Center Austria Director  Guenter Bischof chairs a panel at the European Forum, Alpbach, Austria on Euro-Atlantic relations:
European Forum Alpbach
Transatlantic relations have always been a contested arena. During the Cold War most countries of Western Europe entered into a close security arrangement with the U.S. in the struggle against communism. This made the U.S. a quasi-hegemonic power in Europe just like the Soviet Union was in its Eastern European sphere of influence. Both parts of Europe were grating under this hegemony -- Western Europe's was largely voluntary, Eastern Europe's coerced. With the end of the Cold War this security architecture was radically revised as most of the new Eastern European democracies entered NATO and are building strong ties with the U.S.

 In the case of the Czech Republic and Poland,s these security arrangment even seem to outpace the traditionally strong ties with the U.S. of older NATO partners. Meanwhile much of Western Europe has become a continent of peace and since World War II has abjured military means to solve international conflicts while the U.S. militarization and its military interventionism is continuing unabated.

These different approaches to the use of military power on both sides of the Atlantic may well be the greatest challenge for transatlantic comity.EUrope is trying to shape its own common foreign and security policies, thereby contesting the hegemony the U.S. built on the continent in the Cold War era. Meanwhile the challenge of the new Asian powers will force the U.S. and Europe to work together and mend their differences across the Atlantic. These seachanges in geopolitics are at the heart of the future of the transatlantic relationship much more so than the aberrant policies of George W. Bush.

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