Britain as a bridge to America

Citation

Dunn, T. (2001), "Britain as a bridge to America", European Business Review, Vol. 13 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/ebr.2001.05413bab.010

Britain as a bridge to America

Britain as a bridge to America

Ted Dunn

Keywords: Europe, USA, European Union

If we want to be friends of the people of the USA, in contrast to the almighty power of its military influence, there are times when we must appeal to the enlightened majority of the US thinking public.

There are several sources of information to assess this need or attitude.

First, there is the United States Institute for Peace, an independent organisation created by Congress in 1998 in their Special Report of June 2000, calling for the US to affirm a US-Russian-European agenda to address issues that promote cooperation and that, "a new policy must include … tools other than military force". Also that the primary interests of Europe "lies in building a regional system conductive to economic and political integration without compromising national sovereignty", and that, while the US wants a unified Europe it does not require Russia to be a member of the European Union. The Institute stresses, however, that the US wants to include Russia within a Europe "whole and free".

All these ideas seem to me to be in accordance with the New European's aims of a Europe of Many Circles. In other words, a Europe of many regions all cooperating in the Council of Europe, the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), the EU and the UN, but not in an enlarged deeper EU which would be unmanageable and economically unsustainable. The task of the EU should become one of economic support from the EU to the regions, with programmes similar to the Marshall Plan until such time as each of the regions become able to achieve social progress and economic development under the rule of European law. Unity with diversity should be the aim.

A second source of information come from the prestigious Carnegie Commission on "Preventing deadly conflict" (Washington, DC 20036-2103). This report of 250 pages (whose members consisted of some of the most important world statesmen and women of recent years, i.e. its co-chairman Cyrus R. Vance), concluded with a chapter on the "United Nations and Regional Arrangements" and for more study on this subject.

Such a study comes from the Fourth Freedom Forum whose president is Howard S. Brembeck in his book In Search of the Fourth Freedom, (University of Notre Dame Press, Indiana). In this work Howard challenges the world to replace the law of force with the force of law and recommends the idea of regional development as the best means of achieving this objective.

New thinking also comes from the new Head Office for the European Peacebuilding Office (EPLO) in Brussels which recently co-sponsored a conference in the European Parliament about "enhancing the EU's response to violent conflict: moving beyond reaction to preventive action".

Linking all these strands of thought, the Guardian's editorial of 4 January 2001 calls for "A Year of Hard Choices", perhaps the most important being is to resist the temptation to support the US military in their idea of creating "son of Star Wars" or the Nuclear Missile Defence System, by making it clear that the use of Fylingdales listening post would no longer be available. Such a declaration would be comparable to Attlee's dramatic flight to the US to stop the use of nuclear bombs at a delicate point in time. It would also prove to be a most friendly act by preventing the US (and the world) from committing itself to an act of folly based on nuclear proliferation, in defiance of UN Resolutions calling for nuclear disarmament. Promoting the NMD system would also be in defiance of the important American Union of Concerned Scientists and the Security Studies Program recommendation to, "refrain from any decision to deploy this missile defense system".