Building European Ties:
50 Years of the European Commission in Washington*
(en español)

President Eisenhower (left) and Jean Monnet

The fiftieth anniversary in 2004 of the opening of the European Commission's Washington office was a reminder of the longevity and success of the European integration process, and the enduring importance of the transatlantic partnership.

The office was originally established in 1954, when the Republicans controlled both houses of Congress. Dwight D. Eisenhower was President of the United States and Richard M. Nixon his Vice President. John F. Kennedy was a junior senator from Massachusetts and Lyndon B. Johnson the Democratic leader of the Senate. Winston Churchill was serving his last months as Prime Minister of Britain. George H. W. Bush was in the oil business in west Texas, and William Jefferson Clinton and George W. Bush both in elementary school.  

The series of events leading to the opening of the office was set in motion on August 11, 1952, when the United States was the first non-member country to provide international recognition to the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC). Then-US Secretary of State Dean Acheson sent a diplomatic dispatch on behalf of President Truman to Jean Monnet, serving as the first President of the Community's High Authority, the forerunner to the European Commission. Acheson's dispatch included the following:

"As appropriate under the Treaty, the United States will now deal with the Community on coal and steel matters...All Americans will join me in welcoming this new institution and in expressing the expectation that it will develop as its founders intended, and that it will realize the hopes so many have placed in it."  

One year later the United States established its representation to the ECSC in Brussels, an event that had its fiftieth anniversary celebration in 2003. Monnet reciprocated in 1954 by choosing Washington as the site of the ECSC's first external presence. He was also inspired to move quickly by a political setback in Europe, as plans for a European Defense Community fell through and he grew concerned that US officials might lose enthusiasm for the European integration project.

Monnet was unusually well-networked in Washington, having helped to coordinate the Lend-Lease program during World War II, and the office began in an era when American policy-makers were often more enthusiastic about European integration than many Europeans. Monnet called on the Coal and Steel Community's American lawyer, George Ball, to organize the office. Ball recruited Leonard Tennyson, a former newspaperman and Marshall Plan official, to oversee daily operations. The two-room office with an annual budget of $41,000 was quickly set up next to Ball's law firm, Cleary and Gottlieb, at the Southern Building on Fifteenth Street, NW. This reflects a symbiosis between Ball and the European movement that strongly influenced American policy through the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, when Ball served as a senior State Department official.

The headline of the first Bulletin from the European Community for Coal and Steel, written by Tennyson in October 1954, epitomized the sweep of European integration ambitions of that era. It read "Towards a Federal Government of Europe," and its first paragraph summed up the opportunities and dilemmas ahead for the Washington office: "Today Europe is in march towards unification. Yet the details of this progress are not well known nor is their significance widely understood..." 

An information strategy completed by Tennyson the following year noted that:

"Among more informed circles earlier assumptions that it (the ECSC) was a cartel, was dirigiste, or was merely another impotent international organization, are gradually being corrected. Some influential Americans are coming to recognize it as a pioneer achievement in European federalism and as a strong force for freedom and progress in the economy of the Western world. However...the full appreciation of the Community as the symbol of unification must await some further major step..."

Tennyson and other early veterans of the office emphasized that during that time and through the 1960s they were pushing on a usually open door. Monnet had known US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles since the League of Nations and President Eisenhower since World War II. He had similar Oval Office access with President Kennedy. Though Monnet and Kennedy were hardly contemporaries, they developed a very cordial relationship.

The early US/EC relationship was also helped by the fact that the issues of the time were less divisive than they would become, both within American politics and between the United States and Europe. The great legislative effort was the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, designed to lower tariffs and expand trade with a European Common Market that was expected to admit the UK as a member. Both the corporate leaders and the trade union chiefs of the steel and automotive industries were enthusiastic backers of the legislation, in contrast with their much chillier outlook on liberalized trade in the decades since. Future tensions were inevitable as the European integration process continued and global trade expanded.

The biggest dispute of the early era was the so-called "chicken war" - the first, though regrettably far from the last, high-profile agricultural tiff. Arkansas chicken farmers were trying to block the importation of European chickens, and they had a powerful friend: the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, J. William Fulbright. The Arkansas senator went as far as threatening to cut US troops in NATO before the issue was pushed off to a GATT committee for resolution, but not before reminding such European politicians as West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer that power flows in curious ways in Washington.

The growth and "Europeanization" of the delegation were also inevitable. The small offices at the Southern Building were exchanged in early 1963 for several suites at the Farragut Building on Farragut Square, and an increasing number of European Commission officials were posted from Brussels. Soon the delegation had moved to 2100 M Street, NW, following the progression of many Washington offices from the old downtown to further north and west of the White House.

According to Tennyson, the process of Europeanization accelerated after the original community of six was expanded by three (the UK, Ireland, Denmark) in 1973, and the delegation also took on a higher diplomatic profile as it received full diplomatic recognition from the Nixon Administration. In order to assure that its representative be addressed as Ambassador, the Community appointed a man already with that title -Italian diplomat Aldo Mario Mazio - as delegation head in 1971. He was followed three years later by Jens Otto Krag, a former Danish prime minister.

The first Community functionary to head the delegation was Fernand Spaak, who arrived in 1977, bringing the name of his famous father (Paul Henri Spaak, Belgian statesman and founder of the European movement) and his own political skills to a job increasingly defined as both an inside- and outside-Washington post.

Outside meant taking the Community case to towns and cities all over the United States and also to the Washington and US press. Spaak in particular took the Community show out on the road, where he insisted on learning the name of the local baseball team and if the mayor were a Democrat or Republican. He visited forty-seven to fifty states, bringing the message of the Community to Rotary and Kiwanis clubs and other fora across the land.

Roland de Kergorlay, a Community functionary from France, succeeded Spaak in 1981, and was himself succeeded in 1982 by another Community official, its chief trade negotiator, Sir Roy Denman. Denman arrived already on a first-name basis with many Washington officials, especially anyone dealing with trade, which had been his specialty for decades. His tenure was marked by a particularly prickly series of trade disputes on issues from steel to pasta. But also like Spaak, and even more deeply read in American history and politics, he made a point of getting out of Washington and did manage to speak in all fifty states.

The appointment of Denman's successor, Andreas van Agt, merged two traditions - former politician and one-time prime minister of the Netherlands but one who also had labored for the Community as its delegation chief in Tokyo. Beginning with van Agt, the delegation head presents his formal credentials to the US President, rather than to the State Department. His ambassadorship traversed a period of increasingly complicated relations between an expanding and deepening post-Cold War European Union and the United States on everything from the Uruguay Trade Round to the ramifications of the Single Market and the Treaty of Maastricht. The expansion of issues led to increased staffing, and in 1995 the delegation moved to its current offices at 2300 M Street, NW.

In October 1995, Hugo Paemen was appointed as van Agt's successor. A Belgian national, Paemen began his career as a Belgian diplomat before joining the Commission. Like Denman, Paemen's background was rooted in trade, having served as the Commission's chief negotiator during the Uruguay Round. Paemen's tenure featured a period of expanding trade and investment ties between Europe and the US and again was characterized by several high-profile trade disputes. Paemen's tenure also saw the signing of the New Transatlantic Agenda or "NTA," establishing a more strategic framework for EU/US cooperation on a number of bilateral, regional and global issues. Building on the Transatlantic Declaration of 1990, the NTA recognized the increasing capabilities of the EU as not only an economic power, a trend furthered by the successful launch of the Euro in 1999, but also as an international political actor. Though his service as ambassador ended in 1999, Paemen remains an active participant in transatlantic affairs. Interviewed shortly before his departure, Paemen cited the founding of the Commission's European Union Centers program, which funds teaching, research and outreach activities at universities across the US, as his proudest accomplishment.

Günter Burghardt assumed the ambassadorship in January of 2000. Burghardt had previously served as a Commission official for three decades, most recently as Director General for External Relations. He was former European Commission President Jacques Delors' Deputy Chief of Staff, and as the Commission President's Diplomatic Advisor and Political Director had accompanied Delors to his many encounters with successive US Presidents, starting with a visit to President Reagan in Spring 1985.

The years 2000 - 2004 saw the most serious tensions in the EU/US relationship over several international issues, including Iraq, but they were also characterized by increasing volumes of trade and investment and by high levels of cooperation in combating terrorism following the attacks of September 11, 2001. The EU's international capabilities have been enhanced by the development of the Common Foreign and Security Policy, including the Security Strategy adopted in December 2003, and the historic enlargement to twenty-five Member States on May 1, 2004. On May 6, 2004, the fiftieth anniversary of the first European Commission presence in the US was celebrated at a reception at the US Department of State. Then-US Secretary of State Colin Powell spoke, as did Mr. Burghardt.

Burghardt saw as his main task restoring confidence in the transatlantic partnership between the US and the enlarged and further-strengthened EU, the strategically most important bilateral relationship in the world. This only reinforced the delegation's work, as it began a second half-century of promoting the unified Europe in Washington and beyond the Beltway.

Former Irish Prime Minister John Bruton became Ambassador and Head of Delegation in December, 2004.

*Adapted from Mike Mosettig, "Building European Ties in Washington: Europe's US Delegation 40 Years Later."