic
relations are potentially the Europeans
and the Americans themselves. Americans
and Europeans who would ignore the other
side by assuming it MUST be like oneself.
- our elites must be educated and trained
to understand the rest of the world,
and if possible, to do it together so
that intellectual tools maybe common.
Indeed if they cannot how would the
Transatlantic relation fulfil its role
of global leader?
- these ‘Transatlantic elites’
have to be drastically enlarged. We
also face an ‘enlargement’
challenge within the Transatlantic relation:
it is not a matter of geography but
rather a matter of social fabric. From
the very small group of few hundreds
of EU/US experts (academics, civil servants,
politicians, top business leaders and
army officials), we have to make it
a large ensemble involving dozens of
thousands journalists, students, community
leaders, local politicians, medium size
business leaders, …
Then
of course, if we have the objectives
of the game, the rules of the game and
a large number of players, we would
need leaders. Let’s suppose that
they will emerge from building up this
new game!
One thing is sure though, they will
need to know that yesterday’s
Transatlantic relation is over and that
when they talk, for instance, about
‘the free world’, they do
not appeal to tomorrow’s Europeans
and Americans but rather to the ghosts
of a Transatlantic relation buried in
1989 under the Berlin Wall parts.
In any case it gives a lot to discuss
at next Miami Transatlantic Week within
the future Transatlantic leadership
session.
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