The National Interest
Fall 2001

E Pluribus Confusio

by John Van Oudenaren

 

. . . Reactions to Bush by European leaders, the press and the general public confirm the degree to which Europe, freed of its Cold War dependence on Washington, feels that it can and must assert itself in relations with the United States. "Superpower"—a term rarely used in this context even two years ago—has become commonplace in discussions of the European Union’s economic and political (if not military) ambitions vis-à-vis Washington. While political leaders on both sides of the Atlantic affirm the continued importance of nato, the Europeans clearly attach greater long-term significance to the EU, and they suspect Washington of trying to use the alliance and its enlargement to bolster American influence on the continent and undercut the relative importance of the Union.

A central challenge for the United States in coming years will be to preserve the existing network of transatlantic economic, political, security and institutional ties even as it adjusts to an enlarged and more assertive eu. Among other tasks, this will require managing a complex U.S.-EU economic relationship in which the sheer weight of cooperative links across the Atlantic intersects with differing visions of capitalism and approaches to globalization.

Less well recognized, it will also require U.S. policymakers to deal with the often jarring contrast between the EU’s assertive external posture and its persistent internal divisions. Such divisions are apparent in the intensifying debate among European politicians about the "finality" of the integration process, in the Irish electorate’s rejection of the Treaty of Nice, and indeed in the violent anti-EU demonstrations that increasingly mar the very summits at which European leaders seek to affirm the continent’s unity and resolve toward the rest of the world. Indeed, it is not too much to say that the future of U.S.-EU relations depends more on the vicissitudes of Europe’s internal dilemmas than on anything else. . . .

For the United States and other countries, deciding how to respond to the emergence of a political, economic and security entity that exerts enormous external power but that is not organized like a traditional nation-state will be a major challenge. In Washington, the question of how to relate to the Union inevitably will be debated in the context of U.S. support for European integration stretching back to the Truman Administration. Although such support undoubtedly has existed, it is important to stress that the United States was never an uncritical backer of European integration. It came out of World War II committed to a "universalist" approach to building a new international order, one that rejected the special economic zones associated with Imperial Preference and fascist autarky. Universalism was embodied in the commitment to the most favored nation principle in the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and to universal currency convertibility in the Bretton Woods system. It was only when universalism failed to work in reviving Europe’s economy, raising the specter of communist takeovers, that the United States abandoned the universalist approach and began to work with Europe on region-specific responses to the crisis of that day.

The key point is that the United States was always attentive to the content of European regional integration and how it related to U.S. interests in the global system. When told about Robert Schuman’s plan for a coal and steel community, Dean Acheson was alarmed at what he feared was a cover for "a gigantic European cartel." Only after these concerns were mitigated did the United States mobilize support for the community and the GATT waiver that it required. Washington later backed the creation of the Common Market, but it never endorsed the extension of trade privileges to overseas colonies and territories. What the United States did not want were amorphous economic and political arrangements that would set up difficult-to-combat economic barriers against outsiders, without creating the core political strengths that Washington desired out of European integration.

The European order that is emerging today—one that the United States has been actively promoting—is in some respects the antithesis of the one that Acheson and his successors worked to foster. With open-ended enlargement, an increasingly differentiated and uneven internal decision-making system, and a network of preferential trade and political relationships that extends in all directions, the EU is a far cry from the geographically and functionally well-defined entity of the 1950s and 1960s. It is, as David Calleo and others have noted, a hybrid confederal model that will take many years to work out its internal constitutional dilemmas, and that is itself at risk of becoming overextended to the point of total ineffectiveness. . . .