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Speech by Amb. John B. Richardson (2001-05) at the CCEIR on "The Dynamics of EU-US relations: Where Next?"

For anyone involved in the United Nations it is difficult at the moment to think of anything other than how the 15 members of the Security Council are going to deal with the ongoing crisis of Iraq. This is an important moment for the UN. But at such moments it can be good to step back from the subject on which attention is so closely focused and remember the broader context within which we operate.

Iraq is a country governed by a despotic regime, which has a history of human rights abuses, has resorted to the use of weapons banned by the consensus of the world community, and has tried to engage in territorial conquest by invading its neighbor. It is situated in a region, which itself is largely undemocratic and in which the rule of law is a concept with limited relevance to the lives of most people and which has largely failed to participate in the tremendous growth of GDP per head, which the world has experienced over the last half century.

Let us stop for a moment and realize that this description of a country out of step with its times is only true because we have come to see the rule of law, democracy and human rights, prosperity brought about by a market economy, the inviolability of frontiers as normal. But what a remarkable transformation that is of the world, which emerged from the debris of the Second World War. At that time it seemed normal for neighbors to go to war with each other. Democracy was largely restricted to Europe and to North America. There were few international norms of behavior. And an ideological struggle was emerging between the values embraced by the Atlantic community and the autocratic regimes and planned economies of Communism, with its declared aim of world dominion.

There followed four decades of the struggle we call the Cold War, a power struggle but also a struggle for the minds and hearts of men and women. Four interrelated stories unfolded.

First, the military strength of the Soviet Union was contained by the Atlantic Alliance, the illusions of communism were shown to be inferior to the operation of open societies with market economies. The weaker model eventually collapsed under the strain, the Wall fell, the Soviet Union imploded. The values of the West had triumphed.

The second great story of those fifty years is the transformation of Europe from the cockpit and the source of wars engulfing the world to a Continent of peace and prosperity under the banner of what has become the European Union. For anyone who has read the great literature of the First World War and its poets, who has struggled to understand the evil of Nazi Germany, who has listened to the stories of family members marked for life by the horrors and the grief of the Second World War, this must seem like a wondrous change. To create a system of governance that could make war between European nations unthinkable is surely one of the greatest achievements of the human spirit since the American constitution. And as you are aware, we are now about to extend that system to another 10 countries of Europe. The dream of a Europe "whole and free", peaceful and prosperous, is within our grasp at last.

The third great story of the last part of the twentieth Century is how those values of democracy, rule of law and the market economy have swept around the world. They have helped to transform the countries of the Pacific Rim and allow an economic miracle to take place. They have brought down one dictatorship after another in Latin America and replaced them with democratic governments. And even in Africa, the world's most troubled continent, those values, given the label of "good governance" are now largely accepted as the only solid basis for development.

The fourth story is how the world has given itself the capacity to develop and to promulgate rules of behavior for individuals, for companies, for governments. The dense network of rules and norms emanating from the multilateral system, based on the UN but also including organizations as diverse as the WTO, the International Maritime Organisation, or the International Atomic Energy Agency, represents the creation of a world order undreamt of a century ago. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the many conventions to which it has given birth are a part of this same system. All this gives international expression to the concept of the rule of law.

How has this come about? It is, of course, the product of the vision of many great individuals: Franklin D Roosevelt, Dag Hammarskjold, Winston Churchill, George Marshall, Jean Monnet, and many others. But it is also the product of a common vision and a common project, which united the two sides of the Atlantic throughout this period. The transatlantic partnership, in many areas under American leadership, was the driving force. I participated in the drafting of the Transatlantic Declaration of 1991, which defined the challenges facing the EU and the US and explicitly recognized that they could be dealt with together because of a common will and because of the shared values of the two sides.

All this is true. But reading the newspapers on the two sides of the Atlantic over recent weeks, who would believe it? What on earth has gone wrong? Where is the shared vision and the confidence in each other, which achieved so much for so long?

I want to suggest today that we have all become the victims of the overconfidence, which is bred by success. We have thought that because we got it right for so long we need not think so hard about how to get it right in the future. Together we allowed the successes of the Nonproliferation Treaty to blind us to its weaknesses and do nothing to address them. In Europe we have been so pleased with our internal success that we have neglected to give sufficient attention to how the world is changing around us. On both sides of the Atlantic we have failed to see the emerging problems of the societies we thought we had constructed so well.

Let me quote Romano Prodi in an interview in La Stampa last November:

• "The time is over for the illusion that the system can grow forever. For blind faith in economic expansion, the permanently soaring stock market, when everyone thought they could become another Rockefeller. All of a sudden the boils are bursting. Enron, Vivendi, and Worldcom are more than business scandals. The managers of many American companies - dutifully aped in Europe - set their own salaries, taking a quarter or even a third of the company profits for themselves. There is something seriously wrong with the economic system."

On both sides of the Atlantic we are trying to deal with the excesses of capitalism, which grew and fattened during the years of success as the bubble grew through the nineties. Let us be clear that only if we are successful will our ability to convince others around the world to use the market economy continue. We cannot preach against crony capitalism with conviction if we allow the cozy and corrupt business relationships, which led to the rash of recent scandals, to exist. The British commentator John Plender recently put it like this:

• "The first and most obvious economic fallout from corporate wrong-doing is that the legitimacy of wealth creation is eroded. With free markets under threat from protectionist politicians and anti-globalisation protestors, corporate scandals are a propaganda gift for those in the developed world who are well enough off not to worry about lower growth, and too short sighted to recognize the adverse consequences for poor countries."

On both sides of the Atlantic we are trying to fix this through new regulation. But Plender points out that it is ethical conduct which creates trust, and goes on to say:

• "Trust reduces monitoring and transaction costs in companies and in the wider economy. At the most basic level…ethics are a low-cost substitute for internal control and external regulation."

We have come to believe that we have the perfect economic system. We have come to rely on regulation - one aspect of the rule of law - to make it work. And we have come to rely on law enforcement to ensure that the law is applied. Much has changed since I arrived as a young economist to work for a company in Hamburg, in Northern Germany, in 1970 and was told, "you must realize that in this city business is concluded on the basis of a handshake."

I want to suggest that what is true for our economic system is also true for our system of law and our practice of democracy. We need to work very hard at ensuring that they continue to be the best that can be. Thomas Jefferson wrote the following in July 1816 to his friend, Samuel Kercheval, and you can read this text on the wall of his memorial in Washington:

• "I am certainly not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions. But laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors."

We face a world, which seems full of new dangers. Since 9/11 we are all conscious of the vulnerability of the civilization we have built. It is vulnerable to terrorism, it is vulnerable to the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, it is vulnerable to the destruction of the computer systems upon which it increasingly relies, it is vulnerable to the erosion of the liberties we value in the name of reducing these vulnerabilities.

And around the world peace and security are threatened in so many ways. The AIDS pandemic has the potential to decimate the earth's population in the decades to come. Ethnic hatreds produce conflict all over Africa, within the Middle East, in many parts of Asia, in the Balkans, in Northern Ireland. This fractured world is in desperate need of governance. But what sort of governance?

Surely we know the answer. We need governance based on the values, which have served us so well for the last half century. Of course, we must insist that human behavior is governed by a set of rules worked out by the world community, that the rule of law prevails. Of course, we must continue to refine our economic governance to ensure that competition can provide the motor for increasing prosperity across the globe. Of course, we must insist that governments are subject to the will of their citizens, in what we call democracy. But in doing so let us not commit the error of thinking that we know all the answers. Just as the price of liberty is eternal vigilance, so we should practice a degree of humility in looking at our own societies and being ready to adapt the way we implement our values in practice. It is the continued vitality of our own systems, which will be our strongest argument for others to adopt them. We have much work to do within the Transatlantic community in this task of renewal. And we will do it better if we ensure that the Transatlantic dialogue continues to be as vibrant as it traditionally has been.

Of course, the mere propagation of our values is not enough. As we learned in dealing with the Soviet Union, the strength of ideas must be accompanied by a willingness to counter force with force, power with power. There is a school of thought, as you know, which sees Europeans as being attached to the one, and Americans to the other. Philip Stephens put it like this recently in the Financial Times. He talks about a "fundamental philosophical divide".

"Put briefly, this sees the US administration assert that it can make the world safe for our children by the selective use of overwhelming force. By contrast, most Europeans believe the answer lies in a panoply of multilateral agreements, control regimes and regional security guarantees. Both are wrong. Americans overstate the efficacy of military power, Europeans their power of persuasion."

I do not accept this oversimplified dichotomy. There are Europeans, who accept that force may be needed to enforce UN resolutions. There are Americans, who understand that dealing with a complex world requires a multiplicity of instruments.

We have seen in Afghanistan what American force can achieve, in defeating the Taliban so easily and so convincingly. But we have also seen that the process of rebuilding a shattered society requires resources other than overwhelming force. It requires security and policing forces on the ground, armed not just with weapons but with the authority and legitimacy, which their UN mandate provides. It requires the expertise to show how democracy works, how a market economy functions, how to construct a fair judicial system, why gender equality increases the quality of life for all, and to do this in a society in which these are foreign concepts. And only when this task is complete, and Afghanistan has begun to enjoy the fruits of peace and prosperity, is it likely to cease to be the main supplier of heroin to Western Europe, and to reject the hatred, which drives the actions of terrorists.

The truth is that American and European strengths are complementary. We need each other. Europe is an old civilization, rich in history and experience, usually intent on preserving the best of the past. The US is a young civilization, full of vigor and passion, with a strong belief in the benefits of progress.

In Europe we often spend too much time navel-gazing. We are so pleased with the success of European integration that we forget that its continued success will require just as much hard work and commitment in the future as it did in the past. We have got so used to peace and prosperity that we have forgotten that these must be defended when necessary by force and we have allowed our military capabilities to decline.

We are also doing some things right. We have realized that global interdependence is here to stay and accept that this means accepting the discipline of shared norms. We have written the principle of the sustainability of economic development into the quasi-constitutional articles of our Treaty of Union and embraced the world's efforts through the Kyoto protocol to put it into practice. We accept the thesis that solidarity between people is a bedrock of human existence not only within our societies but also with citizens of the Third World. We are struggling to find effective ways to accommodate multiculturalism not just to deal with our own immigrant problem but also to find recipes, which can help to prevent ethnic conflict around the world.

The United States in contrast is still on a high. The sustained growth of the nineties, the sense of manifest destiny, which pervades Washington, your overwhelming military supremacy, all combine, I think, to form a potent cocktail. But cocktails can impair the judgement.

As long as American strength continues to be used in defence of the values we share and in conformity with the international system we have built up to express those values, it is surely welcome. But I see two dangers. The first is that of being too sure that you are right. The antidote to this is surely a recognition that this great country still has manifest problems within its society - 2 million people in jail, 45 million people without medical insurance, the use of the death penalty, rejected by the rest of the world as an anachronism in an advanced society, the energy addiction of your economy.

The second danger is that power corrupts. The US has used its power largely for good. But perhaps it should think twice before wishing to remain the only superpower. The temptation to flaunt the world's rules, to go against the consensus of the rest of humanity, to do as it likes, will be great. The rejection by the US of both the Kyoto process to deal with global warming and the ICC to bring justice to the world's worst criminals, both of which are an expression of the will of the world community, is not reassuring.

But I am greatly encouraged by part of the Administration's budget proposals, which were published this week. They recommend that Congress amend US tax laws to bring the US into compliance with the WTO rulings against the legislation on Foreign Sales Corporations and against the Byrd amendment dealing with anti-dumping duties. This is a good example of the US allowing its behaviour to be subject to the international rule of law.

Let me conclude as follows. The transatlantic partnership achieved tremendous progress in having its values put into practice ever more broadly around the world in the second half of the Twentieth century. There is no reason why that should not continue to be the case in the first half of the Twenty First, provided that we do not forget what those values are, do not become too intoxicated by our own success, and continue to talk and listen to each other as we work to continually adapt how we give expression to those values both within our societies and around the world. In this fractured world we need more of what served us so well in the past, not less. And the Transatlantic partnership can still serve to bring that about.

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