The European Union and the United States: Studying Competition, Convergence and the EU’s Role(s) in the World Arena

Smith, Michael H. (2009) The European Union and the United States: Studying Competition, Convergence and the EU’s Role(s) in the World Arena. In: UNSPECIFIED. (Unpublished)

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Abstract

Central to the EU’s ‘actorness’ in the world arena is the relationship with the United States. This paper explores the ways in which it is possible to conceptualise EU-US relations within a changing world arena, and relates them to scholarship on EU-US relations since the end of the Cold War, with the aim of exploring the EU’s changing role(s) in transatlantic relations. The paper begins by exploring the changing EU-US policy agenda, identifying issues of scope and scale in the management of that agenda and relating these to the changing analytical agenda for the study of EU-US relations. It then proceeds to identify a number of ways in which the EU-US system of relations can be characterised: as a historically shaped set of structures and norms, as a combination of markets, hierarchies and networks, as a form of incomplete multi-level governance, and as an uneasy blend of bilateralism, multilateralism and ‘bi-multilateralism’. These qualities help us to account for the expansion and diversification of the ways in which EU-US ‘encounters’ have shaped both the EU-US system and the broader global arena since the end of the Cold War. Not least, they help us to think about the implications of EU-US relations for ‘European foreign policy’ and the potential roles played by the EU, both in relation to US foreign policy and more broadly in the world arena. The final part of the paper discusses key elements in the EU’s establishment of roles within the changing EU-US system, identifies four key roles for the EU (subaltern, sub-contractor, substitute and subversive) and evaluates the ways in which these might develop in the next decade.

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