Time to face reality: Americans come from Mars, Europeans are from Venus

Date: 27/06/02

By Simon Coss

Despite President Bush's efforts to repair the US-EU alliance, analysts believe the two sides no longer share a common world view.

IT MAY seem like a rather twisted kind of logic.

But more and more think-tanks are suggesting that the best way to heal the rift in relations between the European Union and the United States is for the two transatlantic partners to stop pretending they're the best of friends.

US policy analyst Robert Kagan set the tone in a recent article published by the Brussels-based European Policy Centre.

'President Bush is making a noble effort to pull together the fraying alliance, but the fact is Europeans and Americans no longer share a common view of the world.

'On the all-important question of power - the utility of power, the morality of power - they have parted ways,' he argues.

'On major strategic and international questions today, Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus; they agree on little and understand one another even less,' he adds.

Kagan argues that since the end of the Cold War, Europe and the US have developed fundamentally different views of just what sort of place the world is and should be.

He says the EU regularly defends the idea of a world where the rule of law rather than sheer brute force should decide how things are done. This is why it has supported initiatives such as the Kyoto Protocol on global warming, the international criminal court and a rules-based global trading system, to mention just three examples of where Washington has been accused of arrogantly ploughing its own furrow since George W. Bush became president.

The US, on the other hand, sees the world as an essentially anarchic and violent place where sometimes the only way to deal with international problems is by showing who's boss, with military force if needs be.

Kagan also accuses Europeans of being somewhat disingenuous when they criticise this kind of US unilateralism.

'Even today Europe's rejection of power politics ultimately depends on America's willingness to use force around the world against those who still do believe in power politics,' he says.

This has led to a situation where Washington now often regards EU member states as 'annoying, irrelevant, naïve and ungrateful,' while the Union sees the US as a bullying 'rogue colossus', he says.

But Kagan insists that rather than trying to see eye-to-eye, the only way forward for EU-US relations is for the two sides to agree to differ.

'There is no cure for this transatlantic divergence,' he says. 'Whatever else we do let's stop pretending we agree.'

Steven Everts of the London-based Centre for European Reform also raises the question of the fundamental ideological divide between Europe and Washington in his recent paper EU Foreign Policy: From Bystander to Actor.

'Europe should resist superpower envy and develop its own distinctive approach [to foreign policy],' Everts argues.

Kirsty Hughes, a senior fellow with the Brussels-based Centre for European Policy Studies, agrees with Everts that the EU's future does not lie in efforts to ape the US.

'The future EU will not be a federal state on the US model, but will continue to be in effect some combination of the US and the UN,' she said in an article published in last week's European Voice.

The think-tanks seem pretty clear on the issue.

Breaking up may be hard to do, but sometimes a mature divorce settlement is far better than a bad marriage.

Despite President Bush's efforts to repair the US-EU alliance, analysts believe the two sides no longer share a common world view.