U.S.-EU Relations

It is an honor for me to address the Transatlantic Policy Network. As individuals, your achievements, your interests, and your commitments to the future represent the richness of relations between the European Union and the United States.

I particularly want to acknowledge and thank Congressman Kolbe. We value his longstanding, staunch support U.S. engagement in the world and for open, free, and transparent trade.

As I looked at your program for this annual meeting, with its emphasis on counterterrorism, trade, and the active U.S.-EU diplomatic partnership, I was impressed with its similarity to a meeting we had today of the U.S.-EU Senior Level Consultative Group.

During this half day session, we discussed our cooperation against global terrorism the U.S.-EU trade relationship after Doha, and our common efforts to reconstruct Afghanistan.

But I would like to offer a snapshot of where we are on each. Together, they capture the overall U.S.-European Union relationship, with all its successes, its challenges, and its potential. Allow me to begin with counterterrorism.

September 11 changed our world. Snapshot one is on September 20, nine days later, when Secretary Powell hosted, on the Eighth Floor of the State Department, EU Presidency Foreign Minister Louis Michel, joined by his Commission and Council colleagues Chris Patten and Javier Solana.

That afternoon, all four issued a joint statement on combating terrorism. We agreed to pursue vigorously aviation and other transport security, police and judicial cooperation, the denial of financing for terrorists, tougher export controls, stepped up measures at our borders, and the sharing of law enforcement information.

We said that the nature of our democratic societies made it imperative to take these steps while still protecting individual liberties, due process, and the rule of law.

Since then, that is what we have been doing. We collaborated in the United Nations to achieve Security Council resolution 1368, condemning the attacks, and Resolution 1373, criminalizing terrorist activity. EU member states, in following up these resolutions, have frozen over $100 million in assets of organizations linked to the Al-Qaeda attackers, pursuant to the decisions of the UN sanctions committee.

Our judicial and law enforcement authorities are working hard to overcome problems that have impeded cooperation in the past.

Our prosecutors are exchanging information on terrorist and other heinous crimes. The signing of the U.S.-EUROPOL Agreement next week will signify the progress we have made in establishing new frameworks for law enforcement cooperation.

Only a few months ago, cynics said that the U.S. and EU were drifting apart, increasingly alienated by trade disputes and differing values. Now we know better. The European Union's swift and resolute support showed the powerful and enduring bonds between our societies and the bedrock values we share.

But let me now turn to trade, however, as the second of my snapshots.

Our stepped-up cooperation with the EU has taken shape on matters not directly linked to the September 11 attacks. Nowhere is this more obvious than the successful launch in Doha of a new round of global trade negotiations.

The outcome at Doha was not destined or pre-ordained; rather, it was the result of active, creative and determined diplomacy.

Ambassador Zoellick personally deserves great credit for his considerable efforts over the past year and in Doha to build bridges. He worked assiduously, at Doha, with his EU counterpart, Pascal Lamy.

They, with Secretary of Agriculture Venneman, crafted a deal on agriculture and the other issues.

While the EU and U.S. cannot impose their will on other members of the WTO, it is equally true that nothing important can happen in world trade if the world’s two great trading powers are working at cross purposes.

Doha should put to rest, at least for a time, the myth of U.S. unilateralism. At Doha the United States engaged actively with all WTO members and was instrumental in pulling together the consensus that allowed negotiations to be launched.

On several issues, notably investment and environment, the United States set aside its own strong preferences to broker compromises that would help the EU, which found itself quite isolated. We did this both because of our overriding interest in launching negotiations and our belief that in a relationship as broad and deep as the EU-U.S. relationship, there must be a place for comity, trust and give and take.

Some of these concerns in the area of consumer confidence, however, seem more political than scientific. Biotechnology is an issue on which Europe and the United States should march forward together and in confidence, rather than separately and in hesitation.

One of the most important facets of our relationship is its potential for accomplishing our mutual foreign policy objectives. Nowhere is this more timely and important than in helping shape the future of Afghanistan.

On November 20 we held here in Washington an initial conference on Afghan reconstruction and development. As we considered how to assemble this conference, we spoke with the Japanese, and with countries of the region that surrounds Afghanistan.

We knew that the EU wanted to play a major role in this historic effort of rebuilding Afghanistan. In the past, efforts of this kind inspired bureaucratic and political rivalries.

Four co-chairs will lead this effort: the United States, the European Union, Japan, and Saudi Arabia. The European Union will be hosting in Brussels the next session of this international effort.

We expect the meeting in Brussels, slated for mid-December, to focus on the funding, coordination, and maybe even initial project identification, in our joint economic and humanitarian campaign. The next conference after that will take place in Japan.

Afghanistan can lift itself from the poverty and political instability that can create fertile ground for the sort of tyranny represented by the Taliban.

Quite frankly, the three year EU "moratorium" on biotechnology approvals, which the Commission itself has acknowledged as "illegal," is a threat to bilateral trading relations, food security in developing countries, and the health of the world trading system.

We welcome the Commission's statements and efforts to restart of the review and approval process for agricultural biotech applications, but we want a commitment that approvals will resume quickly. We do not believe approvals should be conditioned on acceptance of the Commission's July 25 proposals for Tracing and Labeling.

These proposals are unworkable, would disrupt trade and would further confuse consumers. We will be detailing our concerns regarding the Commission's Tracing and Labeling and Food and Feed proposals through the standard WTO Technical Barriers to Trade notification process.

Biotechnology also touches on the developing world. Raising agricultural productivity is key to raising farm incomes and reducing rural poverty. Biotechnology is already helping the world's poor increase yields and grow more nutritious food.

Unilateral rules that disrupt world trade and discourage investment and research could cut off development of this promising technology.

I hope that we can work together with our EU colleagues to make sure the developing world can grow the food it needs to raise incomes, lower poverty, and improve nutritional levels.

We want to encourage thoughtful discussion on biotechnology. We believe that a scientific and rules-based approach better protects the public than a reactive, unscientific, or politicized approach.

We have an established system in the U.S., in which protection of consumers is paramount. We have made science-based rules and precaution integral to our food safety system. We are conscious of the concerns that many Europeans have about food products derived from innovations in biotechnology. We are sensitive to the issue of consumer confidence, as it operates in Europe as well as in the United States.

At the end of World War II, our predecessors recognized a remarkable opportunity to reshape the world. They responded by launching the United Nations, NATO, the Bretton Woods institutions, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, and a set of treaties that began with the European Coal and Steel Community and led through the Maastricht Treaty on European Union and beyond.

We should seize upon September 11 as an impulse to lead our people forward into the 21st century. Our response will be steps both big and small, both discrete and over time. For the United States, such steps can mean Trade Promotion Authority for the President. For Europe, such steps can mean biotechnology. As we move forward, we owe it to our children that we be as wise as our forebears of 50 years ago.

Thank you very much.