Political science analysis of transatlantic relations – which in this contribution will be used as shorthand for the relations between the United States of America, on the one hand, and EU-Europe, on the other-sees these relations as a wide-ranging complex set of nested games, including domestic, transatlantic and global games. It is conscious of the complex nature of the political governance problems involved. Any political coordination of these relations requires optimization of multi-criteria goal catalogues (with internal trade-offs) among multiple independent actors rather than maximization of a short list of goals by one unitary actor. In other words, conflicts in these relations are to be expected, and traditional experience of transatlantic relations has born out this expectation. However, the level and scope of transatlantic differences.
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Notes
- 1.
Such is the title given to a collection of contributions of one of the many conferences held on the subject: Zacharasiewicz, 2004.
- 2.
- 3.
Though not completely: The famously loose assistance obligation contained in article 5 of NATO’s founding treaty was the price to be paid for acceptance of it by the US Congress.
- 4.
As shown in Risse-Kappen, 1995.
- 5.
- 6.
On the sources, forms and fields of US unilateralism see Malone and Khong, 2003.
- 7.
- 8.
The negative reaction provoked by this unilateralism has not gone unnoticed, even (and especially) among classical realist analysts who reckon with counter-balancing to US power anyway; see Walt, 2005.
- 9.
See the classic work by Keohane and Nye, 1977.
- 10.
In figures: from 273 to 557 billion USD according to Gartzke, 2005 who concludes his overview of transatlantic economic relations by stating that the deep economic interdependence “leads to the conclusion that the process of geo-strategic estrangement will not have significant negative impacts on transatlantic economic relations” (184, my translation).
- 11.
Ibid., 175.
- 12.
As was argued early on after the end of the Cold war, and convincingly, by Chernoff, 1995.
- 13.
- 14.
The term was introduced by Ruggie, 1983.
- 15.
This global process is vividly described in Yergin and Stanislaw, 1998.
- 16.
A good overview of the varieties-of-capitalism literature and a central contribution to it is the volume by Hall and Soskice, 2001.
- 17.
- 18.
As is vividly demonstrated in Schildt, 1997.
- 19.
- 20.
Rugman, 2005.
- 21.
Kalff, 2006.
- 22.
These domestic political games of international trade policy are well researched for the US case, see List, 2004 for an overview.
- 23.
The controversy has been reconstructed in Gordon and Shapiro, 2004.
- 24.
See Record, 2003 for a critical assessment of the concept by a knowledgeable expert.
- 25.
- 26.
See Lind, 2003 (the author is a Texan himself).
- 27.
An overview of this new US-internal discussion on a – potential – imperial role can be found in the contributions in Bacevich, 2003; a major non-US contribution to the debate arguing for a dominant US role, but also that the US would be unfit to really fulfil it, is from British historian Ferguson, 2004. In the light of the Iraq experience US willingness for imperial action – especially if that means staying on the ground and getting involved in nation building - indeed seems to be more limited than ever.
- 28.
http://ue.eu.int/uedocs/cmsUpload/78367.pdf (13.03.06).
- 29.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss.pdf (13.03.06).
- 30.
The pernicious impact of leader rhetoric on public views – and the feebback of that on leaders room for political manoeuvre has been analyzed by Snyder, 1991.
- 31.
Martschukat, 2002.
- 32.
Whitman, 2003.
- 33.
Not all transatlantic policy differences, however, are due to underlying differences in values, even in value-related policy areas, as is argued for the field of data protection policy by Heisenberg, 2005.
- 34.
- 35.
Aiginger, 2004 shows the US to be leading in 16 future growth indicators in comparison to the EU; he also points out, however, that comparative evaluation of the success of national economic models is bound to involve normative questions.
- 36.
The – not untypical – quote is deliberately taken from a non-suspicious source: the US-authored entry (by David Shenk) on “information overload” in an internationally produced and marketed major reference work (Johnston, D. H. (Ed.). (2003). Encyclopedia of International Media and Communication (Vol. II, p. 395). Amsterdam. ). Contrast this with the recent headline in the British Guardian (as quoted in Newsweek 09.01.2006, p. 20) which referred to Sweden as “the most successful society the world has ever known”.
- 37.
Analytically, macro-social comparison makes it perfectly sensible to speak of American exceptionalism. See Lipset, 1996. The normative version sees the – indeed special – historical experience of the US as a model for the rest of the world, a view widely shared in the US (see Junker, 2003) – and, if not at all times and in all places, often outside the US as well.
- 38.
In socialism or communism; there is an interesting parallel here between overly self-congratulatory views on the Western side after the end of the Cold War as expressed in Fukuyama’s (1992) declaration of the end of history (in liberal capitalism).
- 39.
The classical analysis is by Van Der Pijl, 1984.
- 40.
This elite community has been open to the extent that, e.g., exchange programs like Fulbright or Rhodes scholarships have allowed for young students, tomorrow’s elites, to make transatlantic experiences ever since the 1950s. Other reach-out activity into the European societies has been done by institutions such as America Houses. Finally, on the most popular level, transatlantic TV program exchange, though rather a one-way street, has popularized a certain image of the US in Europe which overall has attractive rather than repelling qualities (see Pells, 1997 however on the mixed effects). The resulting popular familiarity with things American is somewhat treacherous, however, since it is rather superficial.
- 41.
- 42.
The extent to which Europe has, e.g. not only a common foreign policy strategy, but also an economic development strategy (as distinguished from continuing economic nationalisms) may be questioned. The absence of both certainly does not increase Europe’s impact in either the transatlantic or the global games.
- 43.
These measures tend to be skewed towards a positive view by the weight given to the spectacular southern Chinese economic development over the last years: that development has happened here is hardly to be denied. The problem lies in increased poverty in other regions of the world, including increased relative poverty in developed areas.
- 44.
On which see Klare, 2005; Seifert and Werner, 2005; notwithstanding catchy titles both publications are to be taken seriously. Note also that emphasizing the geo-strategic relevance of the factor oil in the process leading to the Iraq war is not tantamount to subscribing to a crude “blood-for-oil”-interpretation.
- 45.
Try the following argument: If there was either no oil in the Middle East or no western dependence on it, wouldn’t the West (represented mainly by the US) have acceded to Bin Laden’s demand of drawing back from “holy territory”? Indeed: Would the West (the US) have built this presence in the region in the first place?
- 46.
Such surprise is, however, precisely what seems to have happened recently. This probably bespeaks transatlantic illusions left form Cold War times; we have to learn to live without these illusions.
- 47.
There was a time when leading members of he US foreign policy elite had recognized the dangers, to US interests, too, of this arrogance; see Fulbright, 1966.
- 48.
- 49.
Again, there is at least one plain statement of this point from an US analyst: Mandelbaum, 2005.
- 50.
- 51.
See Kerr, 2005 who argues that the governance structure in the North Korean case is actually a regional concert similar to the 19th century’s concert of Europe; on the Iran case see List (2007).
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List, M. (2009). EU-US International Relations: A Political Science Perspective. In: Welfens, P., Addison, J. (eds) Innovation, Employment and Growth Policy Issues in the EU and the US. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-00631-9_16
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