Europe and the US - is it the end of the affair?

WorldView: For 36 per cent of voters in five European countries, the United States is a greater threat to global safety than Iran or China, according to a Harris poll for the Financial Times this week.

And the Pew international survey of 15 countries, published last week, finds majorities in 10 of them believe the war waged by the US in Iraq is the principal danger to world peace. Among the traditional allies of the US, only Germans say Iran is a greater danger.

How to square these public opinion findings with the relatively upbeat outcome of the annual summit between the US and European Union in Vienna on Wednesday? There was convergence in their joint declaration on Iran, China, climate change, energy renewables and funding the Palestinian Authority, even if disagreements on world trade, visas and aviation persisted.

John Bruton, head of the EU delegation in Washington, said the "Iraq experience has taught the Americans the limitations of military power, but in turn the Europeans have learnt that, whatever we thought about the decision to have this war, it's in our own interest to have Iraq stabilised".

President Bush acknowledged European attitudes on Guantanamo by saying he wants to close it and appealing for the past to be put behind them on Iraq. He got irritated when asked about the polls at a press conference, dismissing as "absurd" the notion that his policies destabilise world politics. As counter-examples, he pointed to US humanitarian efforts against Aids in Africa and its involvement in Darfur.

According to Javier Solana, the EU's foreign policy chief; "we are working together in just about every important dossier", including Sudan, Somalia, Kosovo, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Thus there is a great contrast between the current governing elite and public opinion in Europe on relations with the Bush administration. Mark Leonard, author of a recent book on why the EU will run the 21st century, observed: "There has been a remarkable honeymoon between governments and their rhetoric and the way they talk about issues, their desire to find agreement rather than disagreement. But it is quite fragile. On a whole series of different issues the wheels could come off at any point. Iran is the most obvious."

Leonard's book was part of a flurry of publications in 2004, many of them by American authors, arguing along the same lines as he that this century will reward multilateralism and diplomatic soft power, rather than unilateral militarism and that therefore the EU provides a better model than the US. Several of them are having second thoughts now, following rejection of the EU's constitutional treaty and its faltering political leadership since then.

Charles Kupchan, author of The End of the American Era and European expert at the Council of Foreign Relations in New York, sees these factors together with growing economic protectionism, right-wing populism and hostility towards immigrants "plunging the enterprise of European integration into its most serious crisis since World War II".

He concludes that "Europeans must face the reality that they have reached a watershed moment. Unless they urgently revive the project of political and economic union, one of the greatest accomplishments of the 20th century will be at risk." Only a more centralised and capable union can make the EU more relevant to the lives of its citizens, he argues.

One of the obvious ways in which that can be done is by creating a more unified and effective foreign policy to counter US unilateralism by making the world safer in the eyes of its citizens. Other opinion polls consistently show this is what people in most EU member states, Ireland included, want to see happen.

The proposed EU constitution provides for this function and whether the document is rewritten, renamed or kept, it will be retrieved. It corresponds to a basic political reality that integration has grown subject to external pressure. This week's news shows how that pressure continues despite political setbacks.

Much will depend on whether the transatlantic "security community" is being renewed and developed by these tensions, or going through a terminal decline.

Is this a crisis arising from the Bush administration's unilateralism, which will be put right by a new president and more equal transatlantic structures? Or does it signify a deeper conflict of interests and values which makes the status quo unsustainable? A basic definition of the function of a "security community" is that it resolves conflicts peacefully and not by force.

Such a relationship is free from neither conflict nor power, and it must be capable of developing in response to internal and external change. Kupchan worries that Europe's politics are being renationalised; the US would then have to confront the return of national jealousies to the Continent, making the EU too weak to provide the US with the economic and strategic partner it needs.

There are, of course, conflicts within each of the blocs about which way to go. US neoconservatives see the EU as an emerging hostile power which must be countered and not cultivated.

Europe is divided between those who want to maintain and develop the transatlantic relationship and those who say it has come to an end.

There is tension between those who argue, as did most authors of a volume published in 2004 by the Institute of European Affairs in Dublin ahead of the Dromoland EU-US summit, that close economic ties across the Atlantic - by far the strongest in the world - make it an "indispensable partnership", and those who say there are no longer stable common values in Europe and the US to sustain a wider community.

The next few years will tell which is the better account and whether a tipping point has been reached.

Political leaderships point in the direction of renewal rather than termination, whereas public opinion points another way.