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U.S. Consul General A. Daniel Weygandt addresses faculty and students at the Università degli Studi di Trieste, Polo di Gorizia.
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Gorizia Provincial Prefect Roberto De Lorenzo (front row, aisle) looks on as the Consul General addresses the students of the University of Trieste’s Diplomatic Training Program in Gorizia.
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t is a particular pleasure for me to be with you here today. In fact, Gorizia is a place I have wanted to visit for many years. I have spent most of my professional life working in and on Europe. Places like Gorizia, which were on the frontiers of a divided Europe hold a special attraction for me. Places that are now part of a “Europe whole, free and at peace” as our great statesman George Marshall said back in 1947 have a special importance. A peaceful, united Europe has been the goal of American foreign policy since the end of WWII so it’s nice to see what the results of our policy are today.
U.S. support for a united Europe has meant that we have been strong supporters of the European Union – even though at times we have of course had our differences with the EU on issues as diverse as aircraft subsidies, agricultural policy and ensuring that our companies are accorded fair treatment. But we have survived those disagreements and also major differences in the political realm. For example, Jose Barroso, the President of the European Commission, has said that the “relationship between the United States and Europe constitutes the world’s strongest, most comprehensive and strategically most important partnership.” I very much agree with him. The EU member states and the U.S. share common values. We both believe strongly in the importance of market economies, personal freedom, and democracy. From an economic standpoint, U.S. relations with Europe are indispensable. Transatlantic trade amounts to over a billion dollars every day, and is a pillar of the global economy. The investment relationship is equally important. Our leaders see each other regularly, but it is not only friendship between high-ranking individuals that is important. The appreciation of cultural similarities and common understanding between the general populations, and especially among students and academics like you, is critical to improving international relations.
Moreover, to be speaking to a group of largely young people who are committed to building international careers in Europe is a special pleasure for me. I would like to speak to you today as an American whose life has been defined by the transatlantic relationship but also as someone who is concerned that the future of that relationship be as successful as it has been over the last two generations. That success will depend on the next generation represented by many of you in the audience here who will be building a new, united Europe, a Europe that I hope will remain an indispensable partner for the U.S. in the years ahead.
A Brief History of Transatlantic Relations
Although it may be hard to imagine such a situation now, over the past 200 years, transatlantic relations have not always been as strong and intertwined as they are now. In fact, for much of our history, America was focused on its own development. Our relations with Europe were largely driven by trade interests and we were often competitors, not partners, with Europe in many areas. In 1823, President James Monroe declared the Monroe Doctrine, in which the U.S. said it would stay neutral in European affairs but insisted that Europe not intervene in the business of North and especially South American states.
It wasn’t until 1917, after three years of fighting during WWI, that the U.S. intervened on the side of the Entente powers and even this was after President Wilson ran his re-election campaign in 1916 on the slogan “He kept us out of war.” After the war, America did not join the League of Nations and once again adopted a non-interventionist policy with Europe.
Ultimately, it took an attack on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor to finally convince the American public to enter WWII. Only at the end of the Second World War, when the Soviet Union emerged as a competing superpower, did the U.S. abandon its non-interventionist policies in favor of active engagement with and an active military presence in Europe. It took tremendous leadership on the part of men like Marshall, Acheson and bipartisan support in the U.S. Congress to establish U.S. policy towards Europe in the late ‘40’s. Without this support, Italy’s own post-war development from 1948 onwards could have looked quite different.
The Cold War era presented new challenges to the global community. With the Soviet Union controlling the Eastern Bloc, the U.S. and Western Europe worked strongly together to help spread democratic ideals and combat the spread of Communism. Since its inception in 1949, NATO has been the anchor of transatlantic security cooperation, and it has surmounted numerous challenges including the integration of Germany in 1955, the euromissile debate in the 1980s, and in the 1990s, its first military operations in Bosnia and Kosovo.
NATO has remained strong for so long because its members did not allow their differences to overcome their shared interests and values. We must ensure that this remains true for robust transatlantic cooperation to combat emerging global threats in the future.
New Challenges
Today, the international community faces different challenges than it did 50, 20, even 10 years ago. We all agree on the importance of international security, the preservation of personal freedoms and human rights, and the value of a growing economy, but our priorities and approaches to these goals can differ. By mid-2001, European governments were mainly looking inward, preparing for a difficult round of EU enlargement rather than looking outward to arising global threats. In contrast, the U.S., especially after September 11th, became increasingly concerned with new “asymmetric” threats to ourselves and our Allies, including the potential use of weapons of mass destruction by international terrorists.
Today, with the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, American political and military leadership considers itself to be engaged in a long, multi-dimensional struggle against violent extremists.
General John Abizaid, who until last year commanded U.S. forces in the Middle East and Afghanistan, recently called this “the first war of globalization, between openness and closed societies.”
Against this backdrop, diplomacy has in turn become more important than ever. In order to be a successful diplomat, you obviously need to possess the qualities of a well-educated and well-informed individual, but from my experiences over the last nearly 30 years in the field, the most important skill a diplomat can have is the ability to develop and create long-lasting, personal relationships. There are clearly many factors that affect relations between nations, but in the end state-to-state relations rely heavily on relations between people. The friendships and trust that politicians and diplomats create increases understanding between their respective countries.
Fostering Good Relationships
Because of my firm belief in the importance of relationships on an individual basis, we at the Consulate have been working on a few programs that will help foster good relationships. The first is the Partnership for Growth (P4G) http://italy.usembassy.gov/p4g/italiano/, an initiative which Ambassador Spogli launched two years ago, but which has already had significant success. P4G is a vehicle for promoting a more open, transparent Italian economy. We want to take advantage of interest in the U.S. economic model, focusing on those aspects of access to capital, protection of intellectual property, the role of private equity and technology transfer that are the pillars of P4G. The Ambassador led a group of over 60 Italian businesspeople to Silicon Valley in January. Perhaps most interesting for this audience, is the
BEST http://italy.usembassy.gov/p4g/BEST/ scholarship program designed to give energetic Italian graduate students the chance to spend time in California to get familiar with the way Silicon Valley works with its links to applied research facilities. Last year there were 5 scholarships – largely paid for by Italian but also American companies. This year there are already 15 scholarships to be awarded and we hope to make this program self-sustaining in the next year.
I myself have recently launched a program I call the Dialogo Imprenditoria Giovanile – DIG for short – which aims to bring together not only young entrepreneurs, but also the many different groups here in northern Italy that have programs for young entrepreneurs. Unfortunately, my residence in Milan is a little far from Gorizia, but we hope to be able to identify young entrepreneurs to work with here in Friuli-Venezia-Giulia as well. We have also launched various programs for universities like Face-to-Face http://italy.usembassy.gov/face2face/cc/ and Generation Next to share the experience of young entrepreneurs in new technologies.
Economic Cooperation
Making progress in these areas is important. Italy cannot afford to waste the next few years. With real economic difficulties on the horizon in 2008 and growth forecasts being cut back around the world, it will not be easy to get quick improvement no matter how well-designed reforms here might be. For this reason I think it is particularly important to focus on the growth sectors of new technologies where Italy’s tremendous human capital represented by its talented young people, can be put to best effect. I am also aware that Italy faces competition from dynamic economies on its borders.
But I think competition from energetic young Slovenes and other nationalities is good for Italy. The spirit of working together to build a new Europe is present here on the “internal frontier” of places like Friuli, where the division of Europe is increasingly only a memory.
Much of my focus in Milan is on economic issues, for obvious reasons given the importance of the north to Italy’s economy. “My” consular district accounts for nearly half of Italy’s GDP with less than a third of its population. Economic cooperation between the U.S. and Italy is a mutually beneficial goal. According to polling data, more Italians have a favorable view of the U.S. economy than is the case in any other European country. Italians say in large numbers that they wish their economy were more like that of the U.S.
Of course, these polls were taken before the sub-prime mortgage crisis had hit the U.S. and other markets, but still, the basic message of an open American economy, where it is easier to start a business, have access to capital, be able to expand your business, all based on a transparent, efficient regulatory system – these are things that appeal to Italians – especially young people. It is our goal to build on that interest to strengthen our relations in the future, since now half a generation has passed since the end of the Cold War – a shared experience that united Europe and the U.S.
In a globalized world, more and more Americans are looking to Asia rather than to Europe. We cannot assume that the successes of the West in the past will automatically mean a common purpose in the future. We need to re-define the trans-Atlantic relationship – and doing so on the basis of common economic interests is an essential part of this important task.
As a diplomat, I have focused to a large extent on economic issues, although I like to remind people that if I were really a good economist I probably would be off making money in the private sector rather than working for the U.S. government. But I have had some interesting experiences. I was in Russia when the ruble collapsed in August 1998 – I had only arrived a month earlier so this was quite a dramatic introduction to seeing how a country can cope with such extreme economic difficulties – a lesson in humility if nothing else.
On the more positive side, I had the good fortune to be Charge of Aviation Affairs in the economic section at our embassy in Bonn during the period before German unification and through that exciting period. My job was especially interesting since we had to construct an entirely new aviation regime to cover the former GDR – a regime that had to go into effect with essentially the flip of a switch on October 3, 1990. These were some of the most complex negotiations that accompanied the unification process and it was great fun to have a leading role as still a relatively young diplomat.
A final highlight I might mention is having experienced the military takeover in Turkey in September, 1980. Being present during world shaping events is one of the real privileges of being a diplomat – though of course it is the diplomat’s job to prevent crises as much as it is to solve them.
A New Generation of Diplomats
My own career has been very much defined by the end of the Cold War and efforts to build a new trans-Atlantic relationship. For American diplomats, Europe used to be the foundation of U.S. policy, with NATO and Central Europe its focus. After 1990, in the long prosperity of that decade, it was easy to imagine that life in the transatlantic world would continue to be good. We weathered storms together in the Middle East in the first Gulf War and of course in the former Yugoslavia. In those days it seemed that Western domination of the global economy was assured and policies of expanding global trade to bring China and India into the mainstream looked like win-win approaches, good for developed and emerging economies at the same time. I even remember $20 per barrel oil. Those days seem not only long ago, but not likely to return.
American diplomats of the coming generation are likely to focus more on China and India and Africa than on Europe, which has broad implications for the trans-Atlantic relationship. Americans still think of Europe of course as our most important partner. The degree of interest in Europe about the U.S. presidential elections shows not only that Europeans like the drama of American elections – this has been a very exciting election so far and promises to get even more interesting – but it also shows that Europeans understand the importance of the U.S. for Europe's own future. And, we need to keep the positive spirit of the trans-Atlantic community intact. In the U.S. presidential elections, the focus on foreign policy is as much about the economic effects of globalization as it is about security issues. There is a degree of pessimism about the future in the trans-Atlantic community that is troubling.
It is important to resist pessimism. I spent the year before coming to Milan in Baghdad where I was in charge of the Economic Section of the U.S. Embassy in Iraq. Of all the jobs I mentioned earlier, the one in Baghdad was certainly the most difficult. Trying to help build the Iraqi economy under war conditions is exceptionally challenging. In Iraq, as an American diplomat, you learn to live not only with danger, but with frustration as well, when you see the tremendous potential of the country contrasted with the hardships of the present.
It was a memorable experience, living in a container vulnerable to regular rocket and mortar fire. While the chances of being unlucky were relatively slight, a number of people in the U.S. compound were killed by “indirect fire” – i.e., mortars, during the twelve months I was there. Since I left, the security situation has greatly improved, and while I personally believe the U.S. will have to remain in Iraq for several more years, the improvement in security in the last six months is encouraging and I am glad to have had the chance to work on such an important set of issues.
It is not an experience I necessarily recommend, but I learned a lot and my time there has put many other problems into a different perspective.
Clearly, viewed from Iraq, we have entered a globalized era. The conflict there involves Iraq’s neighbors, who all have different ideas about what the future of that country should be, and in many ways Iraq is the stage on which the drama of the West’s presence in the Arab world is being played out. A democratic, peaceful Iraq would contribute to stability in the region and ease international energy markets as it exploits its own tremendous national resource wealth. A failed Iraq would represent a humanitarian catastrophe that would be an order of magnitude worse than Darfur and more importantly be a source of grave instability for the region with unforeseeable consequences for international peace and the global economy.
So, much as the time I spent in Iraq was difficult from a personal standpoint, I see no choice but to continue our efforts to stabilize the country and bring about political conciliation. These efforts will be paramount for the U.S., in my view for at least several more years, which means, in my view, that we will be more reliant on support from our European friends in other areas, including Afghanistan. As the U.S. re-directs its efforts in the coming years we will be looking to Europe for more partnership and simply help in dealing with the very real challenges we all face.
I personally believe the only way we can expect to receive this European support is if our European partners themselves feel confident about their future prospects. Economic success is not only good for a country’s standard of living; it fundamentally shapes how – in a democracy – that country will interact with others.
For 35 years I have been intermittently living in Europe. That’s a long time and it gives me a longer term perspective. I have seen Europe accomplish tremendous things over this last generation: ending the division of the Cold War, establishing an unprecedented standard of living with dramatic strides in creating greater social opportunities for its peoples. Europe is not just a single market and a European passport, Europe of the last 35 years is a success story in human progress.
With all these accomplishments, it simply cannot be that Europe and especially Italy should not be able to make the changes needed to restore a sense of confidence about the future and help re-establish the dynamism of the West.
Many of the challenges Italy faces are ones we Americans face as well: immigration, stagnation of wages, increasing cost of living. In the U.S. we are going through our unique form of re-defining ourselves through our very expensive but very entertaining presidential elections. I am convinced this year’s election will go a long way towards restoring American confidence.
I am similarly convinced that Italy and Europe are perfectly capable of developing policies that will foster growth and give more opportunities to young people to have the same or better standard of living as their parents. We all need these successes to confirm that the trans-Atlantic community of democracies can still solve the problems we face together. As unpleasant as it was to suffer the heat, frustration and anxiety of life in Baghdad, the experience also taught me that all of us are probably tougher than we had imagined. Most importantly, I learned, as if I needed to, that the things we take for granted, especially freedom, are indeed worth fighting for, even if fighting is no fun.
So let me close by saying that viewed from the perspective of places like Gorizia, or for that matter Baghdad, many current problems do not appear to be so intractable. Ending the tyrannies that afflicted Europe for much of the previous century and overcoming the division of Europe were tasks that took real, sustained effort, tasks that were difficult for democracies where the temptation to promise quick or easy solutions can stand in the way of long-term goals. In a globalized era, the challenges may be much more diffuse and harder to define. But when I see what talented young people Europe produces, I am confident that the trans-Atlantic community will find answers to these challenges just as the previous generation did.
Thank you.
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