June 29, 2003	Sunday	Rabi-us-Sani 28,1424

LONDON: An EU-US summit is usually an anodyne and largely substance-free affair, but after the great transatlantic falling out over Iraq, last weeks get-together in Washington had special significance. Both powers did their level best to put a brave face on their differences, but the truth is that some of their thorniest disputes still refuse to go away.

George Bush, to be fair, kept diplomatically to the script, announcing that he had enjoyed a “great meeting, constructive discussions and a nice lunch” with the EU team.

Confusingly, that team consisted of three different people: Costas Simitis, the Greek prime minister and holder of the EU’s rotating presidency, Romano Prodi, the Italian president of the European Commission, and Javier Solana, the union’s Spanish foreign policy chief.

That was in itself a timely reminder of why the EU’s new constitution calls for the creation of the post of union president to represent Europe on the world stage ... and make life more straightforward for the White House.

Niceties apart, everyone privately admits that though the war is over, EU-US relations are still in very poor shape. So in public, both sides made an extra special effort, filling the summer air in Brussels and Washington with the sound of fences being busily mended.

The Europeans bent over backwards to please. Just a few days earlier, their own summit in Greece published the EU’s first ever security doctrine. That was an attempt to get their act together and underline concerns about weapons of mass destruction and terrorism, Washington’s post September 11 2001 preoccupations.

“If we are to have a dialogue on an equal footing, we first have to assess our own interests, assess the new threats and define our policies, developing them in areas where we have not tried to do so before,” explained the Greek foreign minister, George Papandreou.

The Europeans also sent a tough message to Iran — which is anxious to advance its trade and political relations with the union — that it must comply with international demands for more intrusive inspections of its nuclear installations.

Europe’s efforts go a long way to meeting US concerns. But they also underline the importance of approaching the world’s problems multilaterally — exactly what the Americans are accused of failing to do — whether the issue is regime change in Baghdad, Tehran or Pyongyang, the Kyoto global warming treaty or the new international criminal court.

So it was smart of the EU to sign up to agreements that demonstrate the value of such cooperation, on extradition for example — with a guarantee that terrorist suspects would not face the death penalty in the US, and on other legal and security issues.

But here too there are limits, as shown by the EU’s divided response to Washington’s call to outlaw the Palestinian group Hamas. Europe argues that alongside suicide bombings, the organisation also does legitimate political and charitable work.

Nor can other long-running rows be easily sidestepped or resolved. On the eve of the summit, and with impeccable timing, President Bush himself attacked the EU’s five-year moratorium on genetically modified foods. He blamed the EU position, which is reportedly costing US farmers hundreds of millions of dollars in lost export revenues, for contributing to famine in Africa.

Brussels issued a brisk reply, pointing out that the president’s claim was “false”, and noting that the EU gave seven times more financial aid to sub-Saharan Africa than the US.

Trade disputes refuse to go away either. Washington watched closely later in the week, when the EU agreed long-awaited plans to reform the subsidy-rich, common agricultural policy. A shake up of the s43bn (#29.7bn) a year policy is a vital precursor to progress being made at September’s world trade liberalisation talks in Mexico.

Initial reactions suggested that the Americans, like many others, were not hugely impressed, and with US food subsidies running at 20% and Europe’s at 35%, there is clearly room for more movement from the old continent.

Both sides seem permanently poised on the edge of a big bust-up. Last month, the EU won World Trade Organisation authority to issue $4bn (#2.77bn) of trade sanctions in response to a dispute over US tax subsidies to exporters. Then the EU referred the US back to the WTO over anti-dumping duties. And there are large-scale disputes looming over US steel tariffs.

Yet however rocky transatlantic relations may be, there is a sense that the sheer scale of what is at stake will prevent political and economic tensions from getting too dangerously out of hand.

Iraq was certainly a low point, probably the worst since 1945, and it is clearly going to take a much greater effort to get things properly back on the rails. “The differences that we had over the disarming of Iraq are in the past and part of our history,” suggested Howard Leach, the US ambassador to Paris. “They are not forgotten, but each of us is better off focusing on the current international problems and on the future.”

There may now be some cautious grounds for optimism. Europeans seem to be beginning to understand that there is little point in complaining endlessly about US unilateralism, unless they do live up to their own responsibilities.

Policy makers in Brussels have been stung by the compelling thesis of the American political scientist, Robert Kagan. In his essay, Power and Paradise, Kagan argues that in the modern world US “warriors” fight, while spoilt, conflict-averse European “wimps” do the dishes. Or, to put it more colourfully, “Europeans are from Venus and Americans are from Mars.”

Kagan could barely have hoped for better publicity than when the European commission president displayed his occasional talent for delivering a witty and quotable line at the press conference that followed the Washington summit.

“I believe this story about Venus and Mars is a galactic misunderstanding,” Prodi quipped. “And even if you think we live on different planets, don’t we orbit the same sun?”—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.