EU: The European Union's relationship with the United States will feed back into the EU's debates about its own future constitutional and institutional shape, writes Paul Gillespie.
Power and weakness; bellicosity and civil power; primacy and subordination; hard and soft power: these are but some of the terms used to characterise relations between Europe and the United States this year as their values and interests seemed to diverge more and more in an uncertain world. It has appeared to many analysts and political leaders that the two blocs are drifting apart politically after two generations or more when the transatlantic relationship remained relatively stable and, in world terms, dominant.
Looking ahead to 2003, it looks as if their relationship will come under further strain over Iraq and the Middle East. There are clear indications that this is so militarily, politically and economically. As the European Union enlarges to take in more than twice the US population over the next 15 years, and as it integrates more to govern such a vast number of people in an unprecedented transnational experiment, there are many voices saying the relationship with the United States must become more equal to reflect these new realities.
The sharp rhetoric heard in opinion columns, journal articles and political jousting is not necessarily matched in the findings of public opinion research; but very significant differences in approach between Europeans and Americans are nonetheless revealed there. A survey by the Chicago Council of Foreign Relations and the German Marshall Fund of the United States this autumn (reported in the November/December issue of Foreign Policy magazine) found that people in Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy and Poland see eye to eye with US citizens on many issues. Interestingly, there is often more similarity between US public opinion and European attitudes than between US leaders and their citizens.
Europeans and Americans give warm ratings to each other. They want their governments to work together as much as possible and exert strong leadership in the world. Most Americans want their government to share decision-making with Europe, while 80 per cent of the Europeans want the EU to become a superpower like the US, but co-operating not competing with it.
There are significant variations and similarities, as with the 25 per cent of Americans who would prefer to stay out of world affairs compared to 23 per cent for Germany and 24 per cent for the Netherlands.
Three quarters of both populations agree the United Nations and other international organisations should be strengthened. So do similar proportions agree that force should be used to uphold international law; significantly this applies especially if the UN supports US actions in Iraq, though there are some interesting variations, notably in Germany, where support for military action never rises above 41 per cent, while opposition ranges from 49 to 72 per cent.
Although Americans and Europeans may agree on global threats, they differ on their severity, on how much defence spending is required to combat them and on how to share global leadership. They have quite different views on the Middle East conflict.
Europeans feel more secure than Americans - and 55 per cent of them think US policies contributed to the September 11th attacks in New York and Washington. Only 19 per cent of Europeans want to increase military spending, compared to 46 per cent in the US (dealing with expenditure that is already far ahead of the European average, even if it absorbs only 3.5 per cent of US GNP compared to a much higher average during the Cold War). Europeans do not want superpower status if it involves more military expenditure. They would prefer to spend money on foreign aid and economic reconstruction.
Attitudes towards Israel and the Middle East are sharply different, as is willingness to share global leadership by making the US-European relationship more equal.
Interestingly, this snapshot of public opinion tends to bear out analysts who say the US-European relationship is set to undergo turbulence and transformation in coming years. How it is reconfigured will depend on political, military and economic events, not least in the unfolding crisis over Iraq next year.
It is a mistake to overstate the competitive tension, given the huge economic interdependency involved in the transatlantic relationship. As Anthony Wayne, the US assistant secretary of state for economic and business affairs, puts it, "on economic policy as well as on foreign policy, the US and the EU collaborate on far more than we fight".
Conflicts over bananas, steel and taxation have been solved, even while those on biotechnology, the Kyoto Protocol and farm subsidies continue. Two-way trade and investment totals some two trillion dollars, the biggest in the world by far and relatively balanced.
Nonetheless the very equality of the US-EU economic relationship, and the scale of EU enlargement, will force the issue of transatlantic political and security relations more onto the agenda in coming years.
The Europeans must come to terms with the fact that President Bush's team has opted decisively for primacy as its preferred option among the potential models of international leadership on offer. Primacy means that US power will be used to consolidate and widen the disparity between the US and everyone else - or any possible combination of competitors or antagonists. In fact the military disparity has never been wider historically. The alternative models of cooperative security espoused by Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter this year has been rejected, although their pleas for magnanimity and restraint in the use of US power are still extant. Isolation is also rejected, as is selective engagement involving a renewed balance of power arrangement.
Many US critics of the primacy doctrine say it is unsustainable in the long term, because the hard military power on which it is predicated cannot engage more than a small proportion of what it takes to assert world dominance. Such theoretical disputes will be put to a severe practical test in coming months if the US moves against Iraq on its own or with only selective support from European powers and ambiguous UN backing. The same applies to any radical approaches it makes to reorder Middle Eastern politics and oil interests.
This international context will feed back into the EU's debates about its own future constitutional and institutional shape as a new treaty is prepared and negotiated. Political identities are always constructed in relation to others. This applies to the European Union while it makes these decisions over the next two years.