The rift between the US et the EU can only widen. I will just mention two recent factors (among many) pushing in that direction : on the one hand, the current collapse of UK’s credibility in Eastern Europe to seriously promote an alternative to any Franco-German vision of Europe’s future; on the other hand, the growing number of contentious issues of which the last one is the current CIA rendition planes and jails in Europe.

The first factor is affecting in a sustainable way the credibility of US policy most dedicated and influential promoter in Europe, the UK, and will therefore severely hamper in the future the US ability to promote its own agenda in the region.
The second factor is creating much deeper damages than many in the US may think of, and that most of their “usual relays” in Europe will tell them. It has immediately become a daily conversation topic for dozens of millions of Europeans and bundle with the pre-existing bitter feelings left by both the invasion of Iraq and the common understanding in Europe that the so-called “war on terror” is just a failure.
And contrarily to the communication strategy which Secretary of State Dr Rice has been advised to adopt during her current visit to Europe, the mixed message based on the one hand on a “let’s trust us, we are the good guys” and on the other hand, “stop developing the ‘not in my backyard’ attitude and be responsible grown-up people” is completely missing its target.
Maybe one of the reason for such an error is that Washington is relying too much on an expertise about Europeans developed by people and communities who do not understand anymore the Europeans.

As everybody noticed, in particular this year, Europeans tend to behave in a way which takes their own leaders by surprise. The reaction of EU’s elites whether from politics, media, business and academia, to the rejection, by French and Dutch voters of the EU Constitution project six months ago was eloquent: rage, threats, insults and flow of comments on the fact that citizens were just “wrong”.
Meanwhile it is obvious, for anybody who did tour the US in the weeks ahead of the French and Dutch referenda, that the US elites of politics, academia, media and business, were totally unprepared to such an outcome (1) , and to the speed with which the whole ratification process did collapse. Obviously they believed the martial tone of the Commission and political leaders and experts explaining that whatever the French and Dutch will say, the show will go on. Well, in terms of show, it became a way of the cross and the US policy makers had to witness a complete disarray of the EU elites, a disarray which is far from being over.

This crisis of “anticipation”, a key component of any policy making, generated responses in several parts of the globe. For instance, as a Canadians politician told me: “from now on, let’s be honest, we cannot rely anymore only upon our usual sources of information within Europe to assess the course of EU affairs. None of them warned us about what was coming. We cannot fully trust them anymore to shape up our policies.”
But did it trigger such a “review” of the intellectual inputs into US decision making regarding EU affairs? From what I see and what I know, I have to conclude “No. Not yet at least.”.
The same private and public operators are packing the same old Transatlantic seminars and workshops. And the US administration keeps on relying on an expertise which did not warn it about the magnitude of the rift which the Iraq war was about to create, which did not send any warning about the possible failure of the planned EU Constitution, which did not send any signal about the likely failure of the UK presidency and its consequences for the pro-US alliance within the EU in particular regarding the new Member states and right now which do not input any warning about the current CIA planes and secret jails crisis, leaving Washington decision makers that a good blending of moral leadership and patronizing attitude will do … when it will not.

As I tried to explain in my article called ‘Four Transatlantic beliefs to forget
in order to undertake successfully the aggiornamento of the EU-USA relationship’, published on November 8 by Tiesweb, the very fabric of EU/US relations is rapidly and drastically changing. One of the major modification is affecting the European public opinion. Not only its vision of the US now differs a lot from what it was 5 years ago, but the changes are irreversible for most of them. Meanwhile, the same public opinion is becoming the key power broker on EU affairs, relegating the current national European elites which are the traditional partners on European affairs for US policy makers to a secondary role.

Supposing that a good US/EU relationship is an asset for the future, knowing that it cannot be anymore obtain on the basis of the previous US/European countries basis which prevailed after 1945, then the fate of this relationship is linked to only two factors:
. the very nature of US and EU policies, which may be converging or diverging
. the ways and means used to assess the situation and try to impact on the perception of the other side.

For years now, I strongly pushed for a much more pro-active involvement of the EU in the Transatlantic debate on the US territory, within US society.
Now, I think it is time to add a new dimension to the required reshaping of the Transatlantic relationship for the coming decades: the “updating” of input sources within the US policy making circles regarding EU affairs and EU future evolutions.
Indeed most EU experts in the US as well as most usual partners of the US within the EU are completely lost when it comes to understanding what is currently going on in Europe, and how to reach out the larger segments of European populations which start to influence directly the fate of this continent. This fact alone can explain why the second factor of the EU/US relationship is not providing any relief regarding the negative impact of the first factor for a few years now. Far from that it seems on the contrary to reinforce the problems.

It is time to bring new visions, new expertise and new know-how within the inner circles of Transatlantic policy-making. Within the EU the process is on its way because the “decision makers” are less and less able to “decide”; they are de facto sidelined. In Washington, and in US European networks, such an “orange revolution” of the expertise on EU affairs is still to come.

Unless such a change does occur rapidly, the rift between the two continents can only widen.

 

Franck Biancheri
Paris (France)

(1) I can easily assess this degree of surprise by the US policy makers and experts on EU affairs, as I was probably one of the only Europeans touring the US a few months before the referenda who told US audiences in Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Wisconsin and Washington DC that from my analysis the trends were leading the EU to a political disaster on the EU Constitution issue, because our elites were completely ignoring the signals coming from our citizens. The very sceptical reactions of my US audiences at that time were eloquent about the fact that they could not imagine that both their elites and ours could be wrong on such an issue like the fate of the EU Constitution.