KASTELLORIZO, Greece, 5 May 2003 — On the love boat that hosted Prince Charles and Princess Diana’s honeymoon, European Union foreign ministers this weekend contemplated how to salvage their troubled marriage with the United States.
Cruising off an idyllic Greek island, ministers from the 25 present and future EU states tried to draw lessons from their rift over the US-led war in Iraq and Washington’s drive to reshape the world along its own lines with or without United Nations authority. “We all agree that, yes, there is a crisis or at least a problem in our trans-Atlantic relationship,” Greek Foreign Minister George Papandreou told reporters after chairing the discussion aboard the private luxury yacht Alexander. Participants described two schools of thought around the table: Those who believed the US shift toward using pre-emptive force unilaterally if necessary was a temporary aberration, and those who detected a long-term shift under way even before President George W. Bush’s election and the Sept, 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.
European External Relations Commissioner Chris Patten shocked some ministers by arguing that, but for a handful of disputed votes in Florida in the 2000 presidential election, there might never have been a war in Iraq, EU sources said. British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw contradicted him, arguing the trend toward a more unconstrained US use of power was growing well before Bush’s wafer-thin victory, and even his Democratic opponent, Al Gore, would have faced irresistible pressure to act against Iraq after the shock of Sept. 11. One senior EU policy-maker said privately before the war he was worried that a group of neoconservative “revolutionary imperialists”, dismissive of multilateral institutions such as the U.N., NATO and the EU, had gained the ascendancy in US foreign policy, sidelining Secretary of State Colin Powell. After deep trans-Atlantic differences over Iraq, some EU officials fret that the United States may reverse half-a-century of supporting closer European integration and seek to divide and cherry-pick Europeans for “coalitions of the willing”.
Whatever their different analyses, the ministers agreed Europe needs to try to answer for itself the tough questions on new threats such as weapons of mass destruction, terrorism and “irresponsible states” which prompted the Bush administration to adopt a controversial new national security strategy last year. “If we want to have a substantive discussion with the United States, we first and foremost have to agree what our own priorities are as a Union,” Papandreou said. For some Europeans, that could mean overcoming a fundamental aversion to the use of force. For others, it would mean no longer leaving the major effort of military spending and the hard choices about using force only to the United States. For Europe’s two main powers, Britain and France, it would mean reconciling their national interests inside the EU rather than pursuing them in the UN Security Council or bilaterally with Washington without regard to their European partners.
To stimulate reflection, Papandreou invited some 60 leading thinkers on both sides of the Atlantic to send the ministers their thoughts on the future of trans-Atlantic relations and the EU’s stuttering common foreign and security policy. Many contributors, including some eminent Americans, argued that a stronger, more militarily capable EU was vital to act both as a credible partner for and as a restraining multilateral influence on the unrivalled world superpower. Several called for a new economic pact on liberalizing trade and investment — areas in which Europe speaks with one voice and the United States treats it as an equal partner — to relaunch the troubled relationship.
Few EU ministers shared British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s view of a “one polar world” in which Europe’s role was to second the United States in sorting out global problems. But many agreed with Papandreou there was no point blaming the United States for not listening to Europe if the EU did not sort out its own common interests and speak with a single voice. To that end, the ministers mandated EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana to start drafting a first European security strategy including specific proposals on how to fight the spread of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons, for discussion at a mid-June EU summit in Greece and a US-EU summit in Washington. The challenge will be to produce a document with bite that goes beyond the sort of lowest common denominator “motherhood and apple pie” wish list that Greek officials compiled with what member states said should be the EU’s foreign policy priorities — and then to stick to it.
