Ambassador's Corner

WEEKLY MESSAGE FROM AMBASSADOR JOHN BRUTON

September 1, 2009

Never Again - Why the European Union exists

Seventy years ago today something happened, which explains better than anything else why the European Union exists, and why there is a European Union Delegation in Washington.

Early in the morning of the 1st September 1939 German armed forces invaded Poland in an operation that had been made possible by the Pact Germany had concluded with the Soviet Union a fortnight earlier. Britain and France declared war on Germany three days later. No other Western country lifted a hand to aid Poland.

Polish forces resisted with skill and heroism. Warsaw withstood a siege of nineteen days. Polish forces inflicted over 50,000 casualties on the invaders until their fate was finally sealed by the entry of Soviet army into Poland on 17th September 1939. The last Polish unit did not capitulate until 6th October 1939 and the Polish Government managed to escape intact through Romania.

Thus began the second great European civil war of the twentieth century, a second round to another war that also started in lovely summer weather, in August 1914.

I come from a country which took no direct part in the Second World War, but which sacrificed the lives of 49,000 of its young men - all volunteers - in the First World War. These men are commemorated at a beautiful, but rarely visited, memorial at Island bridge in Dublin, designed by the architect Lutyens who also designed the magnificent British Embassy residence here in Washington.

Wars caused by Europeans have brought untold suffering to mankind. They have been driven by many forces - dynastic rivalry, religion, competition for resources, for land and for living space - but the predominant cause of the European wars of the twentieth century was territorial and ethnic nationalism, a desire to enhance national prestige and territory to assuage perceived national humiliations.

The basis of territorial ethnic nationalism is emotional rather than intellectual or ideological. In its most extreme forms ethnic nationalism has provided a cover for genocide and ethnic cleansing.

Based as it is on distinction between peoples on the basis of ancestry or language, ethnic nationalism is the antithesis of Europe's religious heritage, which has emphasised instead forgiveness and charity towards the stranger. It is also the antithesis of the European enlightenment, which emphasised reason rather than emotional affinities.

The European Union, founded a few years after the end of the Second World War, is a brave attempt to forge an institutional system that will serve as an antidote to the territorial ethnic nationalism in Europe. The European Union is about substituting integration and mutual dependence among European peoples for the conflict and mutual rivalry that characterized their relationships in the past.

The European Union project is without precedent in human history. Never before has an entirely voluntary pooling of sovereignty between so many nations, so recently at war with one another, been attempted. But as the memory of the war that gave birth to this Union fades, as the last European generation to have experienced war in their homelands passes on, the risk increases that the lessons of history will be unlearned or forgotten.

We already see some small signs of European Union states falling out with one another over symbolic issues, and exploiting differences with neighbours for domestic political gain. The European Union should provide a higher plane of cooperation onto which to channel the energies that would otherwise be absorbed by such disputes.

The European Union may not always fulfil this role, because it is a rational project which appeals to people's reason, but does not always sufficiently engage their emotional commitment.

The United States, with its devotion to flag and anthem, works hard, every day, to engage the emotional commitment of US citizens, who come here from civilisations and societies more diverse than those that make up the European Union. The European Union can learn from America. A sense of "European-ness" is not something that will come about by accident.

The World's December Climate deadline - Will we make it?

Last week I accompanied Jos Delbeke, the European Commission's climate negotiator, the Swedish Minister for the Environment Andreas Carlgren, and the Spanish State Secretary Teresa Ribera to meetings with their US counterparts to prepare for the meeting of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Copenhagen between 7th and 18th December 2009. This is a vitally important meeting bringing together leaders from 192 countries of the world to devise a common plan to prevent the climate of the world being disrupted by human activity.

The deadline of December 2009 was set two years ago in Bali, Indonesia, for an agreement on what to do about this and on a new international framework beyond the existing Kyoto Protocol's first commitment period, which expires in 2012. The Bali Action plan, agreed on behalf of the United States by the Administration of President George W. Bush, said two very important things about emissions of CO2 and other climate changing gases. It said

The challenge now is to agree how to distribute the burden of reducing the emissions in light of countries' different capacities, and of their historic contribution to the problem.

For the purposes of burden-sharing, countries are at present, divided into two categories:

 Countries were divided into these two categories back in 1992 and a lot has been changed since then. Some countries placed in the "developing" categories have increased their emissions a lot, because globalisation has helped their economies to grow very rapidly. For example, China, which is in the "developing" category, now has greater annual emissions than even the United States, [though significantly less per capita]. Gulf States like Qatar, Kuwait and the U.A.E., which are also classified as "developing," have greater per capita emissions than any "developed" countries!

Incidentally, the United States and China between them emit 40% of all the world's greenhouse gas.

One of the tasks for the Copenhagen meeting will be to eliminate such anomalies and to ensure that emissions in advanced developing economies, where they are increasing very fast, are constrained in a quantifiable way and that those countries are required to reduce the rate of growth of their emissions.

Another challenge will be to improve the system of checking who is emitting CO2 and how much they are emitting. If some countries have their emissions verified by independent observers while other countries are the only ones checking their own emissions, confidence will be weakened and there is a real possibility of fraud. If countries insist on "sovereignty" and refuse inspection from the United Nations of what they are doing, we will get nowhere.

Furthermore, it is important to reach agreement on short-term limits of emissions as well as long-term ones. It is easy to agree that developed countries should reduce emissions to 80% below their 1990 level by 2050, as the G8 did in L'Aquila this summer, but that date is so far into the future that 2050 commitments lack immediate credibility in the absence of shorter-term goals. The EU has short-term as well as long-term goals. It has committed to get its emissions down to 20% below their 1990 level by 2020, and is already well on the way to achieving that. The EU is prepared to agree to go to 30% below 1990 levels in the context of a comprehensive Copenhagen agreement. But others are farther away. If the Waxman/Markey legislation, which was passed by the House of Representatives becomes law, US emissions would be reduced to a maximum of only 7% below their 1990 levels, and many Senators are baulking even at passing that, which complicates the US negotiating position for Copenhagen.

Coal is the most plentiful source of carbon energy but it is also the one that produces the most CO2 when it is burned. One solution urged by many is to trap the CO2 before it is emitted into the atmosphere and bury it underground. This is called carbon sequestration or carbon capture and storage.
 
But as Hans-Werner Sinn pointed out in the Financial Times on 27th August, when coal is burned and partially transformed into CO2, each carbon atom is joined by two oxygen atoms to form the CO2. Coal carbon transformed into CO2 has apparently five times the volume of the coal from which it was originally derived. Thus it will occupy five times as much space underground as the coal itself. Of course, it is not only in coal seams that carbon can be stored. Nevertheless, a calculation he quotes from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change suggests that there is only space underground only for about 10% of all carbon fuels we might burn. In contrast, the US Department of Energy has estimated that there is 900 years of capacity to store sequestered carbon. These differences need to be sorted out before we embrace any technology as providing an all-encompassing solution to how to use coal. 

And on money, the Bali Action Plan provided that efforts by poorer developing countries to reduce their emissions would be supported by access to new financial resources. Some $140 billion will be needed for adaptation and mitigation by 2020. The current recession explains why progress on finding this money has been so slow, but it is time for all developed countries to step up to the plate with some money. The EU for its part is ready to contribute its fair share at the forthcoming G20 meeting.

I must say I am concerned about the prospects of getting a deal in Copenhagen by the deadline of December 2009.

Many American commentators are now saying that the top priority is to pass healthcare legislation and that the Senate will not be able to pass both healthcare legislation and US climate change legislation before the December deadline.

An article written by Michael Levi in the current edition of Foreign Affairs even claims that the odds of agreeing a climate change Treaty in December are "vanishingly small," although the UN Secretary General says that if we get it wrong in Copenhagen "we face catastrophic damage to people, to the planet." So the sides are still far apart.

The talk from US official representatives now is of "managing expectations" for Copenhagen.

But the rest of the other countries of the world cannot be expected to sit around the negotiating table in Copenhagen twiddling their thumbs, waiting for the Senate of one country [however big] to deal with other business.

A vist to Monticello - How Thomas Jefferson explains the politics of  2009

Last week, with some of my family, I visited the beautiful mountaintop home in Virginia of the third President of the United States, Thomas Jefferson.

Jefferson was a man of many talents - an agricultural scientist, an architect, an archaeologist, a constitutional lawyer, an engineer, a university founder and a politician. I wonder if he would be allowed to practice so diverse a range of disciplines in the modern world, where so much emphasis is placed on having formal credentials from academic institutions for everything you do! He was a linguist, speaking fluent French. He even learned Scots Gaelic.

Jefferson is, in many ways, the intellectual architect of the United States constitution. His thoughts are revered and are considered by many Americans to be permanently relevant. His thinking permeates public debate in the United States right up to this day, and an understanding of his ideas will help people from other countries to understand why an American President, even though elected on a mandate to introduce healthcare reform and comprehensive climate change legislation, actually has difficulty achieving those goals. Three quotations from Jefferson illustrate the point. He said: 

Even though the Federal Government of the United States has taken on very many new responsibilities especially since the New Deal of the 1930's and the enactment of Medicare and Medicaid in the 1960's, the accepted rhetoric of American politics remains the rhetoric of Jefferson.

This makes the United States quite different from Europe, and explains the problems now being encountered in getting agreement to an extended role for the Federal Government on healthcare or climate change.

Americans have been advised by their founding fathers like Jefferson to be very wary of government, whereas Europeans expect government to provide the answer to their problems!

Please send me your comments about this or any of my weekly messages or other EU matters. I look forward to hearing from you!

For more information please click: Ambassador Bruton's Website