iCES Occasional Paper 06
23
An American Perspective Colleen Graffy First, let me commend the Institute of Contemporary European Studies and the Senior European Experts for their very thoughtful and thorough paper “Is the Atlantic Getting Wider? The Relationship between the EU, its Member States and the United States.” It succinctly lays down the background of the relationship between the US and the EU. It describes some of the competing theories of where the US role is in the world today and very constructively sets out a vision for a new EU policy framework to rebuild the relationship. However, by labelling the last section: “Rebuilding the Transatlantic Relationship: A Strategy for the EU,” it does rather suggest that the answer to the question – from the authors’ point of view – is that the Atlantic is indeed getting wider. There are, of course, good arguments as to why that might be so. Nick Witney has laid out some of those, and the paper has laid out others. For example, President Obama not attending the US/EU summit in Spain, or the ill-timed message to Warsaw about the US’s new missile defence policy on the 70th anniversary of the invasion in Poland, or, causing much consternation in some quarters: the ‘re-set button’ with Russia. I can add some others from the perspective of the US. For example, I noticed that the paper describes trade as an area where we are working well, but many American companies feel that, in addition to the normal challenges of trying to do business in Europe – that is, the red tape of each individual nation – they also have the challenge of cutting through EU regulations in order to do business. So, from an American perspective, whilst there is an understanding that the EU is still in the process of trying to resolve some of these bureaucratic issues in forming an internal market and the movement of goods, persons and services, it does create impediments for investment when there are two layers of regulations to manoeuvre through. So too in trying to resolve immigration issues: the American government will work bilaterally with other countries on immigration issues and then be criticised by the EU for not working through the EU. However, at the moment, the EU does not have the capacity to assist on some of these immigration issues that only a nation can resolve in its sovereign national capacity. There is a view that there is protection of EU business and to a certain extent one understands that,