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The Question of Trust in U.S. Relations with Germany and the European Union

On November 20, the American Friends of Bucerius (AFB) and the BMW Foundation Herbert Quandt, in cooperation with the Transatlantic Academy, sponsored a discussion on “The Question of Trust in U.S. Relations with Germany and the European Union” at the Washington headquarters of the German Marshall Fund of the United States (GMF).

AFB President Nina Smidt welcomed an audience of more than 50 for the event. Ludger Siemes, the head of the political section at the German Embassy, opened the event by comparing the current state of transatlantic relations to the moment when a couple needs to sit down and “talk,” noting that when a pair in a relationship needs to talk about the relationship, the relationship is not in a good place.  He argued that the pillars of German foreign policy were relationships based on trust with Europe, the United States, and Israel, and that while a strong and prosperous United States was very much in German interests, the National Security Agency spying revelations had caused damage to bilateral relations and there was a need to get to the bottom of what really happened.

Emily Sieg, the Bucerius BMW-Foundation Fellow, noted that the transatlantic relationship is fundamentally based on mutual trust, and disagreed with a common argument that the transatlantic partnership only emerged out of the Cold War due to common threat. Sieg argued that the common values of democracy, open communication and peaceful conflict resolution between European and American partners are the substance of continued cooperation. Reflecting on the recent NSA scandal, Sieg noted that while spying is a reality we will have to live with, the NSA’s activities in Germany seem cut off from any sense of proportion, particularly the targeting of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cell phone.

Abraham Newman of Georgetown University then modeled a panel between Karen Donfried, President of GMF, Annette Heuser, Executive Director of the Bertelsmann Foundation, and Roderich Kiesewetter, a member of the Bundestag for the Christian Democratic Union / Christian Social Union (CDU/CSU), who is a member of the Committee on Foreign Affairs and the Committee of Inquiry on NSA Revelations. Heuser defined trust as a type of currency, which one has to build up and can use in causes like German unification. She argued that the betrayal inherent in the NSA’s spying activities went beyond the divisions over the Iraq War in 2002-03 because Iraq was at heart a matter of policy whereas the NSA’s actions challenged a way of living. The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) had become the target of frustrations and could fail in Germany because of the trust deficit. Donfried saw trust between the German and American governments but recognized great disillusion with U.S. leadership among the German public, from high expectations about what Barack Obama could deliver as president to the extensive state-sanctioned spying that Snowden revealed. She saw the multiple waves of revelations as significant, with the exposure of spying against Angela Merkel as a devastating event just as US-German relations were beginning to recover from the knowledge of the NSA’s metadata collection. She saw Germany as a special case among European countries regarding sensitivity about U.S. spying, although spying on the European Union was also a sensitive issue. Ending on a positive note, she was impressed, however, with transatlantic unity on the Ukraine crisis. Kiesewetter said not all allegations about U.S. spying were true, as there was no evidence of mass surveillance of Germans before 2007, but noted that Germany and the United States had different assessments of how much the state must respect privacy. He discussed priorities and interests in German foreign policy, including Germany and the EU taking more responsibility in the EU’s southern and eastern neighborhoods and reform of the German armed forces.

Further discussion followed in a question and answer session, with significant attention given to generational differences between transatlanticists born before and after 1989.

T. Reinert