FORMER TAOISEACH John Bruton has called on the EU to adopt a new approach to trans-Atlantic relations, stating the US would welcome a “hard-headed” engagement with the union.
Mr Bruton, who recently finished his five-year term as EU ambassador to the US, argued that the union’s relationship with the US was a means to an end and not an end in itself.
“That is how the US sees the trans-Atlantic relationship, and it is how we should see it too,” he said in a speech in Bonn, Germany. Addressing the European Peoples’ Party, Fine Gael’s group in the European Parliament, he said the EU’s 27 members should themselves work out how to harness their collective weight to achieve what they want from the union’s relationship with the US.
Mr Bruton recently campaigned unsuccessfully to become the first president of the European Council, a post created under the Lisbon Treaty.
Under Lisbon, he said, the council was obliged to determine the EU’s strategic interests on issues such as war in Afghanistan, the nature of a Palestinian state, nuclear proliferation and relations with Russia.
The new approach to US relations could only come about after EU members worked out “robust common agreements” binding them on such issues, he said.
“Some of these issues have yet to be discussed in a really profound way in the European Council. But that is the task that is imposed on the council by the treaty. In short, the work on EU foreign policy must first be done in Europe, not in Washington, Beijing or Moscow.”
From his work as ambassador, he believed the US understood it will disagree with the EU from time to time. When US and EU interests diverged, however, realistic compromise would follow honest debate.
Arguing that the US was not particularly interested in a relationship based on “long declarations” or new institutions, he said such activities consumed much bureaucratic time without delivering significant results.
“Nor is the US impressed by EU member states competing with one another to show which of them has the more special relationship with it, who can get the earliest meeting with new US-office holders, and who gets the longest meetings in the White House.”