Anthony Luzzatto Gardner1
(1)
London, UK
Anthony Luzzatto Gardner
“Athens, Athens, conditions for Bruges please.” Every evening on the way home from my office I would hear my embassy driver Alain Dupaix speak these words into a long-range walkie-talkie. “Athens” was the code word for the guardhouse outside the official residence in which I lived for three years as the Ambassador to the European Union. “Bruges” was the code word for the official vehicle when I was riding in it. And every night, except for one following the terrorist attacks in Brussels in March 2016, the guardhouse would radio back the message: “conditions green at all locations.” That meant that it was safe to approach. But conditions were hardly “green” when I arrived at my diplomatic post in Brussels on March 3, 2014. They were amber and started flickering red a few months thereafter.
This was a stark contrast to the heady optimism I had experienced as a young intern in the European Commission, the executive arm of the European Union, in 1990–1991. The European Economic Community, as it was then known, had launched an ambitious program to break down national boundaries inhibiting a true single market in the flow of goods, services, workers, and capital (as largely exists in the United States). Brussels felt like a Washington, DC in the making—the capital of an increasingly unified (and expanding) area of nation states. The Berlin Wall had just fallen and the newly liberated countries of Central and Eastern Europe were waiting at the door for financial and technical assistance, as well as eventual membership in the club. I took the rather unusual decision in 1992 to start my legal career in Brussels, rather than in the United States, in the belief that Brussels would increasingly be at the heart of Europe.
The admission into the bloc of three new members in 1994, ten more in 2004, and a further two in 2007 boosted optimism about the future of the European integration project. Despite the deep slump that Europe experienced in the financial crisis shortly thereafter, continuing optimism seemed justified when the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded its Peace Prize to the European Union in 2012 for its contribution “to the advancement of peace and reconciliation, democracy and human rights in Europe” for over six decades. Croatia joined the club in 2013 and other applicants from the Balkans had started the application process.
But by the time I arrived at post in March 2014, the mood had worsened dramatically. The future suddenly wasn’t what it used to be, to paraphrase the adage of Yogi Berra, an American baseball player. Upon my arrival, I received two recently published books about the EU with identical titles: “Unhappy Union.” The first was written by Professor Loukas Tsoukalis, who had sparked my interest in the EU during my studies at Oxford in the mid-1980s; the second was written by John Peet and Anton La Guardia, two journalists for The Economist whom I had met before my departure from my home in London. They argued that the Union is like a dysfunctional marriage that stays together, not out of love or idealism, but out of practical concerns: the high financial costs of breakup (especially the breakup of the Eurozone and a return to national currencies) and the fear of being alone and with less influence in an increasingly turbulent world. One might add that there are also fears of what would happen to the “children”—the recent arrivals from Central and Eastern Europe—if the marriage were to end in divorce: They might well slide back into bad habits of authoritarian rule or might be sucked back into the chilling embrace of Mother Russia.
Storm Clouds Over Crimea
There was no doubt that the Unhappy Union was already in difficulty by early 2014. Things were about to get significantly worse. Crimea, a territory gifted to Ukraine by the Soviet Union in 1954, provided one of the most serious crises that were to define my diplomatic mission. At the end of 2013, Ukrainian Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych, under heavy pressure to accept cheaper gas and financial aid from Moscow, refused to sign a trade and political association agreement with the EU that would have led to closer integration into Western Europe. Anger about this refusal, as well as widespread indignation about the widespread corruption of government officials, led to protests that culminated in mid-February with riot police and snipers killing dozens of peaceful demonstrators.
I was watching these dramatic events unfold in Frankfurt, Germany, where I was taking an intensive German language course as I waited for final Senate confirmation of my ambassadorial appointment. Over one weekend, as I was tucking into my Sunday brunch at a local restaurant, I practically gagged on my müesli when I saw that all the leading German newspapers were widely reporting a conversation, between my friends and future colleagues, US Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and Geoffrey Pyatt, US Ambassador to Ukraine. In that conversation, probably intercepted and leaked by the Russian secret services, Nuland dismissed EU concerns about the US desire to impose punitive sanctions and to have the United Nations play an intermediating role in the crisis. “Fuck the EU,” she said. I thought to myself: “Well, my future assignment just got more interesting.” Even the normally pro-American Süddeusche Zeitung published a scathing editorial arguing that the remark (though intended to remain private) displayed an emblematic lack of respect for Europe.
In the weeks before my arrival, a new technocratic and pro-Western government had been formed; Yanukovych and other high government officials had fled the country for Russia. Armed men without insignia (but acting on instructions of the Russian military) had taken over the Supreme Council of Crimea and strategic sites, such as the Sevastopol Airport and the port hosting the Russian Black Sea Fleet. In the subsequent days, the occupation of Crimea was completed, with a pro-Russian government installed and Crimean independence declared. Russia formally annexed the territory in mid-March.
As described in Chapter 7, I devoted a significant portion of my diplomatic mission to ensuring a coordinated US–EU response to these events, including the implementation and repeated renewal of strict sanctions against Russia.
My first official meeting on the first day of my arrival in Brussels on March 3, 2014, was with the Ukrainian Ambassador to the EU, Konstantyn Yeliseyev, later to become the National Security Adviser of Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko. My last official meeting on my last day on January 20, 2017, was with his successor, Ambassador Mykola Tochytskyi. By contrast, I never had a formal meeting with my Russian counterpart, Ambassador Vladimir Chizhov, a long-time veteran of the Brussels diplomatic corps. When asked about the clear presence of Russian troops in Ukraine, he denied that there were any there: “Let me assure you that the Russian army is not an army of the future which can make its soldiers invisible.”1
Without coordinated US–EU sanctions on Russia, Moscow might well have decided to press its advantage even further in Crimea and beyond. (The separate sanctions that the US and the EU imposed on Iran, also described in Chapter 7, were equally effective in bringing Teheran to the negotiating table to hammer out a comprehensive agreement that limited its nuclear ambitions.) I also participated in US efforts to assist the EU, described in Chapter 8, to enhance Ukraine’s ability to withstand Russia’s use of gas supplies as a political weapon and to improve the EU’s energy security.
Although the Russian aggression in Ukraine was tragic, I was grateful to Vladimir Putin for helping to deflect attention from a transatlantic rift over data privacy caused by allegations of US government surveillance, including of European citizens. As The Economist astutely observed: “Unwittingly, perhaps, Vladimir Putin is playing Cupid to America’s Mars and Europe’s Venus: By seizing Crimea, he has rekindled the love lost between the transatlantic allies.”2 I hung the cartoon accompanying the article on the wall behind my office desk. It depicted Putin as cupid, bare-chested, and wearing army fatigues, just after firing his arrow at a tree where the US and EU have carved their initials in the shape of a heart. In the distance, President Obama and a woman dressed in the EU flag are walking arm in arm. As the article argued, “Russia is reminding both sides of the ties that bind.” Without the Ukraine crisis, the “love lost” due to the rift over data privacy would have been much worse (Fig. 1.1).
Fig. 1.1
“Putin, Obama & EU”
(© Peter Schrank, 2015. The Economist. Reprinted with Permission)
Storm Clouds Over Data Privacy
Even with this helpful deflection of attention, Europe’s loss of trust in the US because of perceived breaches of European citizens’ privacy rights became the single greatest preoccupation during my diplomatic mission. As described in Chapter 5, I focused considerable energy on addressing this problem as it had the potential to poison the well of US–EU relations and frustrate progress toward numerous common objectives.
One important objective was the negotiation of a Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership Agreement (TTIP). As described in Chapter 4, I was actively involved in the public outreach and strategy of the negotiation. Other important objectives, described in Chapter 6, were to ensure that the EU’s Digital Single Market Program would be consistent with US interests and to promote a transatlantic digital economy. The US and the EU made important progress in all these areas but our failure to conclude TTIP will remain my biggest regret.
The transatlantic rift was due in large part to the actions of Edward Snowden, an outside contractor at the National Security Agency. In 2013, he had fled to Hong Kong with highly classified documents about US intelligence programs (that he subsequently leaked to the press). Some of the leaks related to previously clandestine surveillance programs to collect user data from many leading US technology companies and to harvest significant information from Internet activity around the globe. Based on these leaks, German magazine Der Spiegel reported that the NSA had placed listening devices in EU diplomatic offices in Washington and New York, breached an EU computer network that provided access to internal e-mails and documents, and accessed phone lines in EU headquarters in Brussels.3 Bill Kennard, my friend and predecessor in my post, valiantly coped with the fallout of these revelations prior to his departure in July 2013.
Many in Europe saw Snowden as a brave “whistle blower” who had done a great public service. In 2013, he had been shortlisted for the European Parliament’s Sakharov Prize, Europe’s top human rights award. I strongly disagreed with this view. He appeared to have joined the NSA (and stayed a mere six weeks) for the specific purpose of inflicting maximum damage on the United States; much of the leaked information revealed sources and methods of US intelligence, thereby putting lives at risk and compromising military readiness and defenses against terrorist threats. According to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Snowden had regular contact, from the moment of his arrival in Moscow, with Russian intelligence services and shared information with them.4
Things got even worse in the fall when news reports in Germany revealed that the US intelligence services had been tapping the cell phone of German Chancellor Angela Merkel. News reports alleged that the eavesdropping was being conducted from equipment stationed on the roof of the US Embassy in Berlin, next to the Brandenburg Gate, the German Parliament and government offices. There were further allegations over the following months. For example, the NSA had allegedly exploited its cooperation agreement with the German intelligence services to spy on European politicians and companies. The US and the UK, moreover, had allegedly hacked into the internal computer network of Gemalto, a European company and the world’s largest manufacturer of SIM cards for mobile phones, to steal encryption keys to monitor mobile communications.
Although President Obama and the Chancellor quietly patched up the serious breach in trust, the incident caused significant disruption in transatlantic relations. This was true above all in Germany where data protection has been a highly sensitive issue since Hitler’s dictatorship and Eastern Germany’s authoritarian regime, both of which had collected masses of personal information in order to crush dissent. By contrast, the NSA revelations elicited a collective yawn in the United Kingdom, an established democracy where the government and intelligence services command widespread respect.
The Snowden disclosures were a black cloud that threatened to cast a shadow over the entire US–EU relationship. A few days after I arrived in Brussels, I strolled around my new neighborhood in Uccle, a leafy suburb, and came across a large outdoor advertisement of Carlsberg Beer: “Unhacked by the NSA Since 1847.” I thought to myself: Houston, we have a problem. Lack of trust in the United States, due to data privacy concerns, had even entered popular culture.
In the fall of 2013, the European Commission, under pressure from the European Parliament (especially its Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs), called for a reassessment of the US–EU Terrorist Financing Tracking Program (TFTP). This program, described in Chapter 9, has been a critically important tool for the US and its allies in combating serious crime and terrorism worldwide. It enables the US government, under strict controls, to obtain financial transaction information related to serious crime and terrorism from the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications (SWIFT), a Brussels-based global provider of financial services, including a nearly universal routing code for bank transfers.
The agreement had been painstakingly negotiated and approved in 2009, before being at first rejected by the European Parliament in 2010, revised and then finally ratified four months later after intensive lobbying and a high-profile visit of Vice President Biden to Brussels. The Snowden disclosures had prompted concerns that the US had been collecting SWIFT data in a manner not explicitly authorized by the agreement: by direct intercepts of private companies’ IT systems rather than by means of serving subpoenas on SWIFT itself. These concerns were put to rest during intensive discussions between Under Secretary of the Treasury David Cohen and EU Commissioner Cecilia Malmström in the final months of 2013.
The Snowden disclosures raised broader difficulties about the data privacy protections afforded to EU citizens’ personal data in the US, especially at the hands of US intelligence services. The European Commission, the European Parliament, and the Article 29 Data Protection Working Party, an independent European advisory body on data privacy, had all expressed grave concerns that the Safe Harbor Agreement, concluded in July 2000, was not working as intended. As part of this agreement, the European Commission found that companies complying with certain privacy principles and registering their certification met EU requirements and could therefore transmit European citizens’ personal data to the United States as part of their commercial activities.
The Snowden disclosures not only put in jeopardy the SWIFT and the Safe Harbor arrangements, thereby undermining US–EU cooperation across the board. They also posed massive commercial risks for our leading IT companies. In the fall of 2013, Germany’s biggest telecommunications firm, Deutsche Telekom, announced plans for a German “Internetz”—a national routing system which would send data packets via German pathways when the sender and recipient were both in Germany. Atos, a French leader in digital services, was lobbying the French government to impose a requirement that French companies store their data locally. Other European companies were talking about a “Schengen data zone” allowing the 26 countries belonging to the area of free travel to exchange data securely among themselves.
When I arrived at my post, I quickly realized that protecting TFTP, enhancing and saving Safe Harbor, and restoring trust in the US would be Job Number One. As described in Chapter 5, I played a role in the negotiation of Privacy Shield, the successor agreement to Safe Harbor, that the US and EU scrambled to negotiate after the European Court of Justice invalidated Safe Harbor in October 2015. As described in Chapter 9, I also contributed to the conclusion of a so-called Umbrella Agreement for the transfer of data between law enforcement authorities after four years of intensive negotiations. I focused significant energy on promoting legislation in the US that grants EU citizens the same rights as US citizens under the 1974 Privacy Act with regard to personal data transferred under the Umbrella Agreement. Without this legislation, that corrected years of discrimination against EU citizens, the Umbrella Agreement would never have seen the light of day.
During my Senate confirmation hearings, Senators Chris Murphy and Ron Johnson, the co-chairs of the European sub-committee of the Foreign Affairs Committee, pointedly told me that my job was not to go abroad and apologize for the important work of US intelligence services. Many US allies, they argued forcefully, were benefiting from these activities to bolster their domestic security. During my diplomatic mission, I repeatedly observed that Congress, the Administration, and the US private sector harbored significant bitterness at European hypocrisy. Europe was not only free riding on US intelligence; some national intelligence services, especially those in the UK and France, were operating with significantly fewer checks and balances than in the US. European companies were also fueling criticism of the US to steal business away from their US rivals. European citizens’ data was routinely transferred to other countries (including Russia, China, and Iran) that clearly don’t respect European privacy protections.
A Toxic Brew: Economic Fragility, Mass Migration, Brexit, and Terrorism
Conditions in this Unhappy Union that I found upon my arrival were also flickering amber, rather than green, because of a stubbornly persistent economic slump, lasting seven years after the financial crisis hit in the summer of 2007. That crisis had painfully exposed the precarious foundations of the currency union: While financial union (including banking union and capital markets union) had progressed, fiscal and political union had not.
Martin Feldstein, a well-known economist and Harvard professor, had famously argued that the euro would inevitably fail as a result of imposing a single currency on a heterogeneous group of countries. In 1997 and again in 2002, he predicted that Europe’s economic and monetary union would lead to international conflict among European countries and between Europe and the United States. While that had proven overly gloomy, it was true that the euro had accentuated, rather than diminished, economic differences among members of the Eurozone.5
Growth was anemic in many of the 28 members of the EU, with unemployment higher than in the United States; youth unemployment was especially alarming, reaching over 20% in Italy and higher in Spain and Greece. Italy was already suffering from a decade of stagnation and Greece was struggling to avoid defaulting on its loans. A short while after my arrival, the European Commission, along with the European Central Bank, the Eurogroup (of Eurozone finance ministers), and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) were locked in a frantic effort to keep Greece on a path of economic reform that would allow it to stay inside the Eurozone. I was astonished that the EU would allow a debt crisis in a small economy on the periphery of Europe to metastasize into a threat to European, and even international, financial stability.
The US Treasury played an important role mediating between these institutions and Greece. At key points of the negotiations, when it seemed Greece might choose (or be forced) to leave the Eurozone, the US Treasury urged compromise and rationality on both sides. Goodwill was often in very short supply between the EU institutions and the IMF, on the one hand, and Greece, on the other. Many thought the main culprit was Yannis Varoufakis, the Greek Finance Minister during the first half of 2015, who repeatedly alienated EU and member state officials. Athens considered Washington to be an honest broker and US interventions, especially by President Obama with Greek Prime Minister Tsipras, proved crucial.
Not everyone was happy with US involvement. My German counterpart, Ambassador Reinhard Silberberg, pointedly observed during one of our meetings that the EU wasn’t lecturing the US about how to solve the Puerto Rican debt crisis. The comparison, however, was not apposite as the Puerto Rican crisis did not, unlike the Grexit crisis, carry the risk of international contagion.
Conditions were flickering red in the fall of 2015 when over 1 million refugees poured into Europe, largely from Syria through Greece and the Balkans into the heartland of Europe before many settled in Germany, Sweden, and the Netherlands. This was a crisis of a wholly different dimension from other crises because it was far more tangible to local populations. The very visible presence of refugees in at least several EU member states added cultural and ethnic insecurities to economic anxieties. National leaders who took anti-immigrant stances were rewarded at the polls, whereas those who followed more liberal policies faced a popular backlash. The events appeared chaotic, with frontline states ill-equipped and sometimes unwilling to fulfill their obligations to receive and process asylum requests.
With the EU institutions often lacking the power to act, and member states increasingly pursuing independent and inconsistent national actions, border fences sprouted across the bloc and the Schengen area of free movement appeared to be at risk. Many were declaring Schengen “dead” as one member state after another imposed “temporary” border controls. Nine days after Hungary’s move to seal its southern border drove refugees into Slovenia, the Prime Minister of Slovenia Miro Cerar called on his fellow Central and Eastern European leaders for emergency talks. “If we don’t find a solution…then it is the end of the European Union.” European Commission President Juncker stated that the end of Schengen could cause the collapse of the euro and even of the single market (Fig. 1.2).
Fig. 1.2
Ambassador Gardner with European Commission President Juncker, November 2015
(Source From author’s own collection)
Largely as a result of economic weakness and the refugee crisis, euro-skepticism grew significantly throughout the EU, not only in Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia, but also in traditional bastions of pro-EU sentiment such as Italy and Spain. Extreme populist movements were threatening to win national elections in Austria, the Netherlands, and France. While this did not happen, the United Kingdom voted in a national referendum to leave the EU; this was the first time that a member (let alone a major one) had decided to do so in the history of the bloc, and it triggered a crisis of confidence in the future of the Union. As ambassador to the EU, I was involved in assessing the consequences of a UK vote to leave and I helped clarify the US position before the referendum.
Brexit is perhaps one of the greatest acts of self-harm committed by any country in living memory. As described in Chapter 3, I and many other officials in the Obama administration were flabbergasted by the decision to call an In/Out referendum, as well as by the hugely misleading campaign led by the Leavers. We predicted, accurately I believe, that Brexit would have negative consequences for the EU and especially the UK and, furthermore, that it would weaken the US–EU partnership in some areas where the UK has played an important role (such as sanctions). Nonetheless, as I argue in this book, the EU will continue to offer key capabilities that will make it an essential partner of the US.
On top of all these crises, Europe faced a steady stream of terrorist attacks, many of them masterminded in the Brussels commune of Molenbeek, a stone’s throw from US Mission to the EU. Two months after I arrived, a Frenchman of Algerian origin living in that commune killed four people at a Jewish Museum in downtown Brussels, two blocks from where I had lived for five years in the early 1990s.
The weapons used in terrorist attacks in Paris in January 2015 were traced back to the Brussels train station Bruxelles Midi. In August 2015, a Moroccan national who had lived in Molenbeek opened fire with a Kalashnikov (acquired near the same station) on a high-speed train from Amsterdam to Paris, before being subdued by passengers. And, worst of all, two French terrorists living in Brussels traveled to Paris in November of that year to carry out a killing spree that took the lives of 130 people and injured hundreds.
The fear in Brussels, even among US diplomats who had served in hardship posts around the world, was palpable. One of the key objectives I had during my tenure was to promote closer cooperation between the United States and the European Union in combating serious crime and terrorism. These efforts are described in Chapter 9.
The End of Europe?
In late fall of 2015, the crescendo of lamentations in the press on both sides of the Atlantic and among Europe’s political leaders about the proliferating challenges facing the EU reached its climax. Like many European media outlets, an article in The New York Times Sunday magazine, entitled “Has Europe Reached Breaking Point?” featured a long, gloomy article on the refugee crisis, the risk of Greece leaving the euro, Russian aggression, and terrorism.6 Presidents, chancellors, and prime ministers competed with one another by issuing apocalyptic warnings of Europe’s imminent demise. The EU was capable of dealing with one big crisis at a time, but was it capable of dealing with multiple, large, and interlocking crises all at once?
I recall watching the 2016 State of the Union address by European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker from the public gallery in the European Parliament in Strasbourg. It was a down-beat admission that solidarity was fraying in the EU:
There is not enough Europe in this Union. And there is not enough Union in this Union…The European Union is, at least in part, in existential crisis…never before have I seen such little common ground between our Member States….Never before have I seen so much fragmentation, and so little commonality in our Union.7
There was no doubt that the events of the prior two years had placed substantial strain on the European Union. Dramatic events had called for rapid, effective action; but, as in the past, the EU had continued its practice of muddling through. While that approach had proven to be sufficient in calmer times, it was clearly inadequate in more turbulent ones. As Wolfgang Munchau of the Financial Times had damningly put it: “The EU has an innate tendency towards foul compromises and fair-weather constructions.”8
Hairline fissures had been spreading along the marble floor of the EU temple. Several had been there for some time: One dividing the prosperous North of creditor countries and the stagnating South of debtor nations, and another separating a euro-skeptic fringe from a Europhile core. Other fissures were more recent: between a socially liberal West and an increasingly autocratic East; between those favoring tougher sanctions on Russia and those favoring a policy of accommodation; and between those willing to take in immigrants and those who refused to allow any. The fact that enlargement, one of the EU’s signature accomplishments that had anchored Spain, Portugal, and Greece in liberal democratic systems, had failed to prevent democratic backsliding in recently admitted member states (such as Hungary and Poland) was sapping the EU’s confidence in its mission.
Increasingly harsh criticism of Germany was one example of fraying solidarity. In the highly charged atmosphere in Greece, some of the Greek media and politicians regularly invoked Germany’s Nazi past when rejecting the program of economic austerity promoted by the EU, the European Central Bank, and the IMF. It was even more disconcerting to witness leading members of the Polish government do the same in their regular barbs about German power. The collegiality of EU heads of state meeting in the European Council had certainly declined, with Chancellor Angela Merkel repeatedly the target of harsh criticism.
The Greeks and Poles were not alone. Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi vociferously blamed Berlin for acting as if solidarity is a one-way street. He claimed that Berlin demanded austerity and alignment with EU sanctions on Russia that caused economic pain in Italy, while doing nothing to help Italy cope with significant refugee flows. Moreover, Berlin helped defeat the South Stream pipeline project that would have brought Russian gas into Europe through Italy while supporting the North Stream pipeline project that will bring Russian gas into Europe through Germany. At critical moments Berlin appeared to be taking unilateral decisions that had major implications for all of Europe. At one critical European Council meeting in March 2016, called to discuss proposals on how to deal with the Syrian refugee crisis, many participants objected when they were presented, as a fait accompli, a deal negotiated in secret the night before by the Chancellor, Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu and Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte (holding the rotating EU presidency).
Criticisms of Germany were increasingly met with impatience and hostility in Germany itself. The German public largely believed the prevailing narrative of the popular press (rarely challenged by the government) that the imbalances in the Eurozone are solely due to the sloth of debtor countries and the virtue of Germany and fellow surplus countries. Rather than acknowledging that Germany is the single largest beneficiary of the Eurozone and single market, by enabling German exports to be competitively priced and widely sold thanks to free access to its neighbors’ markets, a large part of the German electorate was demanding an end to a “transfer union” in which Germany would underwrite bailouts.
Under the weight of proliferating and deepening crises, the EU’s governance was visibly creaking. Many of the crises touched the raw nerves of national sovereignty and therefore had to be dealt with through intergovernmental decision-making among heads of state, rather than through the so-called community method of supranational decision-making in which the European Commission plays a critical role. Crisis mode was becoming the norm, with heads of state traveling to Brussels every three to four weeks in all night marathon summits, rather than four to six times per year as in the past. Often the communiqués were rushed and unclear, with ministers left to figure out what had actually been decided. Many other important, but not critically urgent, issues were not getting the attention they deserved.
In the dark days of 2016, I was repeatedly fielding inquiries from Washington about when the wheels were going to fall off the EU bus. I never thought that they would and I said so in repeated cables, paraphrasing Mark Twain by concluding that “reports of the EU’s death are much exaggerated.” It would be a mistake, I argued, to underestimate the political will of EU leaders to defend the integration project. The international media was overly focused on the problems, without giving due credit to what was being achieved.
I did not think that Schengen would collapse because the member states knew that the costs of such a collapse would be prohibitive: One study by the Bertelsmann Foundation estimated that the permanent introduction of border controls in the EU would cause a decline in economic output of between nearly €500 billion and approximately €1.4 trillion over a ten-year period due to the interruption of supply chains, inventory and storage costs, and harm to tourism and cross-border labor mobility.9
I was influenced by a wise observation that Herman van Rompuy, then EU President of the European Council, made over lunch together in 2016. While acknowledging the proliferation of the fissures, he noted that no San Andreas Fault had yet emerged. The fact that the fissures were running in multiple directions depending on the issue, rather than running along one axis dividing one group from another, meant that the member states still appreciated the value of trade-offs and the need to compromise. It is true, former European Commission Spokesman (and currently Commissioner) Margaritis Schinas once confided in me, that few member states consider themselves as shareholders in a common project and therefore fail to see that investments made today will produce dividends in the future. But I also believed that the glue of solidarity would probably hold the project together.
The member states of the EU had walked to the edge of the cliff and had looked into the abyss, before stepping back. The frequently repeated aphorism of Jean Monnet, the EU’s most famous founding father, had proven to be correct: “Europe will be forged in crises, and will be the sum of the solutions adopted for those crises.” As a result of the perfect storm that washed over the EU’s deck, the crew adjusted the rigging, added more ballast, solidified the hull, and improved the navigation.
Today, the EU is better equipped to cope with another financial crisis thanks to supervisory powers granted to the European Central Bank to monitor the financial stability of the Eurozone’s largest banks; a permanent bailout fund to provide financial assistance to Eurozone countries or banks in difficulty; and rules to ensure the orderly winding up of failing banks with minimal costs for taxpayers and the real economy. Moreover, member states have agreed to pool sovereignty to enhance the ability of the Union to protect its external borders, combat terrorism, and enhance its energy security.
The Brussels Bubble
For three years, I had a privileged position from which to witness both the challenges facing the EU and the many areas in which the US and EU have worked together to confront regional and global crises. When I mentioned during a family dinner that I might want to describe these in a book one day, my then 14-year-old daughter Alejandra immediately replied: “Don’t do that, Daddy: no one will read your boring book; and besides, when you return to London you need to focus on making enough money to pay for my school fees.”
I had to admit that she had a point given the stratospheric UK boarding school fees that no book royalties would cover. Bookshelves already groaned with many scholarly, detailed tomes on US–EU relations. One of my predecessors had already written a book about the EU as an emerging superpower. Most readers in the United States ignore the existence of the European Union and even in Europe many find it difficult to understand. As American columnist Tom Friedman put it, including the words “European Union” in the lead of a column in the United States was akin to putting up a “Do Not Read” sign.10
This book focuses on the EU, specifically its main institutions, rather than its member states. Unlike some observers, I find the former just as interesting as the latter. Explaining the EU to a non-expert audience requires stepping out of the “Brussels bubble” and viewing things with proper perspective. Brussels, like Washington, is an extremely self-referential microcosm where it is easy to believe that one is living at the epicenter of events.
Armies of lawyers, lobbyists, and consultants all feed from the same trough of minutiae about legislation, policy information, personnel changes, and gossip. Since 2015, Brussels has had its own version of the Politico “Playbook,” an early morning update on key EU-related information; thousands now start their days scrolling through these e-mails on their way to work. The degree to which Brussels is a bubble really hit home when my wife and I were invited to see Mozart’s opera Mitridate, Re di Ponta performed at Brussels’s famous La Monnaie Theatre. This opera, written in 1770 and describing events in 63 BC during the conflict between Rome and Pontus, was staged as a crisis summit of the European Council, replete with press conferences and bilateral meetings.
The EU’s slow and elaborate procedures can be rather more frustrating than operatic. The EU appears to be like the Echternachter Springprozession, an annual dancing procession in Echternach, Luxembourg, in which dancers take three steps forward and two steps backward—thus taking five steps to advance one. It is no wonder that it takes the dancers several hours to jig their way one and a half kilometers.
Meetings of the EU institutions can be rather painful because of the number of member states represented around the table. Soon after my arrival, I had the opportunity to accompany US Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack to meet his 28 counterparts—ministers of agriculture from each EU member state—in Luxembourg. As Greece was then holding the six-month rotating presidency of the Council, the Greek Minister of Agriculture, Giorgios Karasmanis, had the privilege of speaking first in Greek. The EU Commissioner for Agriculture, Dacian Cioloș, delicately nudged him and whispered a suggestion that he speak in English as no one at the table spoke Greek. But the minister continued for ten minutes, followed by ten minutes of translation delivered by an assistant seated next to him.
The topic of the entire twenty-minute intervention focused on the glory of feta cheese and the necessity that cheese can only be called feta if it is made in Greece. I was tempted to respond that, by that logic, all countries except for Bermuda, Denmark, and France should be banned from selling Bermuda shorts, Danish pastries, and French salad dressing, respectively. (The topic of “geographical indications,” a form of intellectual property protection that the EU extends to a long list of European food and drink names, emerged as a major stumbling block in the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership negotiations. From an American perspective, the list contains a number of generic names.) After the Greek minister had finished, each of the other 28 ministers spoke for about five minutes on each of their favorite topics. Near the end of this marathon, Secretary Vilsack leaned over to me and asked: “Is this the way you spend all your time in Brussels?” Fortunately, it was not.
There were plenty of moments of levity to punctuate the bureaucratic meetings. During my tenure, the annual “press reviews,” a vaudeville show organized by the British press corps, compared Martin Selmayr, the powerful Chief of Staff to President Juncker, to Darth Vader. In the opening to one skit, a deep voice intoned:
The empire is now in the grip of one man who rules with absolute power, whose word is final. He can kill his enemies with a thought, a gesture, or a directive…or worse, reassign them to a job in the farthest reaches of the galaxy….such as Luxembourg. His name, which many dare not speak, is….Darth Selmayr.
Fortunately, I found my regular meetings and lunches with Darth Selmayr to be productive and enjoyable. On the eve of the Juncker Commission taking office in 2014, we had a brief skirmish with our light sabers about trade negotiations (fortunately the Force was with me). Quickly thereafter, we quickly developed an honest channel of communication in which I always found him charming, razor smart, and open to find solutions.
The Brussels bubble can sometimes appear like an episode of Star Wars. I recall one article published in Politico in particular that asked its readers to guess whether certain sentences had been uttered by a character in Star Wars or by an EU official.
Trade disputes, endless plenary sessions with speeches in many languages, the breaking apart of longstanding alliances and coalitions – we must be talking about the European Union, right? Wrong! We’re talking about the ‘Star Wars’ galaxy which may be far, far away but when it comes to political dialogue sounds an awful lot like Brussels.11
This was not the first time that the comparison had been made. Some seasoned observers of the EU scene told me that the Members’ Bar of the European Parliament in Strasbourg reminded them of the Star Wars bar scene because one could find some rather interesting extra-terrestrials there—some humanoid but others not. I spent many hours in that Bar lobbying parliamentarians on data privacy, the TTIP transatlantic trade negotiations, and digital economy issues.
The EU can sometimes appear to be a surreal cartoon strip. After all, Brussels is home to a museum to René Magritte, the renowned Belgian surrealist painter, and to a major cartoon-strip museum. One of the leading tourist attractions is the Mannequin Pis, a statue near the Grand Place of a small and unremarkable boy urinating. The massive and blackening hulk of the Brussels Palace of Justice has become emblematic of Belgium’s occasionally dysfunctional government. Since 2003, it has been shrouded in scaffolding erected to repair its cracked stonework and collapsing ceilings. In 2010, the scaffolding needed repairs and required its own scaffolding. And in 2017, police forensic experts had to don hazmat suits to enter its evidence storage area.
A few kilometers away, in Park Leopold outside the Brussels headquarters of the European Parliament, there are sculptures of ostriches, several of them with their heads in the sand. The UK tabloid press had a field day when it discovered them:
The birds, surrounded by a wasteland of overgrown weeds, perhaps are also meant to represent Europe’s response to Islamist terrorism, the migrant crisis, or the cultural destruction caused by financial stagnation and youth unemployment.12
The truth behind the ostriches was that they were paid for by Brussels, not the EU, and were meant to be a reminder that the park used to be a zoo. Not far away from the park, however, lies a more relevant and truthful symbol: The massive building housing the Representation of the Free State of Bavaria. Dwarfing most national embassies, the building reflects its outsized influence.
The EU institutions are also littered with amusing symbols. The European Parliament building in Strasbourg has such a complicated numbering system for its offices—arrayed in concentric broken circles—that even parliamentarians and seasoned visitors have a hard time finding them. The EU’s foreign ministry and foreign minister are inelegantly named the European External Action Service and the High Representative for Foreign and Security Policy—titles that have “the ring of Gilbert and Sullivan to it”13—because some member states believe that the simpler names would imbue the EU with trappings of statehood.
The Reason for This Book
Despite my daughter’s warning and the difficulties of writing about the EU, my experience in Brussels convinced me of the need for a first-hand non-academic account addressed to informed but non-expert readers about how the United States and the European Union work together, how their foreign policy tools are complementary, and, finally, why regional and global stability depends on their continued joint leadership. Although there are certainly areas of friction, also detailed in this book, their interests are aligned on most issues.
I saw plenty of evidence for that, including in the areas of law enforcement, counterterrorism, sanctions policy, and energy security. It was also clear in how the US and the EU worked closely in the areas of climate change and the environment (as described in Chapter 11), foreign aid and humanitarian assistance (as described in Chapter 12), and even in the area of military and security cooperation (as described in Chapter 10).
Given my family and professional ties on both sides of the Atlantic, I naturally arrived at my post in the hope of deepening and broadening the US–EU relationship. I wanted to build more bridges. Walls are rarely the solution. The Trump administration came to office with the opposite view. Monica Crowley, Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs at the US Treasury, posed in front of the Berlin Wall, a symbol of oppression for millions of people, and tweeted that “Walls Work.”
My preference for bridges influenced my choice of how to decorate the official residence. The State Department had offered me the chance to pick some artwork from their large storage facilities, but my wife and I declined as we thought the choice rather uninspiring. I therefore chose art depicting bridges as a symbol of what the US–EU Mission was seeking to accomplish. After contacting a number of leading architectural firms of the world, including those of Norman Foster and Santiago Calatrava, we covered the walls of the residence with pictures of spectacular bridges that are both architectural and artistic marvels. They served as a good launchpad for conversations at the embassy about the need for more bridges and fewer fences in trade, data privacy, and the digital economy (Fig. 1.3).
Fig. 1.3
“Millau Viaduct”
(© Daniel Jamme/Eiffage. Reprinted with Permission from Foster + Partners)
When I left my post on January 20, 2017, with the arrival of the new Trump administration, I was very concerned that transatlantic fences would replace bridges and that President Obama’s promotion of the transatlantic partnership, building on the work of his predecessors, would unravel. President Trump had given an extraordinary interview in which he had claimed “indifference” to whether the EU succeeds or fails and in which he described the EU as a vehicle of German power, as a “consortium” set up to beat the United States in trade and as a dysfunctional, largely irrelevant institution on the verge of breaking up.14 His only apparent experience of the EU was with the difficulty in obtaining planning permits for his golf course in Scotland. A columnist suggested a plausible reason for his hostility:
To a former New York property developer, the EU is the equivalent of a zoning commission objecting to a garish neon façade, or the bulldozing of a playground. The simple act of it saying no enrages him.15
When President Trump called European Council President Donald Tusk shortly after the election, he had only question: What EU nation would follow the UK out the door of the bloc? To my horror, the President appeared to be receiving counsel from Nigel Farage, a rabid euro-skeptic and purveyor of cartoon-strip caricatures of the EU.
It was against this backdrop that I took the unusual decision of calling a parting press conference—described the next day on the front page of the Financial Times as “pugnacious”—to denounce the “lunacy” of backing populist movements and the breakup of the EU.16 I warned against any effort to sideline the EU in favor of a purely bilateral and transactional relationship with a number of member states, especially the United Kingdom, because the EU is a critical partner with important assets and because most member states would insist on dealing with the US through the EU on many issues. I noted that ever since President John F. Kennedy administrations of both political parties have supported European integration because it has been beneficial to US economic, political, and security goals. The US business community has been a cheerleader of European integration because it has promoted prosperity and stability and, in turn, a favorable environment in which to trade with and invest in Europe. “To think that by supporting fragmentation of Europe we would be advancing our own interests is sheer folly.”
I have always believed that Europe, including specifically the EU institutions, and the United States are each other’s natural partners. When I read the extraordinary statements of the incoming president and his administration about the EU, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and key European allies, I found myself humming the theme song to the hit movie Ghostbusters. “Who you gonna call” when you find something strange or weird that doesn’t look good in the neighbourhood? Europe and the United States had busted quite a few ghosts over the past decades. Undermining that relationship is just an invitation to let some pretty spooky ghosts into the house. Vladimir Putin is just one of them.
At the post-mortem election breakfast I co-hosted on November 9, 2016 with my friends and colleagues, Doug Lute and Denise Bauer, ambassadors to NATO and Belgium, respectively, I could not hold back my true feelings. I quoted from one of my favorite poems, “The Second Coming” by William Butler Yeats:
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold…
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
I was not the only one to worry about a potential Bonfire of the Sanities. Donald Tusk, then President of the European Council, wrote a letter to EU heads of government on the eve of their summit in Malta in February 2017, noting that “worrying declarations by the new American administration all make our future highly unpredictable.” The letter went so far to list the United States as a geopolitical risk for the bloc, in addition to Russia, China, terrorism and uncontrolled migration. “Particularly the change in Washington puts the European Union in a difficult situation, with the new administration seeming to put into question the last 70 years of American foreign policy.”17
At the end of December 2016, the incoming administration had asked me, along with all other non-career ambassadors appointed by President Obama, to step down from my post no later than January 20, 2017, at noon. It was a breach of decades of precedent whereby ambassadors were given several months to arrange for good-byes and to plan for an orderly return to private life. Fortunately, my transition seemed predestined: Having listened to the radio call of “Athens, Athens, conditions for Bruges, please” for three years, it seemed logical to head to the College of Europe in Bruges for a period of reflection. As we sped away from the official residence on our last day, I couldn’t help thinking to myself that, while a book would not pay my daughter’s school fees, the story of the essential partnership between the US and the EU might one day help to repair the damage to the relationship that was bound to occur.
Footnotes
1
Remarks before the European Parliament, January 28, 2015. https://push.tass.ru/en/russia/774264.
2
“Putin’s Arrow,” The Economist, March 29, 2014.
3
Michael Birnbaum, “European Leaders Angry About Allegations of US Spying,” The Washington Post, June 30, 2013.
4
Edward Jay Epstein, “The Fable of Edward Snowden,” The Wall Street Journal, December 30, 2016.
5
Martin Feldstein, “EMU and International Conflict,” Foreign Affairs, November–December 1997. In 2002, he concluded: “The euro has thus caused tensions and conflicts within Europe that would not otherwise have existed. Further steps toward a permanent fiscal union would only exacerbate these tensions.” “The Failure of the Euro: The Little Currency That Couldn’t,” Foreign Affairs, January–February 2002.
6
Jim Yardley, “Has Europe Reached Breaking Point?” The New York Times, December 15, 2015.
7
State of the Union Address 2016: Towards a Better Europe—A Europe that Protects, Empowers and Defends, Strasbourg, September 14, 2016.
8
Wolfgang Münchau, “Europe’s Multiplicity of Crises Is Not Accidental,” Financial Times, January 3, 2016.
9
Bertelsmann Foundation, “Departure from the Schengen Agreement,” 2016. https://www.bertelsmann-stiftung.de/fileadmin/files/BSt/Publikationen/GrauePublikationen/NW_Departure_from_Schengen.pdf.
10
Tom Friedman, “Friends and Refugees in Need,” The New York Times, January 27, 2016.
11
Craig Winneker, “Who Said It: ‘Star Wars’ or the European Union?” Politico, December 14, 2015.
12
Nick Gutteridge, “Symbolic! Brussels Wastes Cash on Sculpture Garden—With Ostriches Burying Heads in Sand,” Express, August 31, 2016.
13
John Peet, “The Future of the European Union,” The Economist, March 25, 2017.
14
The Times, January 16, 2017.
15
Shawn Donnan, “Why a Trump Trade War Is More Likely with the EU Than China,” Financial Times, May 29, 2018.
16
Alex Barker, “Trump Team Rang EU and Asked ‘What Country Is Leaving Next’?” Financial Times, January 13, 2017.
17
Press Office, General Secretariat of the Council, January 31, 2017.