Commission President José Manuel Barroso and Austrian Chancellor and EU President in office Wolfgang Schüssel will meet with US President George W. Bush for the yearly EU-US Summit in Vienna. Other participants in the event will most likely be Commissioner for External Relations and Neighbourhood Policy Benita Ferrero-Waldner and Commissioner for Trade Peter Mandelson as well as the Austrian Foreign Minister Ursula Plassnik in her function as Council President from the EU side and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice from the US side.

Issues

The four themes likely to be discussed at the Summit will be foreign policy co-operation, energy security, economy and trade, and global challenges. In the area of foreign policy relations with Iran, the Middle East and the promotion democracy are expected to dominate the agenda. Energy security will be discussed both in terms of strengthening EU-US strategic cooperation on energy and promoting international principles of good practice taking also into account the forthcoming G8 Summit. Under economy and trade leaders are set to discuss ongoing negotiations at the WTO and the benefits of open investment regimes. The EU will also voice the issue of extending the US Visa Waiver Programme to all citizens of EU Member States. Under global challenges the EU intends to raise co-operation on improved ways to meet the challenge of climate change.

Concrete results of the Summit will most likely be the signature of a  Higher Education and Training Agreement, and an Action Strategy for Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement. Furthermore, leaders are expected to adopt a very substantial Summit Declaration, and to endorse political and economic progress reports about achievements since the last Summit in 2005.

I recently took part in a panel discussion in London about civil conflict and "failed states" around the world, centered on the interesting work of the British economist Paul Collier. The panelists included the son of a famous African liberation-leader-turned-dictator, the former leader of a South American guerrilla group, a Pakistani journalist, a U.N. official and the head of a nongovernmental humanitarian organization. Naturally, our reasoned and learned discussion quickly transmogrified into an extended round-robin denunciation of American foreign policy.

The interesting thing was that the Iraq war was far from the main topic. George W. Bush hardly came up. The panelists focused instead on a long list of grievances against the United States stretching back over six decades. There was much discussion of the "colonial legacy" and "neo-colonialism," especially in the Middle East and Africa. And even though the colonies in question had been ruled by Europeans, panelists insisted that this colonial past was the source of most of the world's resentment toward the United States. There was much criticism of American policy during the Cold War for imposing evil regimes, causing poverty and suffering throughout the world, and blocking national liberation movements as a service to oil companies and multinational corporations. When the moderator brought up nuclear weapons proliferation and Iran, the panelists talked about Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

As for "failed states" and civil conflict, several panelists agreed that they were always and everywhere the fault of the United States. The African insisted that Bosnia and Kosovo were destroyed by American military interventions, not by Slobodan Milosevic, and that Somalia was a failed state because of American policy. The Pakistani insisted the United States was to blame for Afghanistan's descent into anarchy in the 1990s. The former guerrilla leader insisted that most if not all problems in the Western Hemisphere were the product of over a century of American imperialism.