William C. Cromwell

The United States and the European Pillar in the late 1970s and the 1980s

With the development of the EC’s political cooperation since the early 1970s, and with movement toward West European defence cooperation as well, US support for a European pillar in an Atlantic framework continued as a staple of US public diplomacy. As in earlier formulations linking the Atlantic and European ideas, US statements typically have included assumptions and expectations that the emerging West European pillar(s) would reinforce the overall solidarity and strength of the West. Barely more than two years after the bruising Atlantic crisis had challenged the proposition, Henry Kissinger, still Secretary of State during the Ford administration, could affirm to European audiences that the most meaningful Atlantic cooperation ‘will occur only after Europe has achieved political unity’ (ignoring the earlier pain to the US of European attempts to do just that), and that ‘European unity and Atlantic partnership are both essential and mutually reinforcing’.1 In his address to the European Parliament in 1985, President Reagan invoked Kennedy’s Atlantic partnership theme, including its twin pillar imagery, as a continuing aim of US policy.2 In two major speeches in 1987, Reagan stated that ‘the Alliance must become more and more an alliance among equals’ and that the US must ‘welcome a European identity in defense which… is bound to spur Atlantic cooperation’.3 And while in Europe for the NATO summit in May 1989, President Bush affirmed that the drive toward European unity ‘and the transatlantic partnership reinforce each other’.4

The Nixon Administration and Europe, 1969–73

Until 1973, the Nixon administration’s foreign policy priorities centred on disengagement from the Vietnam war and cultivation of what was labeled a new ‘structure of peace’1 based on movement toward normalising relations with the Peoples Republic of China and building a detente relationship with the Soviet Union, the latter premised on the emergence of strategic parity and acceptance of mutual restraint in bilateral relations and in global policy. Given the depth of Soviet—Chinese estrangement at the time, the incipient warming of US—Chinese relations constituted a not too subtle form of pressure against Moscow to move toward improving relations with Washington so as to avoid a more direct US—Chinese alignment against the Soviet Union. While the immediate focus was on achieving a new triangular equilibrium, President Nixon and his assistant for national security affairs, Henry Kissinger were occasionally given to longer range speculation about an emerging pentagonal global order including a unifying Western Europe and Japan. Whether conceived in triangular or pentagonal terms, however, the administration was groping toward a revised global framework of international relations adapted to the circumstances of the relative decline of American power, a more retrenched US global role after Vietnam as sketched in the Nixon Doctrine, and the rise of other power centres.

The European Impulse Revived: The Birth of European Political Cooperation, 1969–73

Unlike the creation of the Eurogroup, which was motivated largely by the possibility of US troop reductions, the movement toward political cooperation was rooted in the longstanding if hitherto failed effort to extend European unity beyond the economic sphere of the ec. Following the aborted Fouchet negotiations in 1962, it had proved impossible to generate sufficient consensus among the six founding members of the ec to revive progress toward political unity or even regularised cooperation on foreign policy matters. The general malaise in this area was compounded by the continued French veto on British membership in the ec and by interruption of the planned supranational evolution in the Council of Ministers whereby many important decisions were to have been taken by weighted majority vote after 1965. Having failed in his earlier attempt during the Fouchet negotiations to shift ec matters under the purview of an intergovernmental union, de Gaulle launched a challenge against the ec institutions themselves by insisting upon a more delimited role for the supranational Commission and by demanding a national veto prerogative within the Council of Ministers. ec business virtually ground to a halt while France boycotted Council proceedings during the so-called ‘empty chair’ crisis in 1965/66.

Other Regional Issues

US—European differences over Central America during the early and mid-1980s resembled the earlier Vietnam experience in several respects. In both cases, the United States had far stronger strategic interests (or at least commitments) at stake as compared to Europe which, coupled with European security dependence on the US through nato, set practical bounds to European dissent and independence from American policies. Both cases involved the direct or indirect use of American military power to effect or prevent change in Third World situations, thus invoking the issue of US political judgement and morality in the use of force against less-developed societies. Relatedly, with respect to both Vietnam and Central America, there was a European tendency to identify American policies with opposition to the expression of indigenous nationalism (Vietnam) or with efforts to prop up or advance the cause of governments or groups which were not genuinely committed to fundamental political, economic and social change (for example, South Vietnam and El Salvador).

The United States and the New Europe in the 1990s

The stunning political changes in Eastern and Central Europe during 1989/90 fundamentally altered the familiar political context of European international relations that had evolved since World War II. These changes, each dramatic in itself, combined to produce a diplomatic environment of unparalleled complexity and challenge as governments sought to design and put in place a post-cold war political and security order in Europe. The main elements of the new situation included the following:

A Moment of Truth: The ‘Year of Europe’ and the Atlantic Crisis of 1973/74

The European reaction to the Nixon administration’s so-called Year of Europe initiative in early 1973, compounded later by the effects of the October Middle East war, constituted a significant watershed in the evolution of US—European relations and of US policy with respect to West European unity. The effect of both developments was to force to the surface the hitherto mostly latent tensions between American notions of Atlantic partnership and the emerging West European identity.

The Formative Period of Atlantic Relations and the European Pillar, 1948–55

Support for West European unity has been a consistent theme of US foreign policy since the early post-World War II period. Initially shaped by the emerging cold war, American policy advocated unity as a means to end Europe’s fratricidal national rivalries, to promote economic and trade cooperation to advance recovery and political stability, to buttress Western Europe’s capability to resist domestic communist radicalism and external pressures from the Soviet Union, and to stabilise and anchor West Germany within a Western economic and political order. The aim was to consolidate a West European entity as a component of a wider Atlantic community representing the western pole of the emerging bipolar European and global cold war configuration.

What Kind of European Pillar

In the early 1960s, the development of the European Economic Community (ec)1 prompted the Kennedy administration to revive the European pillar idea in the form of a proposal for an Atlantic partnership with the emergent ec. Advanced as both a conceptual and programmatic model for US—European relations, Kennedy’s ‘grand design’ envisaged the two sides of the Atlantic working together as separate and increasingly equal entities, yet unified and mutually reinforced by common or similar interests and purposes. As described by presidential advisor McGeorge Bundy in December 1961, ‘the most productive way of conceiving the political future of the Atlantic Community is to think in terms of a partnership between the United States on the one hand and a great European power on the other’.2 President Kennedy later elaborated the theme in a major address in Philadelphia on 4 July 1962, proclaiming the need for closer interdependence between the United States and a unifying Europe: We believe that a united Europe will be capable of playing a greater role in the common defense, of responding more generously to the needs of poorer nations… We see in such a Europe a partner with whom we could deal on a basis of full equality in all the great and burdensome tasks of building and defending a community of free nations.3

The United States and the European Pillar in the 1970s and 1980s: Concluding Assessment

During the 1970s and 1980s, the United States did little to encourage strengthening European Political Cooperation as a pillar in the transatlantic relationship and often projected attitudes and conducted policies that indirectly discouraged it. As the case studies have shown, earlier American complaints that it did not have a European partner with whom to negotiate were gradually replaced by a pattern of irritation over European responses when it was able to speak with one voice. Moreover, having only indirect access to epc deliberations (via Gymnich-type consultations), the United States became wary of the growing political weight of a collective European body with which it had but limited influence. Regular US—epc consultations did develop as an adjunct to the traditional bilateral and multilateral patterns of Atlantic diplomacy. Yet the American interest in these consultations was primarily to influence the character of the European position that would eventually emerge, rather than to reinforce the epc structure itself as a collective body speaking and acting for Europe. Hence, the American tendency was to emphasise bilateral contacts with individual European governments and multilateral consultations in the Alliance — both of which provided larger and more differentiated scope for US influence on European policies.

European Pillars in the 1980s

As discussed in the preceding chapters, by the 1980s the ec’s mechanisms for political cooperation had helped to achieve some notable successes in articulating independent European positions on specific issues, often either at variance with or in direct conflict with those of the United States. Beginning with the 1973/74 Atlantic crisis, Europeans started utilising the newly established procedures for political cooperation as a framework for concerting and articulating what they regarded as distinctively European interests on the issues at hand. However, the effectiveness of European Political Cooperation was often impaired by internal disagreements among EC governments, the inefficient machinery of political cooperation, and by strategic dependence on the United States which discouraged the pursuit of initiatives to the point of risking a damaging break with Washington.