Anthony Luzzatto Gardner1
(1)
London, UK
Anthony Luzzatto Gardner
When I announced to my then 12-year-old son Nicolas that President Obama had named me Ambassador to the European Union, his eyes opened wide with disbelief and he pointed a finger at me: “You?” It was not a morale-boosting moment. But it forced me to articulate why I believed I was suited to be the representative of the United States to the European Union. I believe in the power of the EU to do good in this world and I believe in the power of the relationship between the EU and the United States to advance our common objectives on a wide range of regional and even global issues. We are, in short, indispensable partners in an increasingly turbulent world.
I had eagerly accepted the president’s offer because my personal and professional life has been intimately connected with Europe and specifically with the EU institutions. Steve Jobs observed in his famous graduation address at Stanford University in 2005 that “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards.” That observation resonates with me. Looking backward, one of the few threads that connect all the dots is my interest in the EU. Following my father’s death in 2019, I conducted an archeological dig through decades of my papers in our Connecticut country house. I found an issue of the Harvard International Review that I edited in 1984 on the future of the European Community, an issue of the Columbia Journal of Transnational Law that I also edited in 1990 on the significance of the EU’s Maastricht Treaty, and a book I wrote in 1996 on US–EU relations.
Europe in My Blood
From the moment of my arrival in Brussels, I refused to wear a “friendship” lapel pin (with the flags of the United States and the EU), unlike nearly all my fellow US ambassadors who sported pins featuring their host countries, because I felt my commitment to the relationship should speak for itself. It was in my heart; it didn’t need to be on my lapel.
My personal attachment to Europe became rather painfully clear when I had to undergo vetting by the FBI after my nomination. The disclosure form asked every candidate to a Senate-confirmed post to provide 15 years of travel records. As I had been based in London for the past 14 years and had been traveling several times per week to continental Europe and further afield, this was a monumental task. An even more challenging question on the form asked me whether I had “close and/or continuing contact with a foreign national within the last 7 years” with whom I or my wife was “bound by affection, influence, common interests and/or obligation.” I considered asking the FBI whether I should list every physical contact I have had with my Spanish wife, but I feared that the FBI would not be amused. In the end, we decided to list my wife’s thirty Spanish cousins and my Italian relatives, along with their e-mails, addresses, phone numbers, and professional histories. The completed form was 281 pages and had taken three intensive months of work to complete.
My attachment to Europe is deeply rooted in Italy. In addition to my US citizenship, I have been proud to have Italian citizenship through my Italian mother. I adopted my mother’s maiden name, Luzzatto, as my middle name after her death in 2008 to honor the family’s remarkable history. My maternal grandparents, Bruno and Resy Luzzatto, had to flee Italy and Benito Mussolini, a bombastic narcissist who wanted to Make Italy Great Again but who wound up destroying his country. Mussolini’s granddaughter Alessandra, a former member of Italy’s fascist party, served as a Member of the European Parliament. I was delighted when she took to her Twitter account a few years ago to say that I “speak nonsense.”
Bruno Luzzatto was an engineer and manager of an aluminum plant near Venice. One of my prized possessions is a photograph of Bruno in that plant during an official visit of Fascist officials; he stands to one side, dressed in khaki, while the visitors in the black uniforms of the Fascist party stride down the center. Bruno never joined the party, following in the footsteps of his father Giuseppe, who had resigned from his position of CEO of the largest Italian insurance company rather than collaborate. Other members of his family, including Bruno’s uncle, decided to collaborate to advance their careers (although they naturally justified themselves by saying that they were looking out for the good of the country).
Following the introduction of the anti-Jewish Racial Laws by the Fascist regime in October 1938, my grandparents, along with my six-year-old mother and 4-year-old uncle Francis, fled through Switzerland to Normandy and then to Tarrascon, a small mountain town in southern France. This was a painful decision because the Luzzattos—who had produced eminent rabbis, economists, and intellectuals—had resided in Venice since the early 1500s.
Although Bruno was fortunate to find a job at an aluminum factory in Tarrascon, he and his family had to move on to Marseilles shortly thereafter when the Vichy government shut the factory down and shipped the aluminum production to Germany for the war effort. Bruno’s work permit was due to expire within weeks, along with the family’s ration card. He called upon the military attaché in the Italian consulate to see what could be done. As my uncle Francis later described in The Washington Post: “To the officer the circumstances were clear: if your name is Luzzatto, you are Jewish. If you left Italy and do not want to return, you are anti-Fascist. If you want to remain in Marseilles, you are trying to escape from Europe.”
Despite these evident facts, the officer wrote an official letter of support to the Vichy authorities allowing my grandfather’s family to stay. And as a result, my grandfather applied for admission to Australia, Argentina, Brazil, and the United States. For months, he paid daily desperate calls on the US consulate. When Bruno died in 1988, my uncle found in his papers a copy of a letter addressed to the Vichy Autorité Compétente Française informing him that a visa to the United States had been granted to Bruno and his family. The letter, dated December 5, 1940, is signed by Myles Standish, Vice Consul of the United States.1 It is the same name as the leader of the Pilgrims who invited the local Indian tribe to the first Thanksgiving in 1621. Thanksgiving always retained a special significance for my mother’s family.
My mother saw the Statue of Liberty for the first time on April 1, 1941. She, my uncle, and my grandparents were in New York Bay aboard the Serpa Pinto, a Portuguese ship that they had boarded in Lisbon. She read the words written at the base of the Statue: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…” Writing in an Italian newspaper in 1986, the centenary of the Statue, my mother described her emotions:
“When we passed in front of the Statue in the grey dawn of that morning,” she wrote, “we were all on deck with our eyes directed at Her…Everyone around me was crying; they were embracing each other…However, Lady Liberty gave me hope and I made a pact with Her… I wanted at all cost to succeed. I wanted to become a real American. I wanted her to be proud of me.”2
In the wall above my office desk hangs a framed telegram from Bruno to his relatives in Venice announcing the family’s safe arrival in the United States and bearing the stamp of the Fascist regime’s censor.
After his arrival in Washington, my grandfather joined other Italian Jewish engineers in the State Department’s unit responsible for providing the US military with information on Italy’s industrial infrastructure. He then worked in Paris on the Marshall Plan to help Europe recover from the war’s devastation, before serving with NATO in Brussels and retiring in Rome. As a child, I would spend every summer in Venice and in Rome where my grandmother patiently taught me Italian on her geranium-filled terrace. These were happy memories and more than made up for the occasional teasing I was subjected to in New York primary school for being half-Italian. “Why does the Italian Second Navy have glass-bottom boats?” one boy asked me during lunch break. “To look at the First Italian Navy.”
The family link with Italy was further strengthened when President Carter appointed my father, Richard Gardner, US ambassador to Italy in 1977.3 I recall one dinner from that period at which my mother announced that the Italian government was likely to fall the next day. My father responded that the morning senior staff meeting at the embassy had discussed the matter and had concluded that the government was stable. When the government did fall the next day, my father asked my mother over dinner what had been her source. “I was at the hairdresser,” she said, “and the woman next to me, who is the mistress of Minister [X], told me in great detail of his plans to introduce a motion of no confidence for which he had enough votes.” She then paused for dramatic effect, as she had trained to be an actress: “You know, dear, you really should spend more time at the hairdresser, and less time with your senior staff. You might get better information.” That episode always reminded me of the importance of unofficial relationships. When I recounted that episode to my senior staff, I don’t think they found it very amusing.
Memories of my life in Rome include the turbulent political events, including the assassination of Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro and the terrorist campaign of the Red Brigades, but the most memorable moments were my frequent visits to my grandparents’ house two blocks away from the embassy residence. My sister Nina later went on to marry an Italian diplomat, Ambassador Francesco Olivieri, and to live in Rome for several years where she became friendly with Federica Mogherini, the EU’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy during my diplomatic mission. My family’s connections to Italy, and to Venice in particular, were highlighted upon my arrival in Brussels when The European Voice published a cartoon of me as a gondolier rowing across the Grand Canal. At one of the lunches that Mogherini hosted for Secretary John Kerry, she pointed at me and joked: “John, you should know that you have a great Italian ambassador to the EU!” (Fig. 2.1).
Fig. 2.1
Cartoon of Ambassador Gardner as a gondolier rowing across the Grand Canal
(© Marco Villard, POLITICO Sprl [previously European Voice], POLITICO.eu, May 22, 2014)
My family history repeatedly reminded me of the importance of the transatlantic bond and the necessity to stand firm against Russian aggression and to uphold the principles of democracy, human rights, and the rule of law that the United States and the European Union share. The crisis triggered by the Russian invasion of Ukraine was a personal, not just a professional, matter for me. At the age of fourteen, and during my father’s service as US ambassador to Italy, I had torn down Communist party banners that had been defacing the beautiful clock tower in St. Mark’s square in Venice. Even though I had taken the precaution of waiting until the square was empty at 3 a.m., I could have triggered a minor diplomatic incident had I been apprehended.
The Importance of Transatlantic Values
After the annexation of Crimea, the Baltic Republics rightly worried that they could be the next targets of Russian aggression. When I sat in the Latvian Parliament with parliamentarians from the United States, the European Union, and Latvia during the semi-annual Transatlantic Legislators Dialogue in June 2016, I recalled how Latvians from all walks of life manned the barricades around the same building in January 1991, braving freezing temperatures and potential death at the hands of the Soviet Army, to prevent a Communist coup. I had seen the evil of the Soviet Union with my own eyes, as a student at Leningrad State University, an intern in the Institute of US–Canada Studies of the Soviet Academy of Sciences and as an intern in the US Embassy in Moscow. These experiences led me to take my family to Riga’s Museum of National Occupation so that they could see how Latvia had been traded like a piece of real estate between the totalitarian regimes of Hitler and Stalin.
While the coordinated US–EU response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine was one of the (largely) unsung successes of the relationship, I was occasionally frustrated at the hesitation of the White House to move faster with tougher sanctions, and I was disappointed that several EU member states preferred to negotiate endlessly with Moscow at any cost, while leaving the Ukrainians dangerously exposed. I had grown up believing that values matter and that it is an obligation to support those who fight for freedom.
In 1987, I had traveled to Prague to smuggle reading materials to some of the signatories of the Charter of 77, a human rights manifesto. In 1983, I had studied Polish at Krakow’s Jagiellonian University as a pretext to meet members of the Solidarity resistance movement. I had the memorable opportunity to interview Lech Wałęsa, then under house arrest in Gdansk, and to smuggle the tape out of Poland, despite being stopped by the ZOMO, the Polish paramilitary police. Shortly after my arrival in Brussels as ambassador, I presented a copy of the interview to his son, Jarosław Wałęsa, a Member of the European Parliament. The fact that in one generation, a country like Poland could make a peaceful transition from military law to democracy was a reminder of the EU’s hugely significant contribution to European and, indeed, world peace and stability.
The EU doesn’t necessarily guarantee that positive evolution, however. When I arrived in Brussels, I was reunited with a Hungarian Member of the European Parliament, József Szájer, whom I had gotten to know when he was a Soros Fellow at Oxford. I had been full of admiration for his courageous struggle in the early 1990s for Hungarian independence, along with his old friend Viktor Orban, now Prime Minister of Hungary. Szájer has been a steadfast apologist for the many measures that EU democratic watchdogs have concluded amount to a serious weakening of Hungarian media and judicial independence. Prior to the Trump administration, the United States shared EU concerns about the erosion of Hungarian democracy, increasing corruption and anti-semitism.
During my diplomatic mission in Brussels, I observed several moving historical commemorations that reminded me of the importance of democracy, human rights, and the rule of law. On November 11, 2014, many towns across Europe, especially in Belgium, observed the centenary of the outbreak of World War I. I took my family to visit the Passchendaele Memorial Museum, including the recreation of the trenches, and the Commonwealth graves at Tyne Cot, to remind my children of the horrific cost that past generations paid for our freedom. At a nearby American cemetery, my family came across a white gravestone of a Private named William Fossum from Minnesota; barely an adult and far from home, he died on November 11, 1918, the very day that Armistice was declared. The famous poem “In Flanders Fields”4 came to my mind:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
November 2014 was the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the escape of millions from their Soviet prison to become free Europeans. The East Germans had called that wall the “Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart”—exhibiting the same cynical disdain for the truth as Vladimir Putin. I had first seen the wall during a visit in 1987 and then in the fall of 1991 when I worked in the German Privatisation Ministry housed in the former Luftwaffe Headquarters in East Berlin.
In early December 2014, my wife and I went to Bastogne to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the great battle that took place there and the heroism of American troops who held back a German offensive as part of the larger Battle of the Bulge in the Ardennes. It was freezing cold and snowing, like the conditions back then, but we were warmed by the amazing spirit of the veterans from that battle who were present.
I have never forgotten the role that the United States played in saving my mother’s family, to give my grandfather and his children the opportunity to start anew, and to rebuild the country of their birth. These things have always been engraved in my mind and heart. I recall vividly that my maternal grandparents never permitted me to criticize the United States in their presence, even during the troubled days of the Watergate Crisis that the family discussed passionately during our Italian holidays. I have always believed that the United States is, in the words of my Harvard Professor Joe Nye, “bound to lead”; it alone among nations has the power and the values to lead the world. Despite mistakes, the world has benefited enormously from US leadership.
“Going Native”?
When I was in the State Department preparing for my mission, I heard an anecdote about how former US Secretary of State George Schultz used to call new ambassadors into his office. He would ask them to point to “their country” on a big globe in a corner of his office. Almost invariably the ambassador would point to the country to which he or she had been named. Schultz would explode: “That’s not your country!” Pointing to the United States, he would shout: “This is your country, and don’t you ever forget it.”
I never needed a reminder of that, but it was a salutary warning that US-based government officials would always suspect an ambassador of having gone “native” by taking the side of the government to which he or she was accredited. Given my background, this was a constant concern of mine. During many occasions in which I sought to explain the rationale behind the policies of the EU or the member states, I feared that my opponents would deploy the “gone native” argument against me, especially during the hotly contested negotiations on data privacy and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership Agreement (TTIP).
Although I never went “native,” I did feel like a local upon my arrival in Brussels to take up my post. When I presented my credentials to José Manuel Barroso, the President of the European Commission, and Herman van Rompuy, the President of the European Council, I was met by the jovial head of the European Commission’s protocol office, Nicolas de la Grandville. “We really must do something about our internship program,” he joked, “because people like you see the insides of what we do and then return years later to sit on the other side of the table!” (Figs. 2.2 and 2.3).
Fig. 2.2
Ambassador Gardner with European Commission President Barroso, March 2014
(Source “Presentation of the credentials of the Heads of Mission to José Manuel Barroso, President of the EC” © European Union, 2014. Photographer Georges Boulougouris. Reprinted with Permission)
Fig. 2.3
Ambassador Gardner with European Council President van Rompuy, 2014
(Source From author’s own collection)
I had been fortunate to be an intern in the Directorate-General for Competition Policy of the European Commission in the early 1990s. During that period, I was exposed to the way in which the EU handles antitrust matters such as abuse of copyright, cartels, and restrictions on retailers’ distribution practices. My friend Mike Froman, whom I had gotten to know earlier during our graduate studies at Oxford and with whom I worked intensively on TTIP when he served as US Trade Representative, also worked as an intern in the Forward Studies Unit that provided policy planning for the Commission’s leadership.
It was my experience at the European Commission that convinced me to stay to work on antitrust matters in an international law firm, rather than return to Wall Street and a more traditional career path. I formed close friendships with many Commission officials, such as Daniel Calleja, a brilliant Spanish lawyer who rose to become director-general for the internal market and then for the environment.
I was fortunate to have found my first apartment on the third floor of a building owned by Wittamer, well known for the chocolates and pastries it still sells from its ground floor shop. Every day on my return from work, I would find a tray outside my door with the latest Wittamer confections and a handwritten note from its owner. Perhaps it was this sweet experience that made me a fervent believer in the European Union.
Living in Brussels during the early 1990s also had its share of frustrations. The Washington Post had published an article on my tribulations living in the capital, including the long waiting time to get heating and a telephone line for my apartment. The article had described the bureaucracy as a “bilingual frankenstein’s monster run amok” and quoted me as saying that the 19 communes were like “little Ghaddaffis” exploiting their high degree of autonomy.5 Services, such as telephone lines and heating, are cheaper and of better quality today. The capital continues to suffer from being a territory that is politically and linguistically disputed among the French-speaking Walloons and the Dutch-speaking Flemish. The communes operate on occasion like fiefdoms that often don’t cooperate with one another or federal or regional authorities. Six different police forces operate in Brussels, a city of only 1.2 million people, complicating efforts to have an integrated approach to countering terrorism.
Crafting a Transatlantic Agenda
My belief in the power of the US–EU relationship was solidified during my experience as the official handling matters relating to the EU and key member states such as Germany, France, Italy, and Spain, on the National Security Council staff. I found US relations with the EU to be fascinating because it was like two-dimensional chess played on one supranational board and another member state board. Any approach toward the EU that ignored its rich complexity, or sought to import US ways of doing business, would be doomed to fail. I had already seen many US businesses in Brussels flounder in this regard.
When I arrived on the first day of my job as Director for European Affairs in October 1994, my colleagues were delighted that I wanted to focus on the EU because “no one around here cares about that stuff.” They were all engaged in the rather more glamorous high diplomacy of conflict resolution in the Balkan War (Fig. 2.4).
Fig. 2.4
Ambassador Gardner briefing President Clinton in the Oval Office, fall of 1994
(Source From author’s own collection)
The EU’s continued efforts at political integration, including through the creation of a common currency, were largely ignored. A week after arriving in Washington I called the Treasury Department to ask what the Clinton administration’s policy was toward EU plans to create a single currency. I was told to my astonishment that the administration didn’t need to have a policy because the single currency would never come about. This error was rooted in the belief that the single currency was only an economic project, with apparent flaws, and not equally a political project. And it was a classic case of the United States underestimating the EU’s political will.
Even as a 32-year-old, I was fortunate to be given wide discretion to work closely with our US Mission to the European Union and my mentor, Ambassador Stuart Eizenstat, on all matters affecting the US–EU relationship. I saw the promise of the partnership to promote joint interests on a transatlantic, European, and even global basis. But I also understood why many of my colleagues did not share my enthusiasm. For example, I witnessed the rather uninspiring content of US–EU Summit meetings and the EU’s penchant for issuing communiqués and seeking to be a player on every global issue, regardless of whether it had relevant assets or ideas to contribute. And I observed how member state embassies in Washington routinely undercut the profile of their own EU Delegation to the United States; during the French Presidency of the Council (that rotates every six months), for example, a delegation from Paris sought to exclude the EU Delegation from a meeting with my boss, National Security Adviser Tony Lake, even though the meeting was on European affairs.
My last, and most memorable, experience as a White House official was accompanying President Clinton on Air Force One to Madrid in December 1995 to attend a US–EU Summit and the signing of the New Transatlantic Agenda. That document, in which I had been intimately involved, called for the US–EU relationship to evolve from joint consultation to joint action in a number of areas by specific target dates.
It proposed a “New Transatlantic Marketplace,” essentially a transatlantic free trade agreement, to reduce or progressively eliminate tariff and non-tariff barriers that hinder the flow of goods, services, and capital between Europe and the United States. The US and the EU convened a Transatlantic Business Dialogue in 1995 to serve as an official business sector advisory group on trade and investment issues. The “New Transatlantic Marketplace” laid the intellectual groundwork for the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership Agreement launched one year before my arrival in Brussels.
The core purpose of the Agenda was to enhance structured foreign policy cooperation—specifically the promotion of peace, democracy, and prosperity around the world. While we obviously failed to achieve that goal in the cases of Russia and the Middle East, there have been some notable successes.6
We certainly achieved the goal of promoting peace, democracy, and prosperity, through the transition to a market economy, in Central and Eastern Europe. Although the weakening of the judiciary, media, and civil society in Hungary and Poland is a worry, and although Romania and Bulgaria are still struggling to root out corruption, Central and Eastern Europe has made a remarkable and nearly bloodless transition to peaceful, democratic, and stable market democracies. The enlargement of the EU to the area, including the application of EU law, played a key role in this remarkable achievement. But US–EU coordination in providing technical and financial assistance was also important.
The states of the former Soviet Union have had a more difficult time, due to intensive Russian political, economic, and military efforts to keep them within Moscow’s sphere of influence. Ukraine remains a work in progress, with significant (albeit slow) achievements in transparency and the rule of law. Its trajectory has been miraculous in light of the human and economic costs of fighting Russian aggression.
The Agenda also sought to “assist recovery of the war-ravaged regions of the former Yugoslavia, and to support economic and political reform and new democratic institutions.” The Dayton Accords ended the Yugoslav War and established peace in Bosnia Herzegovina. Slovenia and Croatia joined the EU. Although Serbia has been careful not to antagonize Russia and remains reliant on Russian energy and military equipment, it has steadily pursued its aim of EU membership. Albania is a NATO member and in 2016 became a candidate member for EU accession. The US and the EU have promoted political and economic reforms in Montenegro and Bosnia Herzegovina, in the face of persistent Russian efforts to undermine their transitions with disinformation campaigns and illicit funding of political parties. Under the leadership of the former High Representatives for Foreign and Security Policy, Catherine Ashton and Federica Mogherini, the EU has promoted the normalization of relations between Serbia and Kosovo. The US and the EU have worked together intensively to enable a special prosecutor to investigate and a specialized tribunal based in The Hague to try those accused of war crimes in Kosovo.
The Trump administration has unfortunately deprioritized the promotion of anti-corruption, transparency, and good governance around the world, especially in the Balkans, thereby complicating the EU’s mission there and potentially leaving a vacuum that Russia, Turkey, and other states may fill.
In the Agenda, the US and the EU pledged “to coordinate, cooperate and act jointly in development and humanitarian assistance.” Representing 80% of all official development assistance worldwide, the parties have coordinated at both a country and program level to eliminate wasteful overlap and improve a division of labor that reflects each side’s strengths, thereby improving the quality and impact of international aid and relief.
In the Agenda, the US and the EU also pledged to “cooperate on the fight against illegal drug trafficking, money laundering, terrorism, organized crime and illicit trade in nuclear materials.” Here again, the parties have achieved a great deal, not just on a bilateral level between the US and individual member states of the EU, but also with Europol, the EU’s law enforcement agency, and the European Commission.
Other areas of collaboration mentioned in the Agenda include climate change and data protection. The digital economy, in its infancy at the time of the Agenda, was barely mentioned, as was military cooperation in light of the EU’s modest capabilities. But in the past few years, the parties have collaborated closely in these areas as well.
Supporting the EU in the Obama Administration
I have strongly believed during my service at the White House and thereafter that the European Union is an essential partner of the United States on these and many other regional and global issues. That view was shared widely in the Obama administration. Vice President Biden repeatedly engaged with the EU institutions at critical moments to advance key objectives in our trade and data privacy agenda (Fig. 2.5). In his Address to the People of Europe in April 2016,7 to which I contributed, President Obama told his audience:
your accomplishment – more than 500 million people speaking 24 languages in 28 countries, 19 with a common currency, in one European Union – remains one of the greatest political and economic achievements of modern times.
And he added that he considered it a necessity because European and US security and prosperity are indivisible. He went even further, asserting that the EU is of global importance (Fig. 2.6):
Fig. 2.5
From Left to Right: Alejandra Mac-Crohon Gardner, Ambassador Gardner, Ambassador Lute, Ambassador Bauer, and Vice President Biden, 2015
(Source From author’s own collection)
Fig. 2.6
Ambassador Gardner and President Obama in Brussels in March 2014
(Source From author’s own collection)
A strong, united Europe is a necessity for the world because an integrated Europe remains vital to our international order. Europe helps to uphold the norms and rules that can maintain peace and promote prosperity around the world.
These speeches followed very much in the footsteps of over 60 years of bipartisan support for European integration. On July 4, 1962, President John F. Kennedy had issued a ringing endorsement of the common market:
We believe that a united Europe will be capable of playing a greater role in the common defense, of responding more generously to the needs of poorer nations, of joining with the United States and others in lowering trade barriers, resolving problems of commerce, commodities, and currency, and developing coordinated policies in all economic, political, and diplomatic areas. We see in such a Europe a partner with whom we can deal on a basis of full equality in all the great and burdensome tasks of building and defending a community of free nations.8
This view has been shared by every president, of both parties, since Kennedy up until President Trump. In his historic address to the European Parliament in 1985, President Ronald Reagan had reaffirmed that “America remains…dedicated to the unity of Europe.” President George H. W. Bush had also repeatedly spoken in favor of an integrated Europe and of the EU’s emerging global leadership role.9 On the 60th anniversary of the Treaty of Rome in 2017, the Senate issued a bipartisan resolution paying tribute to the contributions of the EU and the US–EU partnership.
These views stand in sharp contrast to the Trump administration’s cartoon-strip caricatures of the EU. According to the president, the EU “was put there to take advantage of the United States”10 and its principal purpose has been to beat the United States in trade; he has accused it of being a strongly protectionist bloc (while pretending that the US market is entirely open) and merely a vehicle for German power. He has expressed his indifference as to whether the EU succeeds or fails, but in practice his administration has actively sought to divide and undermine the EU.
The six decades of US support prior to the Trump administration for European integration were not born of starry-eyed idealism, but rather stemmed from an appreciation of its benefits for US trade with and investment into Europe. The support has been rooted in a realistic analysis that many regional and global problems are simply not capable of being resolved by the United States acting alone. Europe, acting in a coordinated manner, can be an effective partner in promoting shared values and objectives. Naturally, the United States is occasionally inconvenienced by a strong, more united, and independent voice on foreign policy that differs from its own, but this is more than offset by the fact that on the big issues the views of the US and the EU converge far more often than they diverge.
The European project and institutions have contributed significantly to the creation of a zone of democracy, stability, and prosperity that is the envy of the world. The ultimate proof of this is that millions of people from all over the world risk their lives every year on hazardous land and sea journeys to reach Europe’s shores—not just for economic reasons, but because Europe is an attractive model of freedom and tolerance that offers people enormous opportunities to fulfill their dreams.
The EU certainly has struggled to communicate what it does, even within its own borders, however. That is because it is often noticed—like a windowpane—only when it is dirty or broken. When it is clean and transparent, it remains invisible. The challenge has always been to remind people that, even though it is usually invisible, it plays a key role by letting the light in and keeping the cold air out.
Observing Some EU Flaws
That doesn’t mean to say that there aren’t legitimate reasons to be critical of some aspects of the EU. I too have had moments of doubt about whether the EU has become too unwieldy, bureaucratic, and slow. Due to small member states’ insistence that they each appoint a commissioner, the College of Commissioners has consisted of 28 members (before the departure of the UK), more than the number of substantial portfolios. The need to maintain geographic balance in top positions within the European Commission has hindered the ability to make appointments on merit. Top positions within the EU institutions, such as the presidencies of the Commission, European Council, and Parliament, are sometimes allocated on the basis of national and political affiliation, rather than solely on competence. Occasionally, national governments appoint their commissioners as a pre-retirement gift or to keep them out of national politics.
The EU seems capable of taking big decisions, including significant reforms, only when its leaders are at the cliff edge, facing the abyss and with a knife to their throats. That was certainly the case during the 2008–2010 financial crisis, the negotiations with Greece about its threatened departure from the euro (and possibly even the EU) in 2015, and the migration crisis of 2015–2016. Decision-making by all-night crisis meetings between national leaders became almost routine. Once national leaders had taken the tough decisions and the immediate urgency of the crises lifted, they returned to old habits of postponing further reforms.
Sometimes there is a dangerous chasm between short-term rhetoric and long-term reality that can have serious negative consequences. For example, the EU occasionally pays lip service to the need for a “European Army”—a plan that is totally detached from reality because there won’t be the means or political to carry it out for several decades. The result of this rhetoric is to awaken deep-seated (and misguided) US concerns about any useful actions the EU takes to achieve greater autonomy in military and security matters because they purportedly will undermine NATO.
Although the EU excels at making laws, it has fallen short in enforcing them—largely because of the uneven rigor with which member states implement EU legislation into national laws. It often appears that there is one set of laws for the big member states and another set for the smaller ones. That certainly has been the bitter conclusion of the latter when France, Italy, and even Germany have breached the EU’s fiscal rules that are supposed to be backed by penalties.
The EU has also had great difficulty ensuring that all member states live up to basic standards of human rights, including the independence of the media and judiciary. The EU’s tolerance for sinners among its flock reminds me of an anecdote I once heard about how Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro sought to convince Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme about Sweden’s ability to live by all the bloc’s rules if it joined. Moro explained that the European Community is like joining the Church: You must have faith and know your catechism in order to be admitted, but you can sin and be forgiven once you’re in.
During my mandate in Brussels, I was repeatedly lectured, especially by left-wing members of the European Parliament, that the US market is “the wild west” with hardly any rules, while Europe imposes high standards that permit a civilized way of life. The facts show that this is a gross caricature.
For example, it was the US Environmental Protection Agency that broke the story about Volkswagen’s illegal installation of “defeat devices” to cheat emissions tests. The Joint Research Centre, the Commission’s in-house research arm, had warned five years before the scandal broke in 2015 about the presence of such devices, but no action had been taken.
It was the US Treasury that went public in 2018 with its claims that ABLV, Latvia’s third largest lender, had engaged in “institutionalized money laundering”—including violations of North Korean sanctions. Europe’s top financial regulator, Daniele Nouy admitted: “…it’s very embarrassing to depend on the US authorities to do the job.”11 Another major money laundering scheme was uncovered in Estonia in 2018. Denmark’s Danske Bank revealed that about €200 billion in questionable money had flowed through its Estonian branch of Denmark’s Danske Bank between 2007 and 2015.
Many US and EU businesses fairly complain that EU decision-making remains opaque, despite improvements over the past years. The main reason is that most legislation goes through a process called “trilogue”—informal meetings in which the European Parliament and the Council, assisted by the European Commission, try to agree a common text based on their initial positions before the combined text is voted according to the formal legislative procedure. Although the process has proven to be efficient, the EU’s own Ombudsman acknowledges that it is opaque as few details are revealed about meetings’ timing or content. Once a combined text is agreed, often an early stage of the legislative process, it is rare that outside parties have effective opportunities to amend it.
Another legitimate complaint is that the EU does not enshrine best scientific evidence as part of its legislative program; under pressure from certain member states, the opinions of the EU’s own food safety bodies have been routinely ignored and key exports of the United States, including agricultural products containing genetically modified organisms, hormone-treated beef, and poultry and beef carcasses that have been treated with certain antimicrobial washes, have been barred entry under specious consumer safety grounds. The elimination of the role of Chief Scientific Adviser at the European Commission in 2014 was not a good sign about the commitment to enshrine scientific evidence in EU policy-making.
The €58 billion that the EU spends per year on its Common Agricultural Policy, accounting for 40% of total expenditures, is frequently criticized as being opaque, inefficient, harmful to the bloc’s environmental goals and a source of patronage and corruption, especially in Central and Eastern Europe.12
In my view, businesses also have some legitimate concerns about how the EU’s antitrust policies operate. I have been a staunch defender of this core part of the EU’s mission, perhaps because I served as an intern in the Directorate-General for Competition Policy and later worked on EU antitrust matters in a Brussels-based law firm. I have also defended Margrethe Vestager, Executive Vice President of the European Commission responsible for competition and digital policies, against unfair attacks, including by writing in the Financial Times to criticize President Trump’s inaccurate depiction of her as “anti-American.”13
However, it is legitimate to point out that EU antitrust procedures are flawed because the European Commission is judge, jury, and executioner all rolled into one. The fact that the European Commission does not have to prove its initial case before a judge—as is the case in the United States—has very practical effects. The case teams are frequently staffed by smart young, professionals who have usually never worked in the private sector; they frequently form an early view on their cases, based on academic theories rather than real-world market effects; they enjoy an extraordinary amount of discretion and are rarely challenged by their bureaucracy. The introduction of procedural reforms, such as a hearing officer (essentially an independent arbiter of procedural fairness), and the greater emphasis on sound economic analysis, has had a positive, but limited, impact. The rest of the European Commission will almost never challenge the views of the Directorate-General for Competition. While appeals are of course possible, they are lengthy and usually of little use to parties who restructure or abandon their transactions.
As successful as the EU’s foreign policy has been in numerous instances, it is also not immune from some criticism. Rather than focus its limited human and financial resources on the EU’s neighborhood, the European External Action Service seeks to be relevant in nearly every part of the world and on a vast array of issues, even where it has limited influence. Sometimes it drops the ball in areas where it has the experience and the competence. Senior EU diplomats admitted to me that the Syrian refugee problem in Turkey was certainly foreseeable well before it exploded into a crisis. Much more could have been done earlier to address the problem.
EU foreign policy procedures can be very slow and bureaucratic. Meetings of the Political and Security Committee of the Council, responsible for the EU’s common foreign and security policy, are lengthy exercises in finding lowest common denominator positions among the member state ambassadors to the EU and often result in anodyne communiqués.
Some of the EU’s consultative institutions, like the Committee of Regions and the Economic and Social Committee, moreover, are extremely expensive to run and have limited impact, despite the numerous opinions that they produce. And the European Parliament, with which I interacted intensively as ambassador, is not a fully fledged parliament in the sense that, unlike perhaps any other parliament in the world, it does not have the power to raise revenues, impose taxes, and initiate legislation. It can only modify or block legislation proposed by the European Commission.
Is the EU Too Diverse?
On many occasions during my mandate, I found myself in the public gallery of the European Parliament in Strasbourg looking down on the hemicycle with 751 parliamentarians seated in front of an enormous EU flag. I couldn’t help wondering whether this vision was in fact a mirage. Is the glorious diversity in Europe’s economies, cultures, histories, and languages an insurmountable challenge to the project of integration? Are the divergences too great to forge a common sense of identity and purpose?
Gideon Rachman of the Financial Times has gloomily compared the EU to the League of Nations, a body set up after World War I to solidify international cooperation and the rule of law but swept away by turbulent international events that it couldn’t control.14 While I think that this is far too gloomy, there is no doubt that solidarity is still shallow, varying considerably by country and by the year in which Europeans are polled. Perhaps, this is because many Europeans identify with Europe for intellectual reasons, rather than emotional ones. As Bono, lead vocalist for the rock band U2, has aptly observed, Europe is a thought that needs to become a feeling.
Only positive feelings—a sense of attachment to a purpose—can overcome deep divergences. There aren’t many similarities between Estonia and Cyprus, Ireland and Bulgaria, Sweden and Greece. Many of the member states are at very different stages in their economic development: Luxembourg’s GDP per capita is over five times that of Romania. Some of them are minnows, with populations a fraction of mid-size cities and GDPs smaller than the cash balance of Apple. Their different histories, cultures, and political traditions complicate dialogue.
Some of the member states face serious challenges with corruption, while others uphold admirably high standards of transparency and ethics. Some snub their noses at EU fundamental rights by pursuing a brand of “illiberal” democracy, including attacking the independence of the judiciary and the media, as well as undermining civil society; others feature a healthy system of checks and balance on executive power.
Some member states have a rather spotty record at enforcing EU rules, and their citizens appear to consider laws as almost optional or at least relevant only for the weak and those without connections. My Italian friends remind me of the wonderful dictum: “Fatta la legge, trovato l’inganno” (people will always find a way around the law).
In many areas of Europe, citizens feel primary allegiance to their town or region rather than to their country or to Europe. That has complicated efforts to forge a European identity. The wonderful Italian word “campanilismo,” roughly translated as a person’s strong attachment to his city’s bell tower, expresses the strength of local feeling. My Venetian friends liked repeating an old saying that captured how the inhabitants of the lagoon turn up their noses at their neighbors: “Vicentini mangia gatti, Veronesi tutti matti” (people from Vicenza eat cats, those from Verona are all nuts). The Florentines have their own version: “Meglio un morto in casa che un Pisano all’uscio” (better to have a corpse at home than someone from Pisa on the doorstep).
Differences in national identity can be managed when there are a limited number of countries sitting around the decision-making table. Every visit to the thirteenth floor of the Berlaymont building in Brussels, the sanctum of the President of the Commission and his team of 28 commissioners, reminds me of this point. In a corner of one of the rooms stands the original conference table of the Commission from the 1960s, when there were just six members. While it is true that the group was not entirely homogeneous even then, especially when one compares Italy with the other members, meetings must have had the feeling of a family sitting around a kitchen table. Today that feeling is lost as commissioners strain to see the faces of their partners on the other side of the massive table.
Critics charge that the European Parliament is prone to grandstanding and self-serving attempts to increase its power. Other observers have claimed that the European Parliament is a graveyard of failed national parliamentarians interested in a well-paid sinecure. While these judgments are too harsh, many did seem underworked and bored due to the limited amount of legislative activity. That led the European Parliament to issue lengthy non-binding declarations, often on topics over which the European Parliament has no influence.
Some parliamentarians seemed rather eager to improve their MEP ranking as determined by the Web site mepranking.eu, partly based on how many written questions they ask the European Commission. The inevitable result of this absurd ranking system has been a steep increase in the number of pointless questions such as: “Does Water Hydrate?” and “Does the Commission attribute the death of culture in France to its absorption in the EU?”15
Despite my reservations, I felt that the hemicycle in front of me was a noble vision. Legislators from 28 large and small member states and representing a broad array of political persuasions from extreme right to extreme left were assembled in one place to debate peacefully in 24 “official” languages. I found it irritating that the press corps, especially the British one, focused mostly on the parliament’s more colorful, and less important features, rather than on the substantial amount of hard work put in by many dedicated parliamentarians.
I loved my regular visits to the European Parliament and always found my interactions with the parliamentarians to be worthwhile. On one of these visits, I was told that the Chinese ambassador to the EU had recently addressed the same group and had tartly observed when heckled: “You are here to listen to me, I am not here to listen to you.” I made a point of starting my opening remarks by saying the reverse: “You are not here to listen to me, I am here to listen to you.”
I found the European Parliament to be a temple of free speech, even accommodating the schoolyard antics of the far-right UK Independence Party and the French National Liberation Front, whose representatives regularly interrupted debates with insulting anti-EU tirades. Gianluca Buonanno, one of the MEPs from Italy’s Northern League, showed up for a debate on anti-terrorism measures in full camouflage gear and sporting a black beret; on another occasion, he wore a shirt combining the faces of German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Adolf Hitler.
I found the Euro-parliamentarians to be a wonderfully diverse group, representing states that had provided the world with the greatest achievements in culture, science, and political thought. Many of these states, including long-standing and more recent members, had recently made the transition from authoritarian to democratic rule. In order to maintain a sense of solidarity, the most populous states (especially Germany) had agreed to be underrepresented so that the least populous states could be overrepresented—similar to the United States Senate. Malta and Luxembourg, for example, each have six parliamentarians for their populations of 450,000 and 600,000 respectively (one parliamentarian for every 80,000–100,000 people), whereas Germany has 96 parliamentarians for its population of 83 million (one parliamentarian for every 860,000 people).
That, of course, does not prevent Germany from playing a highly influential, if not dominant role, in European parliamentary politics; Germans have frequently occupied the posts of president and heads of the European People’s Party and the Socialists and Democrats, the two main political groups, as well as senior positions in the European Parliament’s civil service and in the key positions of committee chairs and rapporteurs who do the heavy lifting on legislative work.
“And Yet It Moves”
During the thirty years that I have followed EU affairs, I have always been more impressed by the bloc’s promise than by its shortcomings. Influenced by my family history and by my time behind the Iron Curtain, I have never failed to appreciate the EU’s role as an invisible and often underappreciated windowpane that lets the light in and keeps the cold air out.
My cautious optimism, even during the period of my diplomatic mission, proved justified: The euro did not fail; Greece did not leave the euro or the EU; even though Britain did decide to leave, this decision led to an unprecedented unity among the 27 remaining members; Schengen did not collapse; EU unity was maintained during the implementation and repeated renewal of sanctions on Russia; the refugee crisis was brought under control; economic growth (though still anemic in most countries) did return throughout the bloc and even outpaced US growth in 2016; populists were beaten back in key elections (although scoring strong results in Germany, Austria, Poland, and the Czech Republic); euro-skepticism receded in nearly every country; and following the election of President Emmanuel Macron in 2017, France started to implement sensible economic reforms and exert intellectual leadership that may revive the traditional Franco-German motor of European integration.
When some of my colleagues in the Obama administration complained to me that the European Union was hopelessly slow, I would quote a phrase uttered by Galileo Galilei after being forced by the Inquisition to recant his view that the earth revolves around the sun: “Eppur si muove” (And yet it moves). Similarly, the European Union does move, while appearing immobile. It has made significant progress on key legislation to improve banking union, a digital single market, energy union, the protection of external borders and internal security, and many other areas.
One of the toughest challenges of my diplomatic mission was to translate the European Union to the Washington bureaucracy. I often felt that some of my colleagues committed the fundamental error of seeing the EU as a static snapshot, rather than as a dynamic film. They were like people walking into a cinema in the middle of a film, observing a few frames of chaos, before concluding that the story would end in disaster. The problem was that few had much historical perspective on the European Union and they had little patience to understand its complicated institutional framework and occasionally impenetrable jargon. Few remembered how long it took the United States to achieve its union: It was not until 1863 that uniform national banknotes were introduced and not until 1913 that a Federal Reserve was created.
When colleagues in the administration asked me about the “President of Europe,” I would have to explain that there are Presidents of the European Commission (the executive of the EU), the European Council (the body that organizes and sets strategy for the EU heads of government), the European Parliament (the directly elected assembly of parliamentarians), the Council (the body consisting of national ministers whose president in most configurations changes every six months), and finally the Eurogroup (the informal body that brings together ministers from the euro area to discuss matters relating to the euro). If anyone was still awake after that explanation, I would try to put her to sleep by explaining the difference between “implementing” and “delegated” legislative acts or the “comitology procedure” by which member states control how the European Commission implements EU law. I admit that this was cruel and unusual punishment.
The question about the “President of Europe” reminded me of the oft repeated, and almost certainly apocryphal, story that Secretary of State Henry Kissinger would ask “Whom do I call if I want to speak to Europe?” There has never been a single number and never will be in Europe, not even in Berlin, just as there is rarely a single number to dial in the United States, as most issues are handled in competing power centers in the administration and Congress. During the US–EU Summit meetings that were held during my diplomatic mission, I observed with some amusement the perplexity of our delegation about the officials sitting on the other side of the table: “Who are all these people and what exactly is it that they do?” (Fig. 2.7).
Fig. 2.7
EU–US Summit, March 26, 2014
(© European Union, 2014. EP—Audiovisual Service. Photographer Lieven Creemers. Reprinted with Permission)
A Unique Superpower
My former colleagues in the National Security Council, who were happy to delegate all EU issues to me because they didn’t care about them, made the mistake of judging the EU by the metric of hard power. In the mid-1990s, of course, the EU was unimpressive when judged this way. In 1991, Mark Eyskens, then Belgium’s foreign minister, acknowledged that the EU was an “economic giant, a political dwarf and military worm.” The woefully inadequate response of the EU to the breakup of Yugoslavia, despite the grandiloquent promise of Luxembourg’s then foreign minister Jacques Poos that “this is the hour of Europe…not the hour of the Americans,” would bear this out.
Since the early 1990s, the EU has matured dramatically. The EU has significantly improved its ability to speak with one voice and project influence in the world, thanks in large part to the institutional changes brought about in the Lisbon Treaty passed in 2009 after nearly a decade of acrimonious debate.
Although the EU remains principally a “soft power,” it has a wide array of very effective tools—including the expansion of democracy and good governance through its enlargement process, technical assistance, and financial aid—that have made Europe, the region, and even the world a safer place. In many areas, including competition policy, trade, data privacy, and the digital economy, it is a superpower that sets global standards that affect millions of people’s lives. I was repeatedly struck during my diplomatic mission that the top brass of the US military appreciates the importance of “soft power” very well, sometimes more so than our civilian leaders.
As part of the “Embassy training” that I received before arriving at my post, I and other ambassadorial appointees were flown down to MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida, where we received a briefing by Admiral William McCraven, the head of Special Operations Command (SOCOM). As the Admiral had led the raid on Osama Bin Laden and managed an elite fighting force destined for the most challenging military operations, I was expected a briefing focused on “hard power.” But almost the entire briefing focused on how his command engaged in civilian missions such as the construction of schools, water treatment facilities, and other infrastructure in volatile parts of the world. The message was clear: The military was investing in “upstream” activities to stabilize unstable areas and minimize the danger of military intervention “downstream” when conflict might break out.
When I pointed out that SOCOM’s mission overlaps with activities undertaken by the Department of State and US AID, the foreign aid department of the US government, McCraven gave a memorable reply:
If I could take $1 billion out of my $7 billion budget and give it to the State Department and US AID, I would because these things are their main area of expertise. But I can’t because Congress trusts people in uniform like me more than it trusts people in suits like you.
As I discovered subsequently, this was such a true statement: US diplomats are all too often wrongly considered by their own government as weak, too sympathetic to foreign countries and ineffective.
The European Union remains, therefore, an effective partner of the United States. Although I believed this already before my arrival in Brussels, I was impressed at the breadth and depth of the relationship that is far more important than any other relationship either side has elsewhere. That has been reflected in the fact that administrations on both sides of the aisle have, with rare exceptions, treated the EU as a serious diplomatic assignment. When I looked at the photographs of my predecessors in the lobby of the Mission, dating all the way back to 1961, I felt privileged to be in the same group.
While I knew that the US–EU relationship extended far beyond economic issues to encompass, for example, sanctions policy, foreign aid and humanitarian assistance, human rights, the fight against infectious diseases, climate change, and the promotion of anti-corruption and democratic institutions, it came as a surprise to me just how much we were doing together in areas such as law enforcement and military and security affairs.
I grasped the enormous breadth of our partnership with the EU when I looked at the organigramme of the US–EU Mission in Brussels. I noticed that only half of the 180 staff members come from the State Department. The other half comes from nearly every US government department, including the Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Treasury, Homeland Security, and Defense, as well as many agencies such as the Federal Aviation Agency and the Food and Drug Administration, and the Patent and Trademark Office. It has been one of the few embassies to be growing rather than shrinking under the pressure of budget cuts.
When I arrived in Brussels, I knew I would immediately meet all the people at the top of the EU hierarchy. But I knew from my prior government experience that it was just as important, if not more important, to know those within the bureaucracy who, regardless of title, get things done. I immediately contacted an old friend, Ana Palacio, former Spanish foreign minister and EU commissioner, to ask whether she could provide me with a list of such people. I called them “dentists” and told her a story to explain why.
When my Spanish wife and I wanted to get married in Toledo in 1997, we chose Santa Maria La Blanca, a former church and former synagogue, as the place where we wanted to celebrate the ceremony with a priest and a rabbi. Doing this proved to be extremely challenging because the place, a museum administered by the Archbishop of Toledo, did not permit religious ceremonies. When the Archbishop turned down our request, we asked my father, then serving as US ambassador to Spain, to inquire with the Spanish government’s department of religious affairs, but without success. I asked the Prince of Asturias (now King of Spain), whom I had gotten to know in Washington during my government service, whether he could make inquiries. He was generous enough to do so but was unable to change the result.
Soon after receiving this bad news, my mother had lunch with a Spanish employee of the US Embassy to Spain. Upon hearing the tale, he replied that he might be able to lend a hand. Having solicited so many important people, my mother was rather skeptical and asked him to explain. “I know a dentist,” he said. This was not terribly promising. But he explained further that the following week he was scheduled to see his dentist who was also the dentist of the Archbishop. The following week the employee reported that he had explained the situation to the dentist and that the dentist, by coincidence, was scheduled to see the Archbishop for a sensitive tooth extraction in a few days. I don’t want to know what influence the dentist brought to bear; all I know is that the Archbishop agreed to the wedding. There have no other weddings celebrated since in Santa Maria La Blanca. The lesson has stayed with me: Sometimes in life it is not by scaling the hierarchy that you get things done, but rather by knowing the right people.
Upon my arrival in Brussels, I received a copy of a book by Peter Baldwin entitled The Narcissism of Minor Differences: How America and Europe Are Alike. Sigmund Freud had coined the phrase “the narcissism of minor differences” to account for the “intense energy invested in parsing divergences that, to an impartial observer, might seem trivial and inconsequential.” Baldwin conducted an exhaustive statistical comparison of the United States and Europe on the economy, crime, health care, education, culture, religion, the environment, and many other areas. He concluded that, though there are some differences in views between Europe and America, in almost all cases these differences are not greater than the differences among European nations. The debate about purported ideological differences has “degenerated into ideological posturing, motivated by local politics and tactics… Vast cauldrons of rhetorical soup have been boiled from meagre scraps of evidence.”16
While the election of Donald Trump has widened the Atlantic, I still believe that it is far smaller than widely believed. And it isn’t too wide for broad, beautiful bridges.
Footnotes
1
Francis Luzzatto, “Escape from the Nazis,” The Washington Post, July 26, 1987.
2
Danielle Luzzatto, “La Guardai, Ero Salva,” Il Progresso, [ ] 1986.
3
His memoires of those years is captured in his book, Mission Italy, published by Rowman & Littlefield in 2005.
4
Written by Major John McRae, May 1915, during the Second Battle of Ypres.
5
Sharon Waxman, “Brussels: Capital of Confusion,” The Washington Post, June 9, 1993.
6
Anthony Gardner, “The Long-Term Significance of the New Transatlantic Agenda,” European Voice, November 13, 1996. https://www.politico.eu/article/long-term-significance-of-new-transatlantic-agenda/.
7
Remarks to the People of Europe, Hannover Messe Fairgrounds, April 25, 2016.
8
Address at Independence Hall, Philadelphia, July 4, 1962.
9
In an address to Boston University on May 21, 1989, for example, he had said: “This Administration is of one mind. We believe a strong, united Europe means a strong America…The United States welcomes the emergence of Europe as a partner in world leadership.”
10
Shawn Donnan, “Trump Plays Game of Chicken with Brussels,” Financial Times, May 2, 2018.
11
Richard Milne, “Latvia Banks Scandal Leaves European Regulators Red-Faced,” Financial Times, April 5, 2016.
12
See, for example, Selam Gebrekian, Matt Apuzzo, and Benjamin Novak, “The Money Farmers: How Oligarchs and Populists Milk the E.U. for Millions,” The New York Times, November 3, 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/03/world/europe/eu-farm-subsidy-hungary.html.
13
Anthony Luzzatto Gardner, “Vestager Is Certainly Not Anti-American,” Financial Times, July 2, 2019. https://www.ft.com/content/0a78c864-9bfb-11e9-9c06-a4640c9feebb.
14
Gideon Rachman, “The Crises That Threaten to Unravel the EU,” Financial Times, September 14, 2015. https://www.ft.com/content/7e9a64a0-5ac3-11e5-9846-de406ccb37f2.
15
Maia de la Baume, “Do MEPs Ask Too Many Questions? Do They?” Politico, September 9, 2015.
16
Peter Baldwin, The Narcissism of Minor Differences (Oxford University Press, 2010).