Repairing the Transatlantic Rift

Abstract

The war in Iraq not only split both Europe and the Atlantic alliance. It also gave rise to dangerous myths about an ‘old Europe from Venus’ locked in struggle against a unilateralist ‘America from Mars’. The first task of repair is to strip away such myths. After all, as recently as 1999, the European and American democracies agreed to fight together in Kosovo in the absence of a Security Council resolution. And what is attractive about today’s ‘old Europe’ is that it is so new! The EU countries are not all in the same sovereign boat, but their national boats are lashed together into an island of stability that is unique and powerfully attractive to its neighbours. Witness the desire of Central Europeans and Turkey to join. And those American who say that Europeans are from Venus while Americans are from Mars ignore recent polls by the Pew Research Center that show many Europeans with ‘American’ views on policy and many Americans with ‘European’ views. In fact, the polls show that nearly two-thirds of the American public prefer multilateral rather than unilateral approaches to diplomacy. Despite the frictions, no two parts of the world are more similar in their commitment to democracy and human rights than Europe and its cultural offspring in America.