Title: Towards a Post-American Europe: A Power Audit of EU-U.S. Relations
By Jeremy Shapiro, Director of Research, Center on the United States and Europe , and
Nick Witney, Fellow, European Council on Foreign Relations
European Council on Foreign Relations, November 2009
Full report | Executive Summary

“We are now entering a “post-American world”. The Cold War is fading into history, and globalisation is increasingly redistributing power to the South and the East.

The United States has understood this, and is working to replace its briefly held global dominance with a network of partnerships that will ensure that it remains the “indispensable nation”.

Where does this leave the transatlantic relationship? Is its importance inevitably set to decline? If so, does this matter? And how should Europeans respond?

In this report we argue that the real threat to the transatlantic relationship comes not from the remaking of America’s global strategy, but from European governments’ failure to come to terms with how the world is changing and how the relationship must adapt to those changes.

Our audit (based on extensive interviews and on structured input from all the European Union’s 27 member states) reveals that EU member states 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. In the post-American world, a transatlantic relationship that works for both sides depends on the emergence of a post-American Europe.
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Four Illusions
Among the illusions that European governments find hard to shake off, we identify four which are particularly damaging – the beliefs that:
• European security still depends on American protection;
• American and European interests are at bottom the same – and apparent evidence to the contrary only evidences the need for the US to pay greater heed to European advice;
• the need to keep the relationship close and harmonious therefore trumps any more specific objective that Europeans might want to secure through it; and
• “ganging up” on the US would be improper – indeed, counterproductive – given the “special relationship” that most European states believe they enjoy with Washington.

Pragmatic America

We have described the European attitude to the United States as basically infantile and fetishistic. So the idea that the future of the relationship in which they are so heavily invested lies in their own hands will not be easy to accept. America wants to be Europe’s partner, not its patron; but it cannot be responsible from without for weaning Europe off its client status. The US has other, more pressing problems; and, no matter what the enduring strength of the “ties that bind”, it will value the transatlantic relationship, and give weight and attention to European views and interests, on an essentially pragmatic basis.

Much of what Europeans need to do if they want to stay “relevant” applies not just to the transatlantic relationship but on a global basis. As is often said, Europeans need to speak increasingly with one voice, to assert their interests, and to act in the world with collective weight using all the components of power at their disposal – and they should make full use of the new possibilities that the Lisbon Treaty should offer them to do just that.
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We seek to illustrate what this new approach could mean in practice in relation to three specific issues of current importance: Afghanistan, Russia, and the Middle East. Finally, we suggest how, building on the expectation that the Lisbon Treaty is at last within reaching distance of ratification, the upcoming Spanish Presidency of the European Union (EU) should try to stimulate the necessary change of mindset and of approach.
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Portuguese asset
Portuguese assets vis-à-vis the US: Azores base; Africa expertise; desire to bridge. “