London, 06/02/2001 (Agence Europe) - The Foreign Policy Centre, the independent British think-tank, whose Director is Mark Leonard and President, the Secretary to the Foreign Office, Robin Cook, recently published a report by Malcolm Chalmers entitled "A Transatlantic New Deal: What Europe should pay to promote US engagement. The report mainly stresses the assets that Europe has at its disposal to convince the United States (and the new Bush Administration in particular) not to shirk its international commitments. The author argues that data on military spending, overseas development assistance, UN contributions and greenhouse gas emissions demonstrate that, the EU spends three times as much on overseas development aid as the United States. Instead of "carping about US failings", he argues, the "EU should fashion a more effective division of labour in which it concentrates on developing an effective security capacity". According to Mr Chalmers, the European governments should above all: - promise to stay in the Balkans, whatever the US decides, as long as they are needed to secure the region; - make a unilateral EU commitment to meet the targets which they would have been set had a Climate Change Treaty at The Hague been agreed; - endeavour to make the EU an "international champion" of developing countries through increasing overseas development aid (ODA) budgets to at least 0.5% of GDP by 2006, with the goal of fully meeting the UN's 0.7% target no later than 2010.
Malcolm Chalmers, Professor at the University of Bradford, stresses in his report that Europeans should place emphasis on the "disproportionate contributions" they make to non-military aspects of security, while the United States has much to learn from the "EU's less militarised approach to 'backyard' conflict prevention, as current developments in Columbia are demonstrating all too clearly". In his view, the United States "can and should be a key partner in the development of a more far-sighted approach to these problems" (European security, under-development, global warming), but the condition is above all Europe's determination to "play a disproportionate role in financing non-military international public goods". Professor Chalmers considers that the recent willingness by the EU to take on a greater share of the UN budget is a welcome, and highly symbolic, shift in this direction. "It should set a precedent for European leadership in other areas", he states.
(Address: The Foreign Policy Centre, Elizabeth House, 39 York Road, London SE1 7NQ. Tel.: 020 7401 5350. E-mail: info@fpc.org.uk. The text of the report is available at: http://www.fpc.org.uk ).