to the implementation of basic values – and by military means – by bombing the Milosevic regime
in Serbia and the Taleban regime in Afghanistan and engaging in a number of humanitarian
interventions after the Cold War. Moreover, over the past three decades the ideological distance
between Europe and the United States has been shrinking not growing. In Central and Eastern
Europe, Communist regimes were replaced with liberal democracy as a result of the end of the Cold
War. In Western Europe socialist ideas played an important role in the construction of the welfare
state in the 1960s and 1970s, but today social democratic parties have embraced market economy;
most vigorously in Britain. Communist parties previously prominent in some West European have
lost political influence and voter support.
Rather than evidence of a growing ideological distance between the United States and Europe, the
recent transatlantic conflicts over values reflect the change from a bipolar to a unipolar world order
combined with the ideological substance and ideological intensity of the order promoted by the
United States. First, the conflicts over the proper role of international governance reflect the
different means available to the United States and the European states. The power disparity between
the United States makes it impossible for the Europeans to influence American security policy
unless they act through diplomatic and institutional channels. This conclusion is supported by the
actions of the larger European states in the European Union, where they have not hesitated to
cooperate outside the institutions when it suited their interests as in regard to the conflicts in former
Yugoslavia and the response to US policy in Afghanistan and Iraq (Wivel 2005).
Second, the ideological substance of liberalism makes conflict an intrinsic aspect of transatlantic
relations. Critique and competition are fundamental aspects of all liberal societies and these values
are influencing the interaction between Europe and America. Moreover, the pluralist nature of the
liberal unipole allows for differences among allies and means that all of the states in the
transatlantic area, including the unipole, are constantly negotiating how their power position should
be translated into influence, prestige etc. Thus, ‘[t]ransatlantic relations are embedded in a dense
network of multilateral links, including annual meetings of the Group of Eight major industrialized
nations, semiannual consultations among top officials, and shared membership in the Organization
for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). The transatlantic relationship’s central
organization, NATO, holds biennial summits, frequent meetings of foreign and defence ministers,
and regular consultations among permanent national delegations based in Brussels. The partnership
is supplemented by extensive cooperation among U.S. and European law enforcement agencies for
combating money laundering, drug trafficking, and illegal-refugee smuggling’ (Wallace 2001: 17).
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Convention