European Diary: After months of mutual sniping over Iraq and sharply divergent views at the Convention on the Future of Europe, EU governments have become gripped by a sudden sense of common purpose, writes Denis Staunton
The most striking feature of last weekend's meeting of foreign ministers on the Greek island of Rhodes was not that they sought to mend fences with one another, but that they were able to speak frankly but without rancour about the most fundamental questions that divide them.
The ministers have mandated the EU foreign policy chief, Mr Javier Solana, to start drafting a "strategic security concept", or security doctrine, for the EU and to present his initial report at next month's summit in Thessaloniki. The ministers have yet to agree on what form such a doctrine should take, but they are united on the need to define for the first time where Europe's security interests lie.
The impetus for this action comes partly from a desire to prevent a repeat of the foreign policy chaos caused within the EU by the war in Iraq. But the primary motivation lies in the knowledge that the transatlantic relationship, which has weathered numerous storms over the past half a century, is deep in crisis.
US commentators such as Robert Kagan have been arguing for months that Europe and the US no longer share the same interests and that they embrace entirely contradictory views on how to organise the world.
This analysis is summed up in Mr Kagan's much-quoted aphorism that Europeans are from Venus and Americans are from Mars.
Europeans have been reluctant to confront the crisis in their relationship with the US, not least because they are acutely conscious of how high the stakes are for both sides. As a report by Joseph Quinlan of Johns Hopkins University highlighted recently, the economies of the EU and the US are more deeply integrated than at any time in their history.
Some 4.1 million Europeans are employed by US companies and more than 4.4 million Americans work for European firms. It is foreign investment rather than trade that forms the backbone of the transatlantic economic relationship, and US and European companies invest more in each other's economies than they do in the entire rest of the world. Mr Quinlan notes that US affiliates in Ireland represented 17.8 per cent of the State's GDP in 2000.
Mr Solana cited some of these figures during a speech last month at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. But after listing some of the areas where the EU and the US work well together, he said the current sense of crisis in transatlantic relations was very real.
"Europeans find current events profoundly unsettling, and all the more so since they detect that these events herald the arrival of a new era. New eras are always unsettling," he said.
Mr Solana said that the current crisis could be turned into an opportunity, but Washington must first acknowledge that Europeans are partners and allies rather than tools in a military or diplomatic toolbox.
"Treat your friends like allies and they will behave like allies. Partnerships and alliances bind. They allow for and legitimise leadership by providing a forum for talking and for listening, for defining common tasks and identifying the means to accomplish them.
"The alliance should determine the mission. This is not code for a de facto European veto on American initiatives. It is the best hope of restoring our joint sense of purpose," he said.
Mr Solana acknowledged that the EU should improve its military capabilities but he questioned whether buying an aircraft carrier contributed more to security than spending the same amount of money on peacekeeping or reconstructing failed states.
"Nation-building is not for wimps, as we have found out in Afghanistan and as we will be reminded in Iraq. And Europe's security contribution and her ambitions are relevant and useful," he said.
Mr Solana argued that Europe's commitment to a world order based on rules did not represent a threat to US power and suggested that law and power were two sides of the same coin.
"Power is needed to establish law and law is the legitimate face of power. Sometimes European countries have tended to forget that law, and international norms have to be backed by force. And occasionally I have heard American voices that seem to have forgotten that, if it is to have lasting effect, force needs to be backed by legitimacy," he said.