Clockwise: Strobe Talbott, Jessica Matthews, James Goodby, Robert Cooper.

he Euroatlantic community’s current institutions and practices—established during the Cold War and resilient even today—will have to make significant adjustments to endure an array of emerging challenges: globalization, transnational security threats, and competing foreign and economic policy interests, foreign policy specialists say.

And the future of Russia’s place in the Euroatlantic alliance—always a matter of speculation—has become even less certain due to its profound political and financial crises, the experts conclude.

Over 40 American, European, and Russian scholars, government officials, and foreign policy analysts discussed the “Prospects for a Peaceful, Undivided, and Democratic Europe” at a two-day roundtable discussion October 7–8 in Washington, D.C. The event was co-sponsored by the U.S. Institute of Peace and the State Department’s Foreign Service Institute in cooperation with the secretary of state’s Policy Planning staff. Keynote speaker Strobe Talbott, deputy secretary of state, discussed U.S. policy regarding the Balkans and the conflict in Kosovo at an off-the-record luncheon briefing.

The conference was part of a series of conferences planned by the Institute of Peace’s Working Group on the Future of Europe, co-chaired by former national security adviser Anthony Lake and Stephen Hadley, formerly a member of the National Security Council staff and an assistant secretary of defense for international security policy. Patrick Cronin, director of the Institute’s Research and Studies Program, and program officer Lauren Van Metre helped organize the event.

Distinguished diplomat and scholar James E. Goodby noted in his opening remarks that “the two post–Cold War U.S. presidents—George Bush and Bill Clinton—have held out a vision of a new Europe, a Europe vastly different from the divided, bipolar continent of the Cold War and different, too, from the historical Europe of power-balancing and arms-racing.” While they provided no blueprint for the future, and while there are numerous obstacles to achieving their vision, “it is still possible to think of strategies to overcome those obstacles, to leverage events, and to influence the course of history,” Goodby said. “What is needed is . . . some judgment of how to sustain such a Europe if it could be achieved.”

A former fellow at the Institute of Peace, Goodby is the author of Europe Undivided: The New Logic of Peace in U.S.-Russian Relations, published recently by the Institute’s press.

Participants agreed that the need for collective action, for the resolution of conflict through political dialogue and negotiation, and for increasingly open borders has not gone away, even though the common enemy that engendered such practices—the Soviet Union—has disappeared.

Top: Conference participants discuss the future of the Euroatlantic alliance. Bottom, left to right: Karl Kaiser, Michael Brenner, Wolfgang Reinecke

Yet while the nations of Europe share many common values such as democracy, increasingly pluralistic political and social systems, and individualistic societies, their differences in foreign policy approaches and interests will surely grow in the absence of a common threat.

Also, in areas where Europe and the United States share security interests—such as combating terrorism, corruption, and transnational criminal networks—their approaches may differ based on differing concepts of national sovereignty and legal jurisdiction, participants said.

With the emergence of left-oriented governments in 11 of the 13 European states, participants predicted that domestic policy interests also may diverge. Additionally, issues such as the environment and social welfare may for Europeans begin to take priority over other traditional security interests.

Four major sources of tension face the United States and Europe, according to Jessica Matthews, president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. These include differences over how to deal with rapidly aging populations; the need to reach agreement on major global issues such as climate change; a growing gap in information technologies, with the U.S. lead widening; and differences over the roles of the state and nonstate actors in foreign affairs, and particularly over the degree to which the private sector assumes a policy role.

Yves-Andre Istel, vice chairman of Rothschild, Inc., and chair of the European Institute in Washington, said that job creation is the key economic challenge facing Europe. In the last 20 years, Americans created 70 million new jobs, while losing some 40 million. “Is Europe ready to go through constructive and destructive capitalism on that scale?” To approximate the U.S. success, Europe will have to change its regulations, culture, technology, and entrepreneurial incentives to create jobs in small and medium-sized companies. “Some of the largest employers in the United States today didn’t exist 20 years ago,” Istel said.

And while Europe works out ways to improve its employment picture, the 11 countries that will soon comprise the “Euro area”—those countries using the new Euro as their joint currency—will represent an economy that is 80 percent the size of the U.S. economy and twice as large as Japan’s, noted Brendan Brown, director and head of economic research for Tokyo-Mitsubishi International, London. The shift in economic power may well change Washington’s economic priorities and its past focus on Japan. Also, the Euro area may become more critical of U.S. fiscal and monetary policies and seek to build coalitions with Japan.

While these shifting alliances and priorities may cause some disruptions, the Euroatlantic community needs to focus on the challenges of globalization, cautioned Wolfgang Reinicke, a senior economist with the corporate strategy group at the World Bank. Indeed, the transatlantic economy represents the core of the global economy, and transatlantic economic integration must be considered in that context. However, the West urgently needs to discover new ways of thinking about the global economy and of dealing with the current outmoded global financial, economic, and political architectures.

Although such changes can no longer be made unilaterally or bilaterally, the United States and Europe are the only entities that have the power, resources, and experience to lead such a process. “Unfortunately, I fail to see the degree of assertiveness, determination, and level of cooperation that this would require,” Reinicke concluded. “But a joint effort to put globalization on a sustainable path may turn out to be vital to the survival of political elites on both sides of the Atlantic, as well as to U.S. and European security.”

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