The EU and US

Friends or Rivals?

Resumo

Good EU-US relations are essential for global stability. But today transatlantic relations remain strained largely as a result of the war in Iraq and the unilateral approach of the first George W. Bush administration. The number of EU-US disagreements has increased and covers political and strategic issues as well as economic and social issues. One of the biggest divides is over global governance and the role to be accorded to the UN and other multilateral institutions. There is also a high degree of anti-Americanism (or rather opposition to Bush administration policies) in Europe, and continued resentment at Europe (or rather France and Germany) in the US. The EU has no concept of how to deal with the world’s only superpower. Too often there is a preference for bilateral as opposed to EU channels. But the current EU-US structures do not enable a serious discussion of many of these differences to take place. Neither is NATO an adequate structure for a transatlantic strategic dialogue, as Chancellor Schroeder pointed out at the Wehrkunde conference in Munich in January 2005.