Van Rompuy’s transatlantic security narrative
European Council President Van Rompuy addressed last week the Brussels Forum of the German Marshal Fund on the subject of transatlantic relations (Transatlantic Responses to Global Insecurity). Evoking the post-War history of the GMF, Van Rompuy used the occasion to reflect on the course of U.S.–Europe relations and, in particular, on the continuity between a shared past at the origin of the GMF and an uncertain future.
‘The political question today’, he suggested in his dinner comments, ‘is how to translate this shared history and our shared values into a shared future’. Moreover, he added, it is not enough to ‘list the essential values we share on both sides of the Atlantic’. Something more is needed: a shared narrative.
This is an insightful starting point for an analysis and politics of transatlantic relations. The typically evoked shopping lists of so-called Western values (freedom, democracy, individualism, human rights, etc.) are not only not uniquely Western, they only take on meaning and universal appeal when they are enacted, when they mobilised through concrete settings, relative to tangible references, real people and shared events. In other words, values have value when they are made real through shared accounts of events, shared stories, shared narratives.
It is therefore interesting that Van Rompuy calls for an emphasis on a shared narrative in U.S.–Europe relations and when he rhetorically asks what such a narrative could be, he finds the answer in global insecurity. There are many contrasts, he reminds us, many issues and tensions, but global insecurity can and should be our shared political story.
Pointing to the tensions over the Kyoto protocol and the European rejection of the US proposed SWIFT data sharing arrangement, Von Rompuy reminds his American audience that such disagreements risk emptying the shared narrative of content. ‘The only easy relationship’, he underscores, ‘is an empty relationship’.
And yet, just as an ‘empty narrative’ of the kind Von Rompuy fears will lead us away from meaningful transatlantic politics, one can ask what a truly shared transatlantic security narrative would be, and what added-value it would bring: A perfectly shared, identical security narrative would be exactly as ineffective as an empty one.
This is because a perfectly shared security narrative would close the door to the global character of security. ‘Global security’ does not mean ‘our security against global threats’. The transatlantic story of global security is not a story about how global security is transatlantic, but rather how transatlantic security is global. It is about how the transatlantic security narrative of share values is not only concerned by, but actively implicated in global insecurity, how the transatlantic axis not only experiences, but contributes to global insecurity.
