COOPERATION AND CONFLICT IN TRANSATLANTIC RELATIONS AFTER THE COLD WAR Peter Gowan London Metropolitan University, UK In the 1990s there was a widespread view that there was a deep, organic American transatlantic unity. This view was one-sided, too focused on economic flows strategy and common ideological themes. And it encouraged a misleading perspective ‘on the Bush administration's strategy as being the product of a narrow political coulition on the American right. It is necessary to note how the collapse of the Soviet bloc created a structural crisis of the Atlantic political globalization system and how this crisis was exacerbated by the regionalist political project through which West European states launched and deepened their programme for the social restructuring of West European capitalism. Both these devel- militarism opments, along with the need for a concerted West European policy towards ae East Central Europe, encouraged powerful groups in Western Europe to seek to renegotiate the transatlantic alliance and the nature of US leadership. Since the West the start of the 1990s, successive US administrations have pursued a counter- strategy to reimpose its cold war hegemonic leadership over Western Europe. The resulting conflicts, largely pursued at elite state levels in a closed way during the 1990s, bave become more open and confrontational under Bush. The structural sources of this conflict make it difficult to overcome in the short term. And it may be a positive development from a global point of view. Atlantic alliance imperialism No set of political relationships is so central to the structure of world politics as that between the United States and the West European states. Together interventions Vol. 5(2) 218-232 (ISSN 1369-801X print/1469-929X online) RR Bete, Copyright © 2003 Taylor & Francs Led DOI: 10.1080/1369801031000112950TRANSATLANTIC RELATIONS AFTER THE COLD WAR 219 Peter Gowan their companies own the great bulk of the world’s economic ourput - probably about 65 per cent ~ while their populations amount to somewhat less than 15 per cent of the world’s total. Their states control access to the bulk of the global product markets, and their decisions on whether to open or close these markets can determine the fate of other national economies. They also command the great bulk of the world’s credit capacity at a time when most governments in the world are burdened by chronic debt problems and weak or worse current accounts. Together, the Atlantic states dominate the institutions governing the world economy, such as the G7, the IMF, the ‘World Bank and the World Trade Organization. Collectively, they possess an overwhelmingly dominant concentration of the world’s military resources, and the US along with the British and French states have established their customary right to project their military power into other regions of the world and to overthrow by covert means or by open attack other governments. In aid of these activities, all three of these states maintain bases and staging posts in far-flung parts of the world. The mutual benefits for the Atlantic states of joint decision-making and collective action on international economic and political issues are obvious, if not overwhelming. They are most blatant in the field of political control over the rules of the world economy. With the Uruguay Round and the WTO, both of which were in essence the product of transatlantic bargains, the Atlantic states have taken a great step towards opening the jurisdictions of other states around the world for the entry of Atlantic capitals. Through the IMF they have established a system of public insurance for western specula- tive investors and banks and have also pushed forward programmes for reorganizing other economies to fit the needs of the Atlantic world. Through their military and intelligence apparatuses they target and threaten states whose governments are judged to be hostile to Atlantic interests. And their financial systems offer a safe haven for the property of ruling classes of the rest of the world ~ a facility of great benefit to Atlantic capitalism but of malign if not crippling consequences for economies in the South. ‘We should not, of course, exaggerate the global power of the Atlantic states. Not only are there large independent states like Russia, China and India, but there is also a new dynamic economic growth centre in East and Southeast Asia, centred in Japanese capitalism. But the existence of these other centres only underlines the mutual advantages of alliance and policy coordination by the Atlantic powers. During the 1990s, there was a widespread belief in academic and journal- istic circles on both sides of the Atlantic that transatlantic unity was strong, and tight on almost every level. During the Clinton administration, unity was particularly evident in the ideological field. Governments, media organiza- tions and leading academic centres agreed on a number of central ideological themes: the idea that something called economic globalization was an1 Theidea ofcreating just such a juridical structure for the transatlantic political economy has been a favourite of various Anglo-American leaders, such as Leon Brittan and Henry Kissinger (2001). interventions - 220 international process rather than an Atlantic project; the idea that the only viable policy response to it was domestic ‘neoliberalism’ and the nostrums of the Washington Consensus; the idea that there was something called an ‘international community’ which happened to be centred on and led by the Atlantic powers and that this community had become so sensitive to human rights that it would, from now on, make sovereignty conditional upon states observing basic human rights. This ideological consensus was matched by a very dynamic process of integration of the American and West European economies through large mutual flows of foreign investment. And this integration was accompanied by evidently collusive efforts by Atlantic governments to agree new frame- works of rights for capital against labour, efforts eagerly promoted through bodies like the Transatlantic Business Dialogue. In the external political field, there were coordinated approaches to the double enlargement in Europe of NATO and the EU. The zones of public frictions, whether on WTO issues or regulatory matters in other areas of the international political economy, seemed small and manageable. Amongst the vast outpouring of books during the Clinton years suggesting in one way or another a deep structural integration and unity of the Atlantic axis, one of the most prominent was Empire, by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2000). They even suggested that an Atlantic ‘Empire’ was unified at a juridical level, though they did not specify whar the unifying juridical struc- tures actually were.! Yet with the arrival in office of the Bush administration and especially after 11 September 2001, this 1990s picture of a united transatlantic axis seems to be rapidly weakening, if not shattering. The agreed ideological formula of the 1990s concerning the dominance of globalization has been swept aside by the Bush team — its National Security Strategy has banished the word. Bush's National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice declared that there is no such thing as an ‘international community’. Instead the administration's most important intellectual supporters promote the idea of an American empire or American hegemon imposing its will on the rest of the world, including its allies. In a large range of policy areas, the Bush administration has sought to defeat policy commitments of the West European states, and in the Middle East it has privileged its alliance with Israel over its alliance with Western Europe and has simultaneously taken a number of steps which have menacing implications for European security interests. In economics also, the adminis- tration has gone on the offensive against Western Europe and against a joint approach to WTO development, whether concerning steel tariffs, agricultural subsidies or, more recently, GMOs. This transformation has been a source of bewilderment to those who had believed that the transatlantic axis was strong and stable during the 1990s. Some seek an explanation in the domestic politics of the United States, the