Transcript
Phil Gordon: Thank you all very much, and good morning. I'm Phil Gordon, Director of the Center on the United States and Europe here at Brookings. It's a great pleasure to welcome you all here this morning for this year's annual conference. We have a really great program and great set of participants, not least those of you in the auditorium.
Let me just say one word about the context and the agenda before we open it up with the first panel this morning. It's always true that there are interesting things going on in Europe and in transatlantic relations, so that any time would be good for a conference like this. But I have to say I think the timing of this year's conference is particularly interesting in a number of ways, but just to mention a couple of them.
First of all, since President Bush's election, he has already been to Europe twice. It was his first foreign trip of the second term, and that first trip seemed to be an effort to emphasize a new desire to reach out, to put the Iraq conflict behind us, and to restart the transatlantic dialogue, and it was fairly successful, it seems to me.
The second trip from which the President and his team just returned last night was a little bit more tricky. It was designed to celebrate the common victory with the Soviet Union/Russia in World War II, but it got caught up in some difficulties of the President trying on one hand to stress the freedom, democracy and independence of some smaller countries like Latvia and Georgia, and at the same time trying to strengthen the relationship with Russia, and, indeed, that turned out to be tricky, and it's something that our second panel today in particular I'm sure will want to address.lash,
On top of that set of transatlantic challenges, we have the internal questions going on in Europe, and, again, the timing here couldn't be more interesting. We have a draft E.U. Constitution that is up in the air, to say the least. On May 28th the French will vote. Yesterday's polls say that it's fifty-fifty. A few days after that, the Dutch will vote, and today's polls I saw said actually 54 percent against in the Netherlands, so it's not just the French. Then of course, in the fall, Denmark, Poland, Portugal, and then the U.K. after that.r
So this huge set of internal questions raising questions about the future of European integration and also the degree to which the United States should support European integration, and that's another set of topics that I think this first panel and all of our panels will address.
On top of all of that, we have the global agenda, which is to say, there seems to be at least in the short-term a transatlantic truce on some of these big questions like Iraq, the E.U.-China arms embargo, Iran, Israel, Palestine, for now it looks okay, but one has the sense that right around the corner could be some difficulties that will test the proposition that transatlantic relations are getting to be in better shape.
So all of that is to say I think it's an excellent time to talk about some of these issues, and we have really terrific panels to do so.
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