2005 CUSE Annual Conference: Europe’s Global Role

The crisis over Iraq was the latest in a series of international security crises that demonstrated that the European Union has not yet emerged as unified actor on difficult global security issues. Yet since the Iraq crisis, the member states of Europe have shown a renewed interest in creating EU institutions capable of coherent action on controversial foreign policy issues, in articulating a distinct European strategy for promoting security and stability, and in establishing a European role in issues well beyond the European continent.

The Center on the United States and Europe’s annual conference brought together renowned experts and policymakers from both sides of the Atlantic to examine Europe’s Global Role. The first panel looked at the ongoing efforts by the United Kingdom to steer a course between and “Atlanticist” and “European” foreign policy; the second panel examined the European Union’s efforts to manage its relationships with a proliferating number of candidates to the east—at the same time that it sorts out its own political future; and the last panel looked at the integration of a rising China into the international system, an extra-European issue on which the European Union and the United States have already shown signs of discord.

Welcome and Introduction:

Philip H. Gordon, Director, Center on the United States and Europe

Britain Between America and the European Union:

Philip H. Gordon

Panelists:

Anatol Lieven,
Carnegie Endowment
Gerard Baker,
The London Times
Charles Grant,
Centre for European Reform

Where Does Europe End?

Strobe Talbott,
President, The Brookings Institution

Panelists:

John Bruton,
EU Ambassador to the U.S.
Sylvie Goulard,
Institut d’Etudes Politiques, Paris

Andrew Moravcsik, Princeton University
Vladimir Ryzhkov, Russian Duma

The Global Agenda:

James B. Steinberg,
Vice President and Director, Foreign Policy Studies, The Brookings Institution

Panelists:

R. Nicholas Burns ,
Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs
Jean-David Levitte,
French Ambassador to the U.S.