The Transatlantic relationship is entering a more dangerous era than the period of high tensions generated by the invasion of Iraq. At least at that time, the issues and the positions of each player seemed to be crystal-clear. Today, every single aspect of the EU/USA relationship is getting blurred, generating a widely spread interrogation about its very nature, and therefore about its very future.

On the one hand, the EU and the USA are strongly cooperating concerning some hot international issues like Syria or Iran. Pretty successfully for the first one; largely unsuccessfully for the second one.
On the other hand, from trade issues to environmental issues and the fundamental questions of values (such as torture and treatment of war prisoners), they are officially following completely diverging courses. But, on both sides of the Atlantic, facts are emerging in very contradictory manners, generating this ‘blurred image’.

There again, on the one hand, the official policy of the Bush administration is to keep the USA at bay of any of its Geneva Convention’s obligations when it comes to dealing with terrorists suspects (such as in Guantanamo or in the unknown number of ‘outsourced’ secret prisons CIA and the US Army have developed worldwide), but we see that a very large segment of US public opinion is opposed to that policy, and that even within the Bush administration, a significant opposition to this policy is growing (especially within the Department of State, under Condoleeza Rice’s impulse).
Meanwhile in the EU, on the same topic, though the EU’s position is clear and stands firm against torture and sticks to a broad acceptance of the Geneva Convention, we see a temptation by many governments to follow-up the ‘rule of force versus rule of law’ policy embodied by people like Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld (such as the recent attempts by Tony Blair’s government to open the door for such kind of behaviours with the proposed anti-terrorists laws). And of course, we learn now that some new EU member-states are hosting part of the secret ‘outsourced’ secret US jail system, without having informed their people of course, showing that their governments do not share the same vision of human rights as their fellow EU member-states (1).

Blurring the lines between what is lawful and what is not, between what is legitimate and what is not, between what is us and what is them, seems to represent the main legacy of the last years of the Transatlantic relationship. And it does good to nobody, certainly not to this very relationship.

The effects in Europe of such a mixed-up situation are easy to monitor. They do represent the facts that anybody trying to update the Transatlantic relationship must take into account if he/she does not want to end up talking or writing for nothing. And in particular those who think, as I do, that the world will be better off with a sound and sustainable EU/USA partnership, must look at those facts even if they don’t please them or make things more complex. One does not make good politics with ‘politically correct’ ideas or datas. And those facts are definitely ‘transatlantically incorrect’, obliging those who take care of the relations between the EU and the USA to start forgetting four of their core belief regarding the Transatlantic relationship.

1. Forget about the belief that anything but a very small part of the European public opinion has any positive image of the USA. European public opinion increasingly thinks that the US government and its institutions are acting in a negative way, against their interests, when it comes to the global arena (environment, security, values) and in direct confrontation when it comes to bilateral relations (trade issues, laws on privacy, patents, … ). The largely dominant perception in Europe of a complete US failure in Iraq combined with the disastrous management of Katrina’s effects, have deleted the beliefs of any US superiority in the fields of moral values, social management and war strategy. This point is crucial because in many ways it served as the underlying conviction allowing the post WWII Transatlantic relationship to emerge and last. Therefore, one can ignore the common belief in Transatlantic circles that the amount of money invested on both sides of the Atlantic makes a significant difference when ones look at the next 10/20 years. It may help preventing the two sides to drift away, but it does not weight enough to oppose alone the trends generated by the four facts presented here.

2. Forget about the belief that new EU Member States will provide any ‘natural’ lasting support to US administration’s policies in Europe. Just look at what will happen to the ‘secret prisons’ when countries will be identified and governments obliged to react. Besides, the current ‘natural pro-US’ stance of the governments of these countries are essentially resulting of two factors which are rapidly fading away: former Communist apparatchiks who traded Washington for Moscow in the early 90s (the last ones will be out of business by 2010), and expatriates coming back from the USA after having immigrated there in the past decades (another source which cannot be replenished). For 10 years now, the upcoming generations in the new Member states have been raised and trained within the EU; and their future is from now on linked to it first of all. Even Poland and the Baltic states are part of this evolution contrarily to a widespread belief within current dominant Transatlantic circles.

3. Forget about the belief that British and Dutch policy makers will keep the post WWII Transatlantic relationship at the heart of their own policies. Public opinions in these two countries are perfectly similar to the ones in Germany and France. The Netherlands, being in the Eurozone, is from now on totally bound to the fate of Euroland; and to nothing else. With the war on Iraq, the complete failure of UK’s presidency of the EU and its rapidly deteriorating economy (therefore crushing down the so-called ‘UK model’), UK’s image on the continent is in pieces and UK will most probably be kept out of any significant European initiatives in the coming years. So, far from being able to stir the EU towards the post WWII Transatlantic relationship, what these two solid transatlantic allies may only be able to do is to stimulate the emergence of an updated Transatlantic relationship. The Netherlands can on top of that play a key role by explaining to the US decision makers what is happening within the EU which makes the ‘aggiornamento’ compulsory. The UK elites cannot play that role because they still do not understand what is happening on the continent.

4. Forget about the belief that the Transatlantic relationship can be patched by any quick fix, such as a generation (or a handful) of European leaders embracing the old post WWII relationship based upon the fundamental unbalance between the USA and Europe, or copying the US model within the EU. Such ‘clones’ of current US politics within the EU political arena are not working for two key reasons:
. such ‘clones’ have no chance to compete successfully in European politics because the trends being set by recent votes in Europe (referenda on the constitution, German and Polish elections, … ) are showing a strong will from European voters to refuse any destruction of their social model in favour of a US modelled society. The European elites will have to find a way to solve the problem but the solution will definitely not the dismantlement of the European the social model. Imagination and innovation will be required on that aspect. Definitely not the kind of political content which can be offered by today’s ‘clones’ of US politics.
. the upcoming generations of European leaders, those really representing a major rupture with the babyboomer generation (to which people like Blair, Merkel, Sarkosy, … still belong), will only come into power in the EU at the end of the decade. They are the first EU born and raised political generation. An element which does not push them into the directions of copying anybody but rather to find their own European way forward. In many ways, the risk for this generation is to be to much ‘Euro-nationalist’ rather being too much ‘Atlanticist’. Meanwhile this change of generation illustrates the fact that most usual political relays of US politics in Europe are still national … when the new political arena for the EU is going to be EUwide.

Those facts are not only describing what is over, what is the past. They also offer very precise elements to identify new trends and therefore where to put the emphasis to reshape the Transatlantic relationship.
It will have to be a relationship between equal. Not because anybody claims it, but because once one cannot anymore subdue the other one, it has to get into an equal relationship, or to accept confrontation as the only other option.
It will have to set itself a new common goal, which cannot anymore be implicitly to emulate the US vision of the world or the ‘American way of life’.
It will have to redefine a way to constructively involve the younger generations because they are the cement of tomorrow’s partnership; and today, they are just parting away from the EU/USA relationship.

The vocabulary, the topics, the players of the Transatlantic relationship will have to be significantly changed, because what they are now will have almost no impact and no significance for the future of the EU, and therefore of the EU/USA relations.

In many ways, the Transatlantic relationship is suffering in Europe a similar challenge as the European project. For decades, the Transatlantic relationship was able to integrate all aspects of the relationship between the Europeans and the Americans, as well as the EU process was able to integrate all the stakeholders of the European integration. Today, we see that the EU/USA relations are more and more unable to be covered by the existing policies and instruments of the Transatlantic relationship forger after WWII; in the same way the EU process brutally discovers that it is unable to integrate a new major stakeholder, the people. In both cases, drastic changes are required if one wants to understand and then act in order to preserve the project.

Franck Biancheri
Paris (France)

(1) By the way, I doubt that the concerned countries can keep on such a policy now that the information is public. To just ‘follow’ US leadership in the EU is going to become a risky game for national leaders, both politically and juridically.