Europe’s citizens unconvinced about better EU-US relations

By Andrew Beatty

Date: 08/09/05

The twentieth of September this year will mark two and a half years since the evening missiles began to land on Baghdad, heralding the start of the second Gulf War.

But despite the subsequent work put in by the George W. Bush administration to repair transatlantic ties, attitudes in Europe towards the US remain hostile, according to a poll published on Wednesday (7 September).

The poll, commissioned by the German Marshall Fund of the United States, questioned around 1,000 people in the US and in each of the ten European countries featured.

Although President Bush has made four visits to Europe in his second term in office, including a visit to the EU institutions in Brussels, the polls show that only a minority of Europeans think that relations have improved in the last 12 months.

Some 77% of those questioned in nine EU member states (France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia and Spain and the UK) thought that relations had stayed the same or deteriorated in that period.

Only 20% thought that relations have improved. Slightly fewer (17%) Americans questioned said that relations had improved.

Meanwhile Germans proved the most optimistic with 24% of respondents saying that relations had improved over the last year.

In Spain where the government of José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero struggled to establish good relations with Washington after the withdrawal of Spanish troops from Iraq, 44% said that relations had worsened.

And there seems little indication that Bush's popularity has increased, despite what many commentators have described as a more consensual approach, with almost three in four Europeans disapproving of Bush's handling of international policies, a marginal improvement on last year's responses.

Kurt Volker, a senior official at the State Department's bureau for European and Eurasian affairs, expressed disappointment that the shift in US policy had not been recognised.

"I would hope that people look at this and now begin to see that it is more than a charm offensive," he said.

Meanwhile 70% of Europeans said the EU should become a superpower like the US and 60% believed there should be an EU seat on the UN Security Council.

A majority of Americans said that the US should become closer to the EU while 55% of Europeans said that the EU should take a more independent approach.

But on specific policies there appears to be more convergence.

On the crisis over Iran's nuclear programme, where the EU and US have forged similar policies, there seems to be a consensus on reaching a diplomatic solution, with a small minority on each side of the Atlantic advocating military action.

The US' stated policy of promoting the "march of democracy" worldwide appears more popular among Europeans than in the US.

As many as 74% of Europeans said that it should be the role of the EU to help establish democracy in other countries while 51% of Americans said it should be the US's role.

In Spain and Portugal, countries that joined the EU shortly after emerging from dictatorial regimes, the vast majority of respondents subscribed to that view, 89% and 86% respectively.

A recent poll, commissioned by the German Marshall Fund of the United States, questioned around 1,000 people in the US and in each of the ten European countries featured where they saw transatlantic relations, two-and-a-half years after the beginning of the second Gulf War on 20 September 2003. Most of the Europeans questioned did not see any improvement of relations between Europe and the US.