Historical Forms of US-European Cooperation: Combination or ‘Only’ Coordination?

Abstract:

A review of the historic modalities – potential and actual, proposed and real – of transatlantic cooperation reveals a basic difference between two forms: the one tending towards combination of resources and effort, implying a federal or some other kind of formal organization, even nominal ‘union’; the other favouring, instead, coordination, allowing for independence of action but nonetheless encouraging practical partnership in many areas of policy and also geographic places.

A ‘structural’ approach to strengthening transatlantic leadership, which the author himself supports, does not necessarily imply an elaborate architecture. What it does require, beyond formation of a Leadership Group (however named and constituted), is a wider awareness of the existence of an ‘Atlantic community’, a well-articulated and shared concept of it, and, moreover, a new recognition of the Atlantic pan-region as itself a ‘pole’, among poles, in today’s multipolar world.

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