"Crises and Crisis Management in EU-US Relations: The 'Four Years' Crisis' (2000-2005) in Perspective"

Smith, Michael. (2005) "Crises and Crisis Management in EU-US Relations: The 'Four Years' Crisis' (2000-2005) in Perspective". In: UNSPECIFIED, Austin, Texas. (Unpublished)

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Abstract

This paper explores the nature of crises and crisis management in relations between the European integration project and the United States, with special reference to the ‘four years’ crisis’ from 2000-2004. Although there has been a mass of literature dealing with this crisis, it has not been subjected to systematic analysis in the light of theories of crisis and its management. The paper reviews a number of key questions relating to crises and crisis management, outlines the historical record of crisis and crisis management in EC/EU-US relations, relates this to the record of crises during the George W. Bush Administration, and draws conclusions about the role of crises and crisis management in EU-US relations. The first part of the paper explores the nature of crises in international relations, drawing on a range of literatures. It identifies three key elements of crisis - context; causality; scope, intensity and contagion - and outlines their implications. The paper goes on to explore the implications for crisis management of these conceptions of crisis: who or what is crisis management for, what modes of crisis management can be identified, what are the potential outcomes and underlying logics of crisis management? On this basis the paper discusses the relevance of concepts of crisis and crisis management to EC/EU-US relations, before going on to explore the record of crises in EC/EU-US relations from the 1960s to the 1990s. In the third section of the paper, the focus is on the period 2000-2004, or the ‘four years’crisis’, with the aim of providing four readings of its origins, its characteristics, the use or non-use of management devices and the longer-term implications of the crisis. The conclusions evaluate the uses and usefulness of crisis management analysis in EU-US relations, and some possible policy implications.

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