Towards a post-American Europe: a power audit of EU-US relations
Author: Nick Whitney Jeremy Shapiro
Publisher: European Council on Foreign Relations, London, United Kingdom
35 Old Queen Street
SW1H 9JA London
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Tel: +44 20 70 31 16 10
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http://www.ecfr.eu
“Europe has the US president it wished for, but Barack Obama lacks the strong transatlantic partner he wants”. With EU leaders heading to Washington for their transatlantic summit on 3 November, ECFR cautions EU member states: an unsentimental President Obama has already lost patience with a Europe lacking coherence and purpose.
In a post-American world, the United States knows it needs effective partnerships to ensure that it remains the “indispensable nation”. If Europe cannot step up and adapt to the new environment, the US will look for other privileged partners to do business with. ECFR’s Power Audit — based on extensive interviews and on structured input from all the European Union’s 27 member states — reveals that Europeans have so far failed to shake off the attitudes, behaviours, and strategies they acquired over decades of American hegemony. This sort of Europe is of rapidly decreasing interest to the US. The authors call for EU leaders to enter a new stage of EU-US relations, which requires Europeans to have their own positions on big strategic issues — Russia and European security, Afghanistan, the Middle East peace process, climate change and others– in relation to European interests and then engage with the US by negotiating compromises, instead of hoping to persuade and preserve transatlantic harmony for harmony’s sake without questioning what it is good for.
This report has benefited from data provided by individual experts from all 27 of the EU member states (including from other PASOS members David Král, Jacek Kucharczyk, and Ivo Samson). Each conducted a survey of his or her country’s relationship with the United States and informed the research.
ECFR_EUUSrelations.pdf (1.08 MB)
