Ireland, Europe and the US: A Road to Recovery and Renewed Partnership. Address by Ambassador Anne Anderson, May 29th 2014

It is an honour to be here with this distinguished group. I want to thank Charlie and Nancy Bedford for the invitation. I have been told about the pivotal role you play for the international community in Atlanta and I especially want to thank you for the great support you have given our Consulate since it was established here four years ago.

It is organisations like this Atlanta Council on International Relations – promoting dialogue, debate and deeper understanding – which provide the underpinning to our diplomatic work and the impetus to make our international partnerships stronger and more meaningful.

I have chosen a rather ambitious title for my remarks today: “Ireland, Europe and the US: A Road to Recovery and Renewed Partnership”. As you might have noticed over the years, diplomats love topics like roads to recovery, just as we enjoy pathways to prosperity and anything which manages to be both alliterative and upbeat!

And my story today is indeed a positive one, with a lot of good news to impart. At the same time, I promise not to be relentlessly upbeat. I have too much respect for this audience to avoid the questions and the complexities inherent in these key relationships.

As I begin to tell the story, I should perhaps underline the experience and perspective which informs my own approach.

When I discuss Ireland, Europe and the US, I regard myself as having a firm footing in all three camps.

Ireland of course is my beloved country, which I have served as a career diplomat for over forty years. I was just twenty one years old when Ireland entered the European Union in January 1973. Thirty years later, I was privileged to serve as Ireland’s Permanent Representative, or Ambassador, to the European Union from 2001 to 2005. And this is my ninth year to live in the U.S., having been here as a young diplomat from 1983 to 1987 and then as Ambassador to the United Nation in New York from 2009 to 2013, before moving to my current job as Ambassador to Washington last summer.

I count myself very fortunate that my time as Ambassador in Washington has been a time of such good news from Ireland. After the difficulties we experienced in the aftermath of 2008, our economy is back on its feet again – with buoyant foreign investment, rising exports, very healthy tourism, and reducing (even if still much too high) unemployment. The mix we provide – highly skilled workforce, very competitive corporate tax rate of 12.5%, an English speaking gateway to the European Union – continues to demonstrate its attractiveness. I have been very happy over the past year to talk to American audiences of our resilience, as well as so much else in the Irish story in which we can take legitimate pride.

Alongside this strong pride in Ireland, I also count myself a loyal and committed European. I am conscious of a deep personal debt. My generation in Ireland, and particularly women of my generation, were quite simply liberated by membership of the Union. Equal pay, equal rights and all manner of progressive social legislation, got a huge push forward from our Union membership. Our small country had to open its windows on the wider world, and my generation breathed deeply that heady air.

The economic and financial benefits of membership were hugely significant. But the psychological effect was equally transformative. Ireland was no longer an island behind an island; we were free to claim our European identity: to play our part on the wider European stage. That increment of confidence proved extraordinarily powerful.

Decades later, as I served in Brussels at the time of EU enlargement, when Ireland held the EU Presidency in 2004, I saw and experienced the sheer joy when the European Union enlarged from fifteen to twenty five member states. We celebrated “Europe, whole and free”. For once, we were all focused on the big picture – Europe writ large, rather than the interminable squabbling over the small print that consumes so much of our time in Brussels.
And then there is the attachment to America. I hope I’m not over claiming if I say I sometimes think of the United States as my alternative home. When I was invited a few weeks back to address the Democratic Caucus in Congress on the theme “America the Beautiful”, I was more than happy to do so. The energy and optimism of America, the generosity and open-heartedness of its people, have always profoundly appealed to me.

In the years of my postings to the United Nations – including six years as Ambassador to the UN in Geneva and four years as Ambassador to the UN in New York - I saw the humanitarian and human rights efforts of American foreign policy: the day-in, day-out dedication to making the world a better place.

Let me say at this point how much it is in Ireland’s interest that there should be a rich, vibrant, positive relationship between Europe and the US. Some years back, there was a headline debate in Ireland about what was perceived as a certain schizophrenia in our identity. The shorthand title of the debate was: “Boston or Berlin?” Of course the answer isn’t either/or, it’s both.

Our EU membership is deeply imprinted on us in every way; we have a true sense of belonging within the European family. But situated on the geographical edge of Europe, we also look west. We will never forget that America embraced our people at our time of greatest need, as the ravages of Famine devastated our country in the mid 19th century. Today, America is home to over 35 million people who count themselves of Irish descent. Our two countries are joined by blood, by language, by an empathy that is hard to define but impossible to underestimate.

It is important to underline that the Irish/US relationship is by no means confined to history or sentiment. The contemporary economic ties are extraordinarily strong. Over 70% of our FDI comes from the US. It is our largest market for export of goods, our second largest tourism market. And the economic relationship is truly two-way, with investment and trade flowing in both directions. Right here in Atlanta, the success of Irish building materials company, Oldcastle, is a striking illustration – headquartered here, the company now employs some 37,000 workers across every State in the Union.
Having set out my own perspective and where Ireland is positioned, I now come to some of the harder questions. Why was it that the US-Europe relationship seemed to have became somewhat jaded over recent years - to the point where it became commonplace to speak of the need for renewal? Even if the relationship never deteriorated to the point of needing a “reset”, there has been regular talk of renewal and renaissance. Implicit in that terminology is a sense that things have not been quite as they should be.

Following the fracturing around the Iraq war and the apparent disinterest in or downgrading of multilateralism during the Bush administration, hopes and expectations ran high – maybe impossibly high – in the aftermath of President Obama’s election in 2008. Inevitably, the reality as it played out wasn’t quite so simple.

In the foreign policy area, some of the underlying discontents rumbled away. There was still no settled transatlantic view of the relative roles of soft power/hard power. The Europeans, as before, were prone to feeling taken for granted. It was Chris Patten whom I first heard say, many years ago when he was EU Commissioner for External Relations, that the “Americans get to cook dinner, and the Europeans do the washing up.” In other words, the Europeans have consistently felt undervalued for their slow and steady diplomacy around the world, underpinned as it is by deep financial contributions to development assistance.

For their part, the Americans have long been frustrated by the complexity of European decision making, the slowness to react, and what they perceive as unwillingness to step up to the plate when it comes to defence spending.

Over recent years, these underlying frustrations were being played out in a changing international landscape. As with any long and essentially stable relationship, the partners can all too easily become distracted. President Obama’s “pivot to Asia” was not intended as a pivot away from Europe, but it was hardly surprising that the Europeans felt it in this way. And indeed in both Europe and the US there was certain excitement about the new. Our business people were intrigued by the opportunities opening up in China, the growing middle-class in India, the growth rates in Africa. The BRICs were increasingly claiming our attention, both economically and politically. Hardly surprising if Europe and America perhaps began taking each other a little for granted.

Another key factor over the past few years was the degree to which both the EU and the US were obliged to look inward and focus on domestic issues. After the collapse of Lehman Bros in 2008, the contagion spread like wildfire. The banking crisis took hold in a number of European countries, including Ireland. Europe rather belatedly woke up to some of the design flaws in the euro, which risked destabilizing the Eurozone and by extension the Union itself. In parallel, President Obama was dealing with the ‘great recession’ here, and nation-building at home became a priority.

Today, I believe things have very definitely moved on, and much of this somewhat jaded feeling in the US-Europe relationship is now firmly behind us. A range of both domestic and foreign policy factors have brought our relationship back into foreground focus.

Firstly, there is the fact that Europe has come a considerable distance in dealing with the internal crisis it faced over the past few years. We have a Eurozone with new fiscal rules. We have a definitive European commitment to formally break the link between banking debt and sovereign debt. We have a European Central Bank starting unequivocally that it will do “whatever it takes” to ensure stability. And we are well on the way to developing a single banking regulatory system for the common currency area. That is real progress.

The US too through the worst – not without problems, but with the economy growing again, and employment levels recovering.

In parallel, the wider political landscape also has evolved. Asia, and the BRICs continue to offer important opportunities to strengthen partnership, but the views have become more nuanced, less simplistic. There is a careful appraisal of the election results in India, the fluctuating relationship between China and its neighbours, the demands for social change in Brazil. In brief, the rest of the world is looking like the complicated and challenging place it always was.
What has happened in Ukraine has been a major jolt. President Putin’s annexation of the Crimea, and the posturing in Eastern Ukraine, have powerfully reminded us of the need for the US and Europe to stand together – protecting not just our shared values, but the values which are enshrined in international law. The work of devising and calibrating sanctions, both punitive and dissuasive, has brought us back into the closest of working relationships.

In parallel, the US and Europe are working very closely together on the hugely important issue of dealing with Iran’s nuclear threat. There is no question but that EU sanctions played a very important part in bringing Iran to the negotiating table, and the US side is fully conscious of this.

Further, the profoundly disappointing playing out of the Arab Spring – and in particular the continuing unconscionable suffering of the people of Syria – also forcibly reminds Europe and the US of joint challenges and responsibilities. This region is on Europe’s southern border, but what happens there has direct and major implications for American foreign policy.

And apart from our joint work on the political front, we have put our shoulders to the wheel on the economic front.

As you know, Europe and the US are engaged in the hugely ambitious task of negotiating TTIP – the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. The stakes are high: the potential benefits are huge. Just in this state of Georgia alone, where 88,000 people are already employed directly by European companies, it is estimated that TTIP could be worth more than 24,000 new jobs and lead to a more than 30% increase in Georgia’s exports to the EU.

The fifth round of negotiations took place in DC in the past week or so. The EU teams comprised 100 negotiators – this gives some sense of the scope and complexity of what is under negotiation.

It was clear from the outset of the TTIP negotiation that the economic stakes and interests were high, and that of course will continue to be the substance of the negotiation. But I think over recent months there has also been a readiness to look beyond the basic arithmetic to the wider picture – a growing sense that, with multilateralism under increasing pressure, a strong TTIP outcome would be an important restatement of free trade values, properly regulated to ensure fair and balanced outcomes.

All of this, as I said, points to a renewed focus on the EU/US relationship, a renewed recognition that we are indispensible partners on both the political and economic fronts. When President Obama visits Europe at the beginning of June, I have no doubt that this will offer the opportunity for a strong restatement of the strength and centrality of the relationship.

I promised at the outset of my remarks that I would try not to shy away from the complexities or airbrush the problems.

Undoubtedly we face issues on both sides of the Atlantic. The European Parliament elections this past weekend were a sharp reminder of some of the challenges ahead for Europe. And there are also major issues to be faced in the United States.

All of you will have read of the outcome of the European Parliament elections. Caveats are required in interpreting the results. Participation levels were relatively low, and there is no question but that, across each of the 28 member states, national issues weighed heavily in the voting. People were sending messages to their own governments as least as much as they were transmitting messages to Brussels.

It is still very early days in the analysis of the results, and a whole separate address – or indeed series of addresses - would be merited.

But some very basic things are clear. Across the EU, significant sectors of the population are feeling unsettled and alienated - buffeted by globalization, distanced from what is happening at European level, threatened by change that they cannot control. There are communication issues, and underlying policy issues.

European leaders are trying to come to terms with the election outcome, and we saw the beginning of that process as they gathered on Tuesday night in Brussels. As the dust settles, important decisions will have to be taken - leadership choices, but also policy choices.

And I should make clear that, despite the positive developments I have mentioned, Ireland is not immune from the wider mood of discontent in Europe: the frustrations and austerity fatigue were evident in our vote also.

There has been no comparable jolt in the US. We await the mid-term elections in November to see what message the voters will send. But I am not being disrespectful if I acknowledge what every commentator here decries: the gridlock in Congress which is causing to so much concern about dysfunction and paralysis.

I am not of course equating the situations in the European Union and the US. Our histories are different; our constitutional make-up it is vastly different; our mindset is in many ways different. But, what I am saying is that each of us has challenges in ensuring our policy making apparatus is fit for purpose and responsive to what our citizens expect and require.

And in this highly unsettled world, it is more than ever imperative that the US and Europe have a close and functioning relationship. We certainly need to try to deal with serious irritants such as the NSA spying allegations. But beyond that, we need a deep understanding of how we assert and defend shared values, how we protect multilateralism, how we effectively exercise and project soft power – or smart power, as it is perhaps better described - and how we see each others’ roles and responsibilities when it comes to defence spending and exercise of hard power.

As this debate develops, both on recovery and renewal in Europe, and continued renewal in the transatlantic relationship, Ireland will be a very engaged contributor. We have much to bring to the table: our experience, our aspirations, our values. But the fundamentals I have described – the strength of our attachment both to Europe and the US – will not change. These are enduring and defining aspects of our foreign policy.

Thank you