Transatlantic Institutions: Can Partnership be Engineered?
| Published date | 01 February 2009 |
| Date | 01 February 2009 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-856x.2008.00355.x |
| Subject Matter | Article |
Transatlantic Institutions:
Can Partnership be Engineered?
John Peterson and Rebecca Steffenson
The transatlantic alliance is widely viewed as being in a state of decline. Conflict over the war in
Iraq highlighted a growing divergence between the Bush administration and European Union
governments in their attitudes towards multilateralism. The rift severely tested institutions created
to manage bilateral EU–US relations in the aftermath of the cold war. This article examines how
well this institutional architecture has held up. It scrutinises the limitations of networked gover-
nance in transatlantic relations and acknowledges the quandary of trying to manufacture part-
nership using imperfect institutions. The Brussels–Washington channel is only one among many
through which transatlantic relations flow, but we argue that it continues to gain in importance.
Despite the limits of institutional engineering, we conclude that the US and the EU remain each
other’s most important ally.
Keywords: transatlantic alliance; network governance; new institutionalism;
multilateralism
Even the most ardent devotee of the transatlantic alliance cannot now dismiss the
vast number of recent commentaries predicting demise and doom.1Their sheer
volume suggests that something went seriously wrong during George W. Bush’s
time in office. Most such analyses focus on the transatlantic rift over the US-led
military action in Iraq. Arguably, Iraq caused an even more politically damaging
split within the European Union itself (see Peterson 2004), which the Bush admin-
istration did not seek to prevent and, at times, seemed actively to encourage.
Precisely what went wrong? For some, the Iraq crisis was not ‘really about Iraq’. It
was a political accident waiting to happen because the foundations of the transat-
lantic alliance had become so weak (see Serfaty 2005b). For others, the split
reflected competing and incompatible world-views. Robert Kagan’s (2003) famous
soundbite, ‘Americans are from Mars, Europeans are from Venus’, was a statement
about both diverging values and policy preferences, as well as different approaches
to the organisation of international relations (IR) more generally.
The width of the transatlantic gap on matters of values and world-views remains
debatable. What is not is that Iraq and everything after has severely tested a unique
infrastructure designed after the cold war to buttress the NATO security alliance and
manage an expanded policy agenda. The institutionalisation of EU–US relations
across levels of government and civil society groups in the 1990s was extensive,
ambitious and intended to provide a foundation for a political and economic
partnership (Steffenson 2005a). It marked a shift away from a traditional focus on
cold war security issues to a modern, co-operative agenda of democracy promotion,
The British Journal of
Politics and International Relations
doi: 10.1111/j.1467-856x.2008.00355.x BJPIR: 2009 VOL 11, 25–45
© 2008 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2008 Political Studies Association
regulatory convergence and global governance. The Bush-era crisis raises questions
about whether it is naïve and misguided to think that a new and modernised
transatlantic relationship could ever be institutionalised, or ‘engineered’, especially
when the basic foundations of the relationship are badly shaken by a clash over
security and geopolitics.
We develop three main arguments. First, to a surprising extent, the US is a sort of
regulator of European integration. It gives incentives to the EU to show unity both
when it looks for a single Europe to share the burden of managing global issues as
well as when it engages (as it sometimes does) in divide-and-rule tactics. Second,
the Brussels/EU institutional channel is only one among many through which
transatlantic relations flow, but it continues to gain in importance. The EU steadily
advances as America’s main interlocutor because of the importance, from
Washington’s point of view, of issues that lie squarely within the Union’s policy
remit: counter-terrorism, energy, economic regulation and (post-2008) climate
change. Third, a surprisingly frequent feature of American foreign policy thinking
is the assumption of Europe as an increasingly single player, with the EU as its
institutional focus.
We offer two more general, ‘macro-political’ conclusions about (first) institutions in
international politics and (second) American hegemony. The first flows from the
limits to how much strong or productive transatlantic relations can be manufac-
tured via engineering what is already a very imperfect system for EU–US
exchanges. Institutions may matter less in transatlantic relations than the architects
of today’s so-called New Transatlantic Agenda (NTA, see below) framework
assumed or hoped when it was created.
Second, we argue that America under Barack Obama’s administration is likely to
embrace multilateralism more often than it eschews it. There may well be a difficult
period of adjustment, when differing European and American views about precisely
what multilateralism means in practice have to be reconciled (see Taft and Burwell
2007). But there is now widespread conviction in the American political class that
the most dangerous threats of the 21st century demand multilateral solutions. That
in itself bodes well for a transatlantic relationship of the quality required to advance
multilateralism in the 2010s.
1. The New Institutionalism of Transatlantic Relations
In retrospect, the 1990s were a golden era in transatlantic institution building. New
channels for US–EU dialogue were established through a series of political agree-
ments, including the Transatlantic Declaration (1990) and The New Transatlantic
Agenda (1995). These agreements and the institutions they created might be seen
as part of a ‘new institutionalism’ that gained traction in international relations
more generally after the cold war (see Keohane 1998). A diverse variety of new
transatlantic institutions operating under the shorthand ‘NTA framework’ fostered
exchange and policy co-ordination across a range of issue areas, bringing govern-
mental and non-governmental actors together at regular intervals as well as on an
ad hoc basis. A series of agreed policy goals included the promotion of economic
liberalisation and democracy (especially in central and eastern Europe), and
26 JOHN PETERSON, REBECCA STEFFENSON
© 2008 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2008 Political Studies Association
BJPIR, 2009, 11(1)
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