Anti-European sentiment is back in fashion in the US. It is not new. The US was built by immigrants who shook off the disappointments of the old world for the hope of the new. Businessmen and politicians in late 19th century America believed they represented the vigorous future, Europe the enfeebled past. In the two world wars Americans saw themselves as sailing across the Atlantic to sort out European quarrels which Europeans were incapable of resolving among themselves.
After 1945, America's prescription for Europe was to make it "more like us"-to build an Americanised Europe which would become a loyal partner within the western alliance. In the years since, the US has veered between disappointment at Europe's unwillingness to accept its leadership unconditionally, and fear that Europe will agree on a framework for integration different from that preferred by Washington.
Although America's official position continues to be one of support for European economic, even political, integration, a growing proportion of informed opinion has embraced an exaggerated Euroscepticism. Irving Kristol writes of "the slowly emerging crisis in Europe's economy and society," in contrast to US economic and social vitality. "Europe is resigned to be a quasi-autonomous protectorate of the US," he states, adding: "Europeans do not know-and seem not to want to know-what is happening to them." Senator Jesse Helms, moving the Senate resolution on Nato enlargement, declared that "the EU could not fight its way out of a wet paper bag." The celebrated economist Martin Feldstein has gone so far as to suggest that the collapse of Europe into war is a plausible outcome of Europe's economic and monetary union. Just as European anti-Americanism damaged western solidarity during the cold war, so America's triumphalism now threatens to unravel transatlantic co-operation in the post-cold war era. If the US expects Europe to shoulder a larger burden of global leadership, a decent respect for Europe's opinions is in US's interests.
one explanation for these anti-European rumblings is that Americans suffer from dwindling information and expertise on Europe, as the US media retreats into domestic coverage and exotic human interest stories, and the generation of exiled Europeans teaching in US universities passes on. But American Eurosceptics, like most of their British counterparts, are also genuinely anxious that European integration might give birth to a modified model of capitalism with the status to challenge the US's purer capitalist model. Anti-Europeanism thus tends to be strongest on the Republican right, though it also appeals to some imperially-minded Democrats within the foreign policy elite.
American commentary projects on to Europe its own partisan debates. Warnings in the late 1980s about the threat of economic competition from a powerful fortress Europe were the flip side of the debate over US economic decline. Denigration of European economic stagnation in the late 1990s mirrors the happy consensus on America's "Goldilocks" economy. But the picture of a European economy in perpetual decline is a caricature. American punditry has ignored the one-time effect of German unification in slowing European growth. The German government borrowed to finance the transformation of East Germany, forcing the Bundesbank to raise interest rates. Meanwhile, the squeeze on budgetary deficits imposed by the criteria for monetary union also depressed short-term growth. This necessary correction in European fiscal policies should, however, lay the foundation for stronger growth with lower inflation in the future. In fact, the overall EU growth rate between 1985 and 1992, before the unification-induced rise in interest rates, was higher than that in the US. Faster American growth between 1993 and 1997 may reflect different stages in the business cycle rather than long-term changes in competitiveness. (The OECD predicts that Europe will grow faster than the US in 1999.)
American leadership in information technology is unchallenged, but in pharmaceuticals and new materials Europe is highly competitive. Sluggish domestic demand in Germany has been accompanied by the rapid development of exports to central and eastern Europe. While France has struggled through a painful adjustment of economic and social policies with high unemployment, the Netherlands achieved a higher growth rate than the US in 1997 (4.2 per cent versus 3.7 per cent). Ireland's growth rate was an astounding 9.5 per cent, Finland's a technology-driven 5.9 per cent. Airbus competes effectively with Boeing; Daimler-Benz, now with Mack Truck and Chrysler in its group, competes with General Motors. Transatlantic trade, in balance for much of the past 20 years, has recently shifted towards a hefty European surplus.
American denunciation of Europe's costly welfare systems, heavy social regulation, and sluggish labour mobility also project on to Europe the domestic US debate. Proponents of free markets and welfare cuts have a vested interest in portraying Europe as uncompetitive. But the German economy is a standing rebuke to neo-liberal critics. Several times in the past two decades Anglo-Saxon economists have written obituaries for the German model, only to watch it bounce back on high-quality exports, a well-trained and productive workforce, and changes in social and economic policies negotiated among managers, employee representatives, and federal and state authorities.
The various models of social regulation and welfare in western Europe do carry heavy costs, most evident in the current failure to create full employment. All countries are under pressure from demographic change, as populations age and pension and health costs rise; all are facing difficult adjustments to welfare systems. But a sturdy safety net also delivers tangible benefits. Life expectancy in the EU is higher than in the US, infant mortality lower. The EU maintains a much smaller gap between rich and poor than does the US. Bringing jobs to communities rather than compelling workers to move hundreds of miles maintains social cohesion. As a result, Europe's cities are vibrant and safe, and crime rates are far lower than in the US. America jails more than 1 per cent of the working-age male population-a proportion eight times higher than the European average. If this figure is added to calculations of the unemployment rate and the cost of the American prison system to the US welfare budget, we get a more balanced comparison between American and European approaches to economic and social regulation.
american criticism of European incoherence in foreign and defence policy is better justified, notably in the Bosnian tragedy. European rhetoric in 1991 that "the hour of Europe" had come, soon rang hollow, as did the 1992 Maastricht Treaty's assertion that "a Common Foreign and Security Policy is hereby established." Tragically, domestic pressures in Germany forced a hasty recognition of Slovenia and Croatia without accompanying plans to help consolidate their independence, protect minority rights, or address the bloody ramifications for Bosnia. The Balkan crisis provided a painful lesson in the problems with collective foreign-and defence-policymaking for the EU, with Germany ultimately agreeing to send troops outside its borders on a mission in Europe for the first time since the second world war. With less success, France and Britain developed a bilateral defence dialogue without creating an effective framework for action. EU foreign policy remained so fragmented that the US envoy to Bosnia, Richard Holbrooke, charged European governments with "sleeping through the night" while US policy makers imposed a compromise settlement.
Here again, however, US criticism masks an underlying ambivalence. Zbigniew Brzezinski has called for a wider but weaker EU to "expand the range of American influence without simultaneously creating a Europe so politically integrated that it could challenge the US on matters of geopolitical importance, particularly in the middle east." Successive administrations have called for political and security partnership while obstructing moves towards a "European caucus" within or outside Nato. The Senate resolution on Nato enlargement reasserted "an ongoing and direct leadership role for the US in European security affairs" while demanding that "the responsibility and financial burden of defending the democracies of Europe be more equitably shared."
For European governments, this story is wearily familiar. Henry Kissinger's response to western Europe's first steps towards foreign policy coordination, at the Helsinki Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe in 1972-73, was to demand that US representatives sit in on all consultations. He felt particularly concerned that Europe might develop an autonomous policy towards the middle east. More recently, the US response to European negotiations on common foreign policy at the 1991 Maastricht Intergovernmental Conference signalled that the transformation of the WEU, the defence arm of the EU, into an autonomous grouping within Nato would be unacceptable to the US. The British and Dutch governments took the hint, and weakened their proposals for closer European co-operation while the French stiffened their resistance to what they saw as the re-emergence of American hegemony.
More recently, Tony Blair launched a Franco-British initiative for a European pillar of Nato which would give the EU the capacity for independent action. British officials are anxious that Washington may again wish to obstruct moves towards closer European defence collaboration, even when led by its most loyal European ally.
As a result of all this, the EU remains a civilian power, an effective global actor in economic policy, aid and international institutions, but without comparable political clout or military capacity. Having helped produce this dilemma, US officials now criticise it.
Europe is accused of being a free rider on American-provided security. But that charge is sustainable only within the narrow confines of military capability and expenditure. True, European Nato members together only spend the equivalent of 66 per cent of the US defence budget. By any broader definition of security, however, the European contribution is far higher. In the five years after the Berlin Wall fell, three quarters of western economic and financial assistance to Russia and the countries of central and eastern Europe came from the EU. Over half the international aid to the West Bank and Gaza Strip between 1994-97 came from western Europe, in contrast to only 10 per cent from the US. European contributions to the poorest states of Africa and south Asia greatly exceed the shrinking US share. This is equitable burden-sharing by any honest calculation. Repetition of the claim that Europe should pay more-without letting those who pay the piper have some say in choosing the tune-is one of the most corrosive elements in US criticism. Western European governments, deeply conscious of the value of the US-led Nato framework, are far from breaking the transatlantic link. But there is increasing irritation that what Congress and the administration really demand is that the Europeans pay for US hegemony.
American confidence in the vigour of the US economy contrasts oddly with American protests that the US can no longer afford to support its share of international responsibilities. This incoherence is another result of domestic politics being projected on to transatlantic relations. Years of partisan wrangling over the US deficit, taxation, foreign aid and contributions to international organisations have created a consensus that Americans cannot pay more and resentment that Europe appears to be paying less.
European governments, which have struggled to publicise to Congress and the American media their substantial financial contributions to Russia, eastern Europe, the middle east and Africa, are exasperated by the failure of American political leaders to recognise this reality. From the president downward, US leaders happily lecture their allies on their responsibilities but do nothing to challenge perceptions which they know to be inaccurate.
The confident expectation of America's foreign policy elite that Europeans will sweep aside their own domestic constraints when the US needs their support contrasts painfully with the timidity with which this same elite approaches its own domestic audience. Even the most internationalist of administration officials feed rather than combat congressional resentment. In one example, at the Nato foreign ministers' meeting in December 1997, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright protested that the US was providing 90 per cent of the funds for a new training programme for the Bosnian police. "In key areas such as this, other members of the alliance need to do much, much more." Her European audience, conscious that they were already providing over 70 per cent of the total budget for peacekeeping and civilian construction in Bosnia and 80 per cent of the peacekeepers on the ground, could only worry about the impact on audiences in Washington of such selective statistics.
while foreign policy makers in Washington complain about the chaos of different institutions in Brussels and clashing national interests among European states, Europeans have to grapple with the confusion of competing power centres in Washington and the embittered conflict between a Republican Congress and a Democratic White House. Europeans see US foreign policy-making crippled by the wide gap between the professional elite and Congress, and by a comparable gap between Congress and public opinion. Such gaps emerged partly from the post-Vietnam and post-Iranian revolution traumas which still hang over US politicians, and partly from the power which lobbies wield in Washington.
The search for campaign finance in US politics-which enables special interests to "buy" congressmen, senators, even presidential candidates-has a corrosive effect on US foreign and trade policy. The US administration justifies its current attack on the EU's banana import regime by appealing to the rules of free trade; but there are widespread rumours that both Administration and Congress have, in effect, been "bought" by US companies which seek to control the transatlantic fruit trade. Although the EU has modified the banana regime it is not enough for the US which is still (in early February) threatening to retaliate with sanctions against some EU goods. The financial power of the Global Climate Coalition, exercised also through extensive political advertising, has come close to buying America's international environmental policy. And US unions have exerted strong influence on trade debates through campaign contributions to favoured candidates.
Two thirds of the world's population is covered by some form of US sanction imposed by Congress or state and local governments-a messier tangle of overlapping and incoherent laws than anything the EU can offer. But the problem is not just trade. The Cuban lobby has discredited US policy towards Castro. Washington's approach to Nato enlargement-reversing its elaborately prepared Partnership for Peace initiative-was announced without warning in speeches to Polish-American and Baltic-American groups. And much of the funding for the US Committee to Expand Nato was provided by armaments companies hoping to sell US weapon systems to new member states.
Most famously, policy towards the middle east is distorted by the influence of the pro-Israel lobby. European governments understand that it made sense in domestic politics for President Clinton to unveil increased sanctions against Iran at the World Jewish Congress in New York and why former Senator Alfonse D'Amato of New York has pushed for the Iran-Libya Sanctions Act (ILSA). But these moves make all the more questionable Washington's insistence that Europe should uncritically accept American leadership in middle east policy.
Even greater damage results from the way some congressional leaders, and even a few administration officials, address their European partners. Any European parliamentary leader who treated US representatives in the style of the Senate's foreign relations chairman would provoke outrage in Washington. Jesse Helms walked out when the British foreign secretary disagreed with him on burden-sharing in a May 1997 meeting. "To hell with international law," the San Francisco Chronicle reported D'Amato telling a European ambassador who hinted that ILSA contravened it. D'Amato added: "You've got a choice to make: you're either with us or against us, and I only hope for your sake you make the right decision." European politicians are galled by White House officials who assure them that the policies resulting from such rhetoric are nevertheless part of a rational global strategy that Europe must support.
In one telling example of US ambivalence towards international law, American policy makers have called on European states, institutions and private actors to support the restitution of Jewish assets stolen during the Holocaust. This appeal to international justice, backed by threats of unilateral sanctions, roughly coincided with the American refusal to accept that the jurisdiction of the new International Criminal Court (ICC) might apply to the US itself. European governments are painfully aware of the dark periods in their history, but they find it hard to accept the claim that America is entirely exceptional. "Everyone knows that the US is a righteous nation," Joshua Muravchik of the American Enterprise Institute boldly declared to a surprised European audience. For Europe, it is not self-evident that the US, with its own historical demons, has earned the right to place itself above the disciplines of international law. US delegates voted with Iraq, Libya and China in opposing the ICC, against all their European allies.
The US approach to international organisations combines unilateral abrogation of its own financial obligations with insistence that other states observe theirs, all the while demanding that the organisations in question follow Washington's commands promptly and fully. Few Europeans can understand the deep roots of US antagonism towards the UN, and European governments feel no sympathy for America's failure to pay its UN dues. Watching the US exploit the UN when necessary and disrespect it the rest of the time, European governments are hard pressed to persuade their citizens to follow US policy wherever it may lead. They also question American assumptions that the World Trade Organisation can be relied upon to rule in their favour, and that the IMF will follow the US lead. "Of course the US follows international rules," a former White House staffer disarmingly told an LSE audience, "the US makes the rules."
american policy institutes offer prolific proposals for transatlantic redesign. Few, however, address the changes needed in US policy to reinforce this partnership. For example, a 1997 Rand report, America and Europe: A Partnership for a New Era, still views the relationship as one in which the US leads in cold war style. One proposal, echoing Kissinger's 1973 demands, suggests that Europe inform and consult the US before making EU decisions: "This will be awkward for EU members and institutions, but it is essential for an effective partnership." And yet the same report dismisses the idea that US policymaking should take European interests into account as "illogical... because the US is a sovereign country." In a similar vein, Charles Kupchan's 1996 Foreign Affairs manifesto for "an Atlantic Union" concentrates on what the Europeans must do to adhere to American preferences, not the other way around.
Transatlantic relations in the late 1990s are characterised by intense economic relations but weak political contacts. Yet an effective US-European partnership across a wide range of policy areas is essential to global order and the world economy. Those in Washington who depicted the Asia-Pacific region as America's future, and Europe its past, should recognise after the Asian crisis that the Europeans-with all their weaknesses-are the US's only dependable partners, sharing America's values and burdens. The survival of the transatlantic partnership forged under the cold war should not be taken for granted. For most of American history, relations with Europe have been cool. If Europeans were to apply to the US the same realist logic that John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago applied to post-cold war Europe, they would predict a return of American isolationism or transatlantic rivalry. A productive transatlantic relationship cannot be sustained without firm domestic support within both the US and Europe. Sadly, American foreign policy makers have failed to provide the necessary domestic leadership.
Despite official support for Emu, there is a danger that American political and business elites will react to the successful launch of the euro with a mood swing similar to that of ten years ago: from proclamations of Europe's decline to complaints of European threats to US interests. Monetary union will alter the balance of the Atlantic relationship. Smaller steps towards integrating EU foreign policy-such as the reorganisation of the European commission's directorates-general for external relations into a coherent group and the transformation of the role of the EU council's secretary-general into a post akin to that of the Nato secretary-general, may also appear to threaten American interests. Negotiations for eastern enlargement of the EU are bound to involve compromises that some US enterprises will see as against their interests. Different domestic constraints will pull European and American policy makers in opposite directions on issues ranging from global warming to global governance of the internet to genetically modified crops.
As Europe's confederal mechanisms lumber forward, American elites must avoid alarmism and accept that long-term partnership in the absence of an external threat requires greater equality between the partners. The Franco-British defence initiative, together with the Amsterdam Treaty reforms to the EU's foreign policy framework, may at last begin construction of an effective European security pillar. The most immediate task is to convince US policy makers that a European caucus within Nato is in America's long-term interest. On this point the Rand study rightly observes: "American resistance to the formation of an EU identity within Nato will only rekindle European interest in an eventual EU military alliance outside Nato." As a start, the US could consolidate its huge missions to the EU and Nato and appoint a senior political figure to represent the US as a whole to European institutions. In return, European governments need to improve co-ordination among their embassies in Washington.
A long-term partnership requires mutual accommodation and two-way communication. That requires European governments to be more active in explaining their distinctive interests to American opinion formers. Participants in Washington's self-absorbed but noisy debate must exert themselves, in turn, to listen more carefully to European concerns, and to explain them to the wider American public. Weak institutions and divided governments on both sides of the Atlantic inhibit cooperation, leaving both American and European leaders vulnerable to domestic pressures. But there are no other available partners, either for western Europe or for the US, in managing the global economy and in maintaining world order. The resentful rhetoric of American anti-Europeanism now represents a danger to the transatlantic relationship which political leaders on both sides of the Atlantic must strive to overcome.
