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WorldView: President Jacques Chirac said yesterday at the European Council in Brussels that "Europe today has more than ever the need, the necessity, to reinforce itself and its dynamism and unity. That is the goal of the constitution in a world that is more multi-polar than ever."
He spoke after Tony Blair said in an interview that some people in Europe are in a state of denial about George Bush's victory, that he does want to heal the rift with Europe, and that both sides must now listen to each other realistically.
Their remarks encapsulate an emerging debate on transatlantic relations. Can they be repaired in a second Bush term? What policy and institutional factors would be involved? Are their respective values and interests diverging inescapably in the longer term?
Those who argue for repair tend to start with the transatlantic economic relationship. It remains extraordinarily deep despite the political and strategic disagreements over Iraq, Iran, terrorism, Israel and the Palestinians, United Nations reform, the International Criminal Court, the Kyoto Protocol and pre-emptive wars run by coalitions of the willing which developed in the first Bush term and which he seems set to continue in his second one.
Total transatlantic trade in goods increased from $422 billion in 2000 to an estimated $475 billion this year. European affiliates in the US are expected to earn $60 billion in profits this year; the weak dollar brought US earnings in the EU last year to $82 billion, a figure up by nearly 30 per cent in 2004. Total US-EU commerce came to about $2.5 trillion in 2000, making their ties by far the strongest in the world.
Experts point out there is more European investment in Texas than the total US investment in Japan and China put together. Over the last four years more than 60 per cent of US overseas investment has gone to EU states and is expected to reach a record high of $120 billion in 2004.
Such figures were underlined at the EU-US summit in Ireland last June, as was this state's central interest in them. Ireland makes up over five per cent of total trade in merchandise goods between the two blocs, and has the same proportion of US investment in the EU. The task of repairing transatlantic relations will fall significantly on John Bruton's shoulders, as the new EU ambassador in Washington. As he sees it, the depth of the economic relationship provides a strong motive to overcome trade disputes over steel, beef hormones, corporate taxes or biotechnology and arguments in the World Trade Organisation over agricultural subsidies.
It is one thing to repair relations, another to restructure them to take account of new realities.
Blair said in his interview with the (London) Times yesterday that he agrees with Bush's war on terror and therefore does not expect to be compensated for it. "I do not feel we have been acting out of blind loyalty or out of compassion as an ally". Nor is neoconservatism a world away from the progressive left in wanting to extend democracy and human rights in the Middle East.
He said Britain is still uniquely placed in Europe to find areas of common ground. But that "does also require America to be prepared to reach out. You don't get a partnership except on a basis of equality". Action is needed on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Iran and Iraq.
A more equal transatlantic relationship does not necessarily betoken a more multipolar world, according to critics of Chirac's approach.
The term alarms them because it implies the emergence of separate, competing blocs in a new global order no longer dominated by US hegemony and military unilateralism.
It is not difficult to see how this feeds into French ambitions for a more powerful Europe capable of projecting its power elsewhere in the world.
In that perspective NATO would gradually be superseded as the main pillar of European security by a common EU foreign and security policy.
But could it be built on the basis of such clear differences between British and French leaders?
A lot will depend on how Bush responds to European demands for greater engagement and equality, especially on the Middle East, and who he appoints to key posts. If he continues his basic commitment to unilateral action, military dominance and pre-emption it is hard not to see a growing divergence of interests and values with Europe, their deep economic relations notwithstanding.
These do not necessarily provide the glue and solidarity to hold the post-war transatlantic alliance together when the political and strategic rationale for it has changed so profoundly after the end of the Cold War. What we are seeing now is a playing out of the end of that period and a transition to a new one.
It is, of course, a mistake to counterpose the US and the EU in this way, without taking proper account of divisions within the US itself.
The multipolar idea overlooks the extent of commonality that still exists and tends to rely on an "othering" process between Europe and the United States to reinforce divisions. But the growing differences between a secular, liberal Europe in which the distinction between public morality and private religious belief is insisted upon and a US in which it is being so eroded creates its own differentiating momentum.
The same applies to models of political order. Growing attention is being paid in the US to the alternative multilateral, transnational and dialogic EU now that the European Constitution, as Bertie Ahern calls it, has been signed and awaits ratification.
According to a recent book by the Washington-based writer and activist Jeremy Rifkin, Europe is more egalitarian, communitarian and cosmopolitan than the US, making it a much more attractive international model for the 21st century.
Its soft power compensates for hard military supremacy.
Such a long view also informs a stimulating article in the latest Foreign Affairs magazine by Kalypso Nicolaides. She argues that by virtue of these characteristics the EU is a "demoi-ocracy", which harnesses the distinctive political community or demos of each national democracy into a new kind of transnational pluralism.
Such intellectual straws in the wind should be taken seriously when looking at a potentially momentous shift in transatlantic relations, in which forthcoming decisions and events will shape future decades.