US ATTITUDES TO TREATY:While the Bush administration has sent mixed signals on EU integration, most US observers are now positive, writes Denis Stauntonin Washington
THE DEBATE over the Lisbon Treaty has received little media attention in the United States but Washington's foreign policy establishment will be watching tomorrow's referendum with close interest.
The Bush administration has sent mixed signals over the past seven years about European political integration, with the state department offering consistent support for the process, while some neo-conservatives elsewhere in government are more sceptical.
"I think there is a significant degree of scepticism about the treaty within the White House and the Pentagon and some wings of the executive branch," says Nile Gardiner, director of the Heritage Foundation's Margaret Thatcher Centre for Freedom.
"The state department has traditionally supported European integration and there exists at the moment a divide between administration officials who are supportive of the European project and those who see it as a threat to Nato and to bilateral alliances with European countries."
Daniel Benjamin, director of the Brookings Institution's Centre on the United States and Europe, says that Democrats are united in their support for further European integration and that sceptical voices are becoming weaker even among conservatives.
"From an American perspective, anything that makes the EU a more coherent and decisive actor will actually be welcomed here in the long run.
"Some will argue that it's another step in an effort to create a counterweight to American power but I think that view is in a minority right now," he says.
Marian Tupy, a policy analyst at the conservative Cato Institute, argues that the EU is hypocritical in trumpeting its commitment to democracy without giving most Europeans a chance to vote on the new treaty.
He dismisses US conservative fears about Lisbon's foreign policy impact, however, as unfounded and unrepresentative of mainstream thinking in Washington.
"There is ample evidence that the European powers are not prepared to undertake the kind of military spending that would be necessary in order to threaten the dominance of the US globally, primarily because they have other priorities," he says.
"We are talking about neo-conservatives. We are talking about people whose vision of the US is as the sole hegemon.
"They do not believe in a multi-polar world," says Tupy.
"They believe that the United States should not be simply primus inter pares but that it should be a dominant force in the world and also the world's policeman.
"They will look at any increase in foreign and security policy co-operation in Europe as a threat to the continued dominance and hegemony of the US."
Tupy warns against exploiting the views of American neo-conservatives to alarm voters into supporting the treaty, suggesting that the US right and European federalists are setting each other up as bogeymen.
"The neo-cons are a declining force in the US.
"They had a brief moment in the sunshine and they managed to get the US involved in a useless war but they are on their way out," he says.
Gardiner insists that US opposition to Lisbon is not confined to neo-conservatives, although he acknowledges that the treaty's loudest critics in Washington are conservatives who "fear for the future of the Anglo-American special relationship", often advised by British Eurosceptics like himself.
"There are close ties between Eurosceptics in Britain and opponents of Euro-federalism in Washington," he says.
Benjamin maintains that, even if British Eurosceptics and home-grown neo-conservatives are making the most noise about the treaty, most Washington foreign policy analysts will be disappointed if Ireland votes No tomorrow.
"The US can't be more pro-integration, pro-European, than the Europeans themselves, and Washington will deal with it.
"It will continue to have the same sort of emphasis I assume on bilateral relations that it has now while the development of stronger ties with Brussels will be inhibited.
"Look, it's not the highest thing on the American radar screen but I think that there would be some disappointment," he says.