E3G

Europe’s Mars Mission

By John Ashton

There are other differences between the cultural baggage we carry into international conversations. US political culture is adversarial. There has been no shared vision of US society since Roosevelt’s New Deal. The middle ground is less crowded than in Europe. Where the EU consults stakeholders to the clink of coffee cups, the US holds hearings under the gavel.

In the US, policy proceeds by legislation. Every detail must be elaborated in law. This is driven not by political parties but by individual politicians, who pull together constantly shifting coalitions according to the latest wind direction on Capitol Hill or its local counterparts. Political parties are loose associations, only coming together fully to secure the election of preferred candidates to public office.

The budgets required to carry out policy are themselves subject to separate legislation. Policies already legislated for are often reopened in subsequent line by line budgetary warfare.

In Europe, political parties are policy-forming engines. Coalitions are assembled not around individual lines in a piece of legislation but around policies and programmes. Only the goals and broad budgetary framework of policy have to be enshrined in law. Implementation is part of the administrative process, including detailed spending allocations.

Public trust is also allocated differently across the Atlantic. NGO’s are less trusted in the US than in Europe. The public is more likely in the US than in Europe to believe what it is told by government or corporations. In Europe, NGO’s have more credibility than either – and are correspondingly more important in building legitimacy for any course of action.

It is hard to agree on what to do without some common understanding of what science says about the nature of the problem. In Europe the science underlying policy choices remains less politicised than in the US, where debate over the substance is more likely to degenerate into attacks on the personal integrity of individual scientists.

In the US, the environment is on the political front line. It is part of the contest between conflicting views of national identity, inseparable from arguments about states’ rights, sovereignty, and wilderness. In Europe, there is a broad consensus on the environment, and debate is conducted at a less iconic level.