External EU Relations

Though yesterday's meals had been truly European, in that there were many courses which took several hours to be presented to us, today we were provided a magnificent buffet. After lunch came two sessions on external affairs of the EU. First discussed was the EU neighborhood policy. This is a brand new policy which hopes to surround the EU with friendly and cooperative border-countries. The countries who the EU have implemented these policies on include; Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbijan, Syria, Lebanon, Georgia, Israel, Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Algeria and Morrocco. These are all nations which are not candidates for joining the EU for various reasons, but who for the most part are willing to cooperate with the EU. The Good Neighbor Policy provides seperate “action plans” for each nation. These actions, broadly, encourage the countries to modernize, increase human rights, and increase democratic institutions. Goals vary greatly from country to country, and the EU provides them with economic rewards for the progress these countries are able to make. The goal of this policy is to provide the EU with a ring of stability surrounding it, but the policy is way too young to be able to tell whether it is working or not.

Perhaps the most disappointing session of the seminar thus far was the session on EU/US relations. This was the session I had been looking forward to this session most today, however, it did not come close to meeting my expectations. I hoped he would discuss concrete economic, and social issues the US and the EU were facing right now. He began, however, with stating that Europeans trust in Americans had gone down significantly since 2004 (Bush's re-election), and that Europeans cannot accept American exceptionalism, and unilateralism. He then went into hypothetical examples of why EU/US relations could be, or could not be, restored. The examples were quite simple, and only stated that globalization could either strengthen the EU/US bond, or make it whither away. This struck me as odd, since he was briefed beforehand that his audience would be fulbright scholars, and a high school student could have made that argument. The rest of his lecture focused on the pessimistic view that the relationship could not hold, focusing on America's decision to invade Iraq unilaterally as the pill that Europeans could not swallow. I found this absurd, as did everyone else in the group, however, I believe we were all so shell-shocked at the argument he was making, we were unable to get him off the subject. I figured in his briefing he read that it was a group of Americans, and skimmed over the fact that all of them were academics who had been studying in Europe for the last year, and probably had a pretty good idea of some European's opinions of the US. Thus, he figured we would attack him as soon as he questioned America's policy decisions. At least, I hope so. If he puts American scholars studying in Europe at that level of intelligence, I'd hate to see what he thinks of the rest of Americans.