The United States and Europe: Making up

Date: 28/06/03

Tensions could be shifting from politics and terrorism to economics

EVERY year now the United States and the European Union hold a summit. It used to be every six months, but George Bush seems to have stopped that. Why get together just to produce a lot of happy-clappy bromides about how the United States and Europe are “working together to solve the problems of the world”?

One beauty of this week's summit in Washington, DC, was that these bromides should have been impossible to utter. In the wake of the rift over Iraq, transatlantic relations are arguably at their lowest point since the second world war. Americans are still refusing to buy French wine. European newspapers are still portraying the United States as a rogue nation. And at least one senior French minister is still telling his fellow diplomats that the only thing that Americans know how to do is shoot.

So there was something rather magnificent in the way that Costas Simitis, the Greek prime minister and current president of the European Union, and Romano Prodi, the president of the European Commission, held the line at their press conference. Mr Prodi declared ingeniously that it was “a very good meeting because it was a very good meeting atmosphere” before meditating on the virtues of old age. CNN terminated its coverage as soon as it decently could, leaving Americans to ponder another eternal mystery: how could the EU send such extraordinarily boring leaders to the home of the remote control?

Yet behind the scenes both American and European officials were billing the summit as an important piece of repair work. The western alliance is beginning to see eye to eye on what some Americans call “the new security environment” of rogue states, terrorist networks and weapons of mass destruction.

Better than it looks

The most obvious signs of this progress are various new agreements to speed up the extradition of terrorists and improve the investigation of suspect bank accounts. The Americans, who have long whinged about the EU's failure to tackle weapons of mass destruction, were pleasantly surprised by Europe's tougher approach to Iran. The Europeans are willing to scrap a proposed trade deal with Iran if it does not accept inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Of course, the Europeans continue to be much keener on fighting the war against terrorism through diplomacy and multilateral institutions than the Americans. And they are also balking at Mr Bush's insistence that they declare Hamas a terrorist organisation. But Mr Bush's people think some recent soul-searching in the EU is leading to a tougher approach.

Last week EU foreign ministers agreed that the use of force to deal with weapons of mass destruction could be envisaged when diplomacy fails. A tough new EU paper on security does not read as if it was written by complacent inhabitants of a “post-historical paradise” - to use the term for Europe coined by one neo-conservative, Robert Kagan. In Washington, Javier Solana, the EU's foreign policy co-ordinator and a former head of NATO, is increasingly seen as hawkish - or as tough as a bearded Spanish socialist can be.

On the economic side of the relationship, there was also good news to report. The summiteers unveiled an “open-skies” agreement to free up flying between the two continents. There was talk of progress on trade. Pascal Lamy and Robert Zoellick, the top European and American trade negotiators, get on much better than Charlene Barshefsky and Leon Brittan did in the Clinton era, and their good relationship has survived serious blows, such as America's decision to impose steel tariffs. Philip Gordon of the Brookings Institution points out that one encouraging message of the summit is that business does go on.

But clouds are gathering. It remains to be seen how Europe's new deal on the common agricultural policy will affect the Doha trade round. Meanwhile, Europe continues to stand by its 1998 moratorium on the import of genetically modified food - a moratorium that supposedly costs American farmers $300m a year in lost corn exports alone.

Mr Bush is off to Africa next month where he will probably argue that Europe's hostility to GM food is helping to worsen famine. And there are no signs that the administration will withdraw the suit against the Europeans' GM-food ban at the WTO. The next set of rows - and of bromides at summits - could be about economics, not politics.

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