The Future of Economic and Political Relations
Between the European Union and the United States
John Bruton, European Union Ambassador to the United States
Next Sunday, on March 25, 2007, the European Union will be fifty years in existence. I am delighted to
celebrate that event for the European Union, which I now represent by coming to Notre Dame, this
little part of Ireland in the middle of the United States, for the first time. As I said earlier to some
people I met here, from the very first moment I came to the United States—on a visit back in 1970
after very recently being elected to the Dáil—people asked me “Well, have you been to Notre Dame?
Have you not been to Notre Dame?” as if, really, one had not visited the United States of America at
all unless one had been to Notre Dame. Well now I am here, and I feel that the next part of my life—
the remainder of my life—will be much richer for the fact that I have now been here, and hopefully I’ll
come back. Anyway, I am going to talk to you about the European Union—what it is, what it does and
does not do, why it matters to Indiana and to the United States, and what some of those things are
that we Europeans and Americans need to do together in order to make the world a safer and a better
place for you and for your children in their time.
First of all, I want to say that the European Union is the only multi-national democracy in the
world. We have the United Nations, but there is no parliament of the United Nations. You cannot
vote for the secretary-general of the United Nations, and there is no direct election for the people
who run the U.N. We have the World Trade Organization, which does very important work, but it is
a diplomatic organization just like the United Nations. Its work and its decisions are negotiated,
frequently in secret, between diplomats and ministers. There is no direct participation by the people in
the W.T.O. through directly elected representatives, or in the World Health Organization, the World
Patent Organization, the world organization dealing with education (UNESCO), and so forth. There is
only one organization—a multi-national organization consisting in this instance of twenty-seven
nations—where the people directly elect the parliament that makes decisions that govern that
collective area.
Every five years, the twenty-seven nations of the European Union each have an election in
which they elect the members of the European Parliament. When European Union legislation comes to
be made, it is proposed by the European Commission, which is a bit like the administration here in the
United States. In fact, in Europe only the administration may propose legislation; individual members of
the parliament cannot do it. Whenever legislation is proposed by the European Commission—which is
the equivalent of the U.S. administration—that legislation, which will apply to twenty-seven member
states, must be passed by two bodies. It must be passed not only by the Council of Ministers, which is
comprised of twenty-seven ministers representing the twenty-seven countries, but also by the
European Parliament, which has over seven hundred members, every one of whom has been directly
elected by the people of Europe in proportion to the population of each part of Europe from which
those members come. So, we have a parliamentary democracy governing twenty-seven countries. It is
something without precedent in world history, and it is proving to be a very good model, a very
attractive model, that many other countries want to join. In this decade, since 2004, the European
Union has increased its membership by twelve countries. We have gone from having fifteen countries
on December 31, 2003 to having twenty-seven members on January 1, 2007. We have increased our
entire membership—our entire population—to 500 million people, making us about twice the size of
the United States in terms of population, and this has been done with the unanimous agreement of all
of the existing members.
To illustrate to an American audience what this enlargement of the European Union means, it
would be good to imagine a parallel situation here in North America. What we have done would be - 2 -
similar to what the U.S. would have done if, in the last four years, each one of the fifty states of the
United States—from Hawaii to Vermont—had individually agreed to merge with the thirty-two states
of the Estados Unidos Mexicanos (Mexico). Instead of 100 senators meeting in Washington or
somewhere like that, there were now 164 senators, 64 of whom were Spanish-speaking and who
represented, 2 each, the Mexican states. The administration had been adjusted, and a lot of people who
had held important positions in the U.S. administration lost their jobs to make room for Mexicans. A
lot of Mexicans who had held important jobs in Mexico City lost their jobs to make way for U.S.
citizens. Furthermore, the voting power of any individual state in the United States had been reduced,
because that state was now one of eighty-two states instead of one of fifty states. As a result of the
merge, there was now a commitment that every person from Chiapas in southern Mexico could seek a
job in any one of the fifty states of the U.S. as well as in the other thirty-two states of Mexico. Equally,
any person from Indiana in the United States now had, as of right, the ability to take a job anywhere in
the thirty-two states of Mexico.
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