Fifth Transatlantic Roundtable for the Editors of Foreign Policy Journals

Towards a new strategic partnership?

09.06.2005 · Improving Responsiveness

Already for the fifth time, the editors of the most prominent transatlantic foreign policy journals followed in invitation by C·A·P's project Improving Responsiveness to a transatlantic roundtable. This year's roundtable was co-hosted by the Italian journal The International Spectator and took place in Rome/Italy on April 28/29, 2005. After four successful roundtables in Washington D.C., London, Berlin, and New York City, the editors of eighteen journals were invited to discuss the future of transatlantic relations under the title "Transatlantic Relations – Towards a new strategic partnership?".

Among the participating journals were Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The Washington Quarterly, Commentary, Journal of Democracy, ORBIS, and Current History from the U.S. as well as International Affairs, The International Spectator, Zeitschrift für Internationale Beziehungen, Aspenia, WeltTrends, Survival, Foreign Policy Edicion Espanola, Vereinte Nationen, Slovak Foreign Policy Affairs, and The World Today from Europe.

The topic of this year's roundtable were the strategic challenges to the transatlantic partnership: terrorism and WMD proliferation as threats to international security, geostrategic implications from the political and economic boom in East Asia, the reform of the United Nations for an effective protection of peace and security in the world, as well as implications of these issues for and their incorporation into the transatlantic partnership. All debates, in which once again clear analytical, tactical and strategic differences between American and European participants were revealed, but also groundwork for strategic transatlantic dialogues was laid, were facilitated by a set of extraordinary speakers.

From left to right: Josef Janning (deputy director of C·A·P), James Hoge (editor of Foreign Affairs), and Werner Weidenfeld (director of C·A·P)

In an informal introductory pre-session for the editors, a free exchange over current trends and challenges to the business field of foreign policy journals was promoted. The session followed the question, whether foreign policy journals are successful in creating an informed and enlightened foreign policy community, taking increased competition from daily and weekly newspapers and their foreign policy coverage into consideration. Other aspects covered in this session included technical improvements in the process from editing to printing to mailing, and the ongoing shift from print subscription to online subscriptions. The individual situation of the participating journals proved to be quite different, some seeing dailies and weeklies as a real competition, others seeing them rather as an ally in raising awareness towards foreign policy issues. The degree of economic menace by competition also depends on the financial foundation of each journal; close contact to universities or think-tanks is sometimes necessary to survive in harsh economic conditions.

After the official opening of the roundtable, Stefano Silvestri, president of the Rome-based Italian Istituto Affari Internazionali first analyzed the development of terrorism networks and Al Qaida after 9/11 into a "franchising" network of terrorist groups, locally organized as in the past, but with many more different group interest and thus less able to act as a corporate international actor. This structure makes it more probable that local terrorists instead of international terrorists can acquire WMDs. Since WMD proliferation will never be fully stopped or prevented by international regimes and no single country is currently adequately prepared for an attack by biological weapons, the intriguing questions would thus be whether we really have the right strategy to fight terrorism and WMD proliferation.

Edwina Campbell, security studies expert at the U.S. Air Force’s Air University in Alabama, took the question of current and future threats even further: The Islamic world currently fights its own "30 Years War"; only through the use of sophisticated technology the inter-Islamic conflict about the future form of government in the Islamic world becomes a global conflict. The resulting true globalization of world politics marks the end of the European era since the 15th century. Attempts of European power projection will be rivaled by other world regions and meets a fundamentally different approach to the use of force in the U.S., where it is still deemed legitimate, also to master the rest of the world. This fundamental difference in European and American mentality stems from World War II: Whereas European drew the conclusion that the use of force creates problems, the American lesson learned is that the use of force may be necessary to avoid problems. This results in two parallel tracks of the use of force in Europe and the U.S. and prevents a single combined approach.

The discussion revealed other differing fundamental approaches, e.g. as an analogy to the use of force the use of (international) law where the lessons learned for Europe and the U.S. are vice versa contrary. It was also pointed out that any such two-track approach does not have any legitimacy in the long run and that the transatlantic split in the tactical and strategic approach to the fight on terror comes as a threat to the transatlantic partnership, also reflected in the fundamental common threat assessment: For the U.S. terrorism can be an end by itself, whereas Europeans see terrorism also as a means to fight poverty and global hegemony. As a result and to avoid transatlantic pitfalls, the lesson learned should be that deterrence against terrorists and their host countries can work if the U.S. and Europe adopt the terrorists’ perception into their own account. The Hobbesian rationale may be outdated, and it can have made sense to Iraq to prefer a U.S. attack rather than to loose its face in the region. In the future, Islam will have to be combined with democracy and continue its evolution; however, Islamic democracies do not necessarily have to be democracies in the Western sense.

The conference room's view.

Following the first panel, Ferdinando Nelli Feroci, Director-General of the European Integration Department in the Italian Foreign Ministry, gave a presentation on Italian attitudes towards European integration. He pointed out Italy’s long-standing support for European integration, as Italian prosperity and economic stability have only been possible within the European Community. However, attitudes changed after the year 2000/2001, when deepening and consolidation rather than enlargement were preferred. Critique of the EU relates to its bureaucracy, insufficiently delivered results with respect to economic competitiveness and domestic security, especially concerning illegal immigration into Italy, as well as an insufficient international role. Nevertheless, the EU constitutional treaty is still seen as the better alternative compared with a continuation of the Nice Treaty.

Dennis Redmont, bureau chief in Rome of the news agency Associated Press, took up on this and elaborated more on the economic situation in Italy, which competes hard with China and has a negative trade balance. Within the EU, Italy is often seen as either the last of the first or the first of the last.

In the panel on transatlantic threats and opportunities in East and Southeast Asia James Hoge, editor of Foreign Affairs in New York, would not agree that transatlantic relations are marginalized by the growing economic and political power of China and India. In his view, China seeks a peaceful rise to power unlike Germany in the early 20th century, counterbalancing but not contesting the predominant US power in the region, whereas India is rather a clever power, using the US support on its own way to power. The U.S., however, is too much involved in its global war on terror to sufficiently understand the geostrategic development in East/Southeast Asia, even though terrorism spreads throughout Southeast Asia and the future security issues lay between Taiwan, North Korea, India and Pakistan. Europe has no strategy towards Asia at all, and vice versa Asia is split between hope and frustration with respect to European global capabilities. As Asia is already the world region to focus on in terms of future security issues, the U.S. has not yet done enough, and both Europe and the U.S. are – if at all – approaching Asia from different angles, as the EU arms embargo shows. Thus, Asia can play with both of them and can consequently become a challenge for transatlantic security management.

Marta Dassù, Director-General of the international program at the Aspen Institute Italia in Rome, added that both the EU and the US have a different instinct towards power: Unlike the U.S., the EU is not afraid of newly emerging global powers and rather favors multipolarity. The EU trusts economic integration to prevent political conflict, notwithstanding its own perceptional gap between economic power and political evolution. Therefore, the EU can be more relaxed as far as its arms embargo against China is concerned (not to mention that the U.S. delivers arms to China as well using routes via Israel). Nevertheless, a new transatlantic agreement on technology transfers is needed in light of the quarrels over the China arms embargo, since China’s demand on the world markets is still growing and will continue as China has to become rich before it gets old demographically.

In the discussions two options for an Asian security cooperation to engage the growing political powers and to avoid a situation as in Europe in the early 20th century were brought forward: Such a security cooperation could either base upon the five powers besides North Korea out of the six party talks (U.S., Japan, China, India, South Korea) which could form a North-Asian security institution, or it could found upon the ASEAN member states plus China, Japan, and South Korea. Other than that, the Chinese power ambitions warmed the discussion. Perceptions ranged between seeing China as a regional power with no global power interests and China as an ambitiously growing world power which threatens the role of the U.S. as a Pacific power. Accordingly, the question arose whether China follows its own equivalent of the Monroe Doctrine, i.e. not enforcing a certain structure in the region as long as no other country tries to order the region. China is certainly not an expanding power in historical European, i.e. colonial, terms, but it expands along old Chinese imperial terms. It does not follow the concept of a "Jeffersonian" democracy, but rather tries to handle 1.4 billion people, and thus has an ambiguous approach to the US, sometimes perceiving the US as a stabilizing force in the region and sometimes as a threatening and policy-imposing Pacific power.

The third panel on "The Role of the United Nations in the 21st Century" once again exhibited clear and fundamental differences between the U.S. and Europe. As Jeffrey Laurenti, senior fellow with The Century Foundation in New York, emphasized, the U.S. sees the UN as a wrench in its foreign policy toolkit. The wide-spread sense of irrelevance of the UN in the U.S. is countered by the interest to reform the UN to increase its efficiency and effectiveness. Nevertheless, according to Laurenti, the odds for a substantial reform of the UN is almost zero, as the high level panel’s recommendations were already weak and were further watered by making two different reform packages out of them.

This skepticism in the ability of the UN to reform was reflected by the remarks of Guido Lenzi of the Italian Foreign Ministry. While strengthening the European approach to legitimacy as a function of participation and process and of legality as an outcome of international law, he concluded that the current UN does not need any reform at all.

The discussion then revealed a restrained approach to the UN reform: If anything is to happen, the bundled and linked UN reform packages are likely to be unlinked again since many panel propositions do not necessarily need a reform of the UN Charter. Only one thing seems to be certain: The U.S. will never bind its use of force to mandatory approval by any international organization; not under a Bush administration and not under any other administration. The hard test case for the relevance of the UN will thus be when the current Iran issue is brought in front of the Security Council without any reform of the UN structure.

The concluding panel then wrapped up the findings and related them to the future form of transatlantic partnership. Stephen Szabo, Professor for European Studies at Johns Hopkins University in Washington DC, made a clear case that the former transatlantic alliance is developing towards a transatlantic alignment. The enlarged modern European Union will develop a new psychology and mentality, once its CFSP and ESDP work effectively; this will ultimately result in European balancing rather than bandwagoning with the US. Giovanni Brauzzi, head of the Italian Foreign Ministry's NATO office in Rome, contradicted by emphasizing that ESDP would not be an alternative to NATO, but rather a contribution to transatlantic robust crisis management, and that NATO will remain the venue for transatlantic political consultations, but with simultaneously strengthened EU-US relations.

Josef Janning, deputy director of the Center for Applied Policy Research, took a deeper look at the development of CFSP and ESDP, bringing forward a two-axis model: The horizontal axis describes the relationship between the EU's member states as represented in the Council of the EU with regards to CFSP, the vertical axis focuses on the interaction between the member states and the European institutions. On the vertical axis, a non-traditional nature of emerging strong pillars on a rather supra-governmental level can be identified, such as the Eurogroup and European Central Bank on the vertical axis versus the ECOFIN Council on the horizontal one. In a similar way, CFSP will remain part of the horizontal axis, but ESDP may become an opt-in process on the vertical axis. That way, any possible European seat in the UN Security Council would probably fall to CFSP on the horizontal axis, while simultaneously two different unions in Europe could emerge: the EU-25 with a common foreign minister and responsibilities for CFSP, and a smaller EU-3+x for active (military) crisis management in the context of ESDP around the core group of UK, France, and Germany. The great advantage of such a structure for the United States would be a reduction of complexity in European security policies with much reduced cacophony; but at the same time this would leave uncertainty for any constellation of the transatlantic alliance and could create new quarrels among the European member states for political influence. Though contested by the Italian side during the discussion, Janning made clear that such an EU-3 is already pressing the direction of ESDP development and is accepted by many EU member states.

In the discussions it was also pointed out that Europe and the U.S. widely agree on the global spread of freedom and democracy and see a transatlantic convergence on global democratic assistance. If regime change has to occur, it has to happen from within a country instead of being imposed. Democracy cannot be separated from the answer to terrorism; it can correct the grounds of terrorisms and a democracy can even absorb a certain degree of terrorism.

In each of the sessions, clearly diverging European and American views as well as commonalities were exhibited. At the same time, it was common sense that transatlantic cooperation is the key to tackle global challenges. As multipliers for a politically sensitive audience, all editors found tremendous food for thought to address transatlantic challenges and opportunities, differences and commonalities over a diverse spectrum of political fields in future issues of their respective magazines.

This Transatlantic Editors' Roundtable was made possible through the support of the key institutions programs by the German Marshall Funds of the United States. The German Marshall Fund of the United States is an American organization which promotes the exchange of ideas and the cooperation between the U.S: and Europe in the spirit of the post-war Marshall plan.

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Agenda

Participants List

Participants Papers:

• Michael Cox: Beyond the West: Terrors in Transatlantia
• Anja Papenfuß: Kofi Annan's Reform Package and the Prospects of Implementation
• International Affairs: The role of the United Nations in the 21^st century
• Marc F. Plattner: Europeanisation and Americanisation: Rival Projects or Synonyms?
• Stephen F. Szabo: Defining Transatlantic Relations in a New World Order