EU and NATO, Need For a Coherent Partnership
The United States and its European allies share a common commitment to global order, moderated by the quest of global justice. So long as the Soviet Union stationed its armies across central Europe, the overriding common interest of maintaining the security and freedom of Western Europe held the Atlantic Alliance together. Underneath this, however, interests (and perceptions of interests) had diverged from the 1960s onwards, as American security concerns focused more on Southeast Asia and the Persian Gulf, while European governments explored the possibilities of détente within their own region. Since 1990, different geopolitical positions have driven US and European interests apart. Different trends in energy dependence - and different understandings of climate change - have also shaped distinctive interests. Different levels of military capability in the projection of force have interacted with divergent understandings of the process of political, social and economic development, of the roots of terrorist movements and the pathology of aggressive state regimes. Widespread resistance within the USA to accepting the legitimacy of international law and of global institutions, rooted in the belief in the exceptional character of the U.S. Constitution and the self-evident morality of American policy, as well as in the self-evident supremacy of U.S. military power, has also widened the gap in interests and understandings across the Atlantic. In recent years, the most fundamental challenge to management of the EU-NATO relationship has been the combination of a United States drifting toward unilat¬eralism and European concentration on creating an "autonomous" defence policy. Such natural but ominous tendencies could feed on one another, creating cir¬cumstances that could lead the transatlantic bargain from one crisis to another. This article deals with the EU-NATO relations and their views regarding the security and the partnership in general.