The West-West Agenda

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Sometime in 1987, a moment of great concern for political relations between Europe and America, the London Director of the Washington-based International Finance Corporation (IFC) approached me with a concept for avoiding and repairing the many jolts and misunderstandings besetting that relationship. US policies like Star Wars and trade wars over beef hormones were diminishing rather than strengthening Atlantic solidarity. Among a group of concerned individuals headed by Sepp Strobel, a plan was taking shape to promote more rapid comprehension of divisive issues through a Euro-American Information Bureau that would collate and distribute press reactions on both sides of the Atlantic. Sepp suggested that I should join this endeavour. Being still concerned with the Atlantic dimension and alive to its problems, I agreed. Over the following months I sought out principally the American initiators, who proved a wonderfully diverse group of historic figures of world stature.

On the American side the intellectual leader was Helmut Sonnenfeldt, a State Department giant who had masterminded the Potsdam Conference; former Secretary for Defense, Admiral Bobby Inman; Andy Newburg, an influential lawyer and policy adviser during the negotiations on the post-war status of Vienna; Prof. Harry Woolf at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton; and lvo Lederer, a Stanford modern history Professor who acted as motivator of the US group. All were wedded to the concept of improving transatlantic relations and widening the spectrum of contacts between policy makers; but few believed that this would be achieved by acting on as broad and unspecific a front as the mooted Information Bureau.

This stance was substantially echoed by the European members of the nascent group. The august US foreign policy element was matched by Sir Frank Roberts, a fellow participant in the Potsdam Conference; politically by the Leader of the Italian People's Party, Prof. Beniamino Andreatta, former French Prime Minister Edouard Balladur, and Lord Lever of Manchester. The impulse and leadership was provided mainly by Malcolm Rutherford, Assistant Editor of the Financial Times, supported by international lawyer and banker David Suratgar.

By some process of intellectual osmosis, lvo Lederer, Malcolm Rutherford and I ended up with the same conclusion: to establish an organism with the task of stimulating regular contacts between senior policy makers from the two continents, by means of an annual meeting to widen the impact and encouraging the continuation of these contacts through individual meetings whenever possible. This would require the least amount of organisation, based on a West-West Agenda USA and a WWA Europe, run by lvo and me respectively, with each side responsible for funding its own costs. Admiral Bobby Inman and Lord Lever would be invited to become Co-Chairmen. I produced a position paper along these lines which was readily accepted and we were in business. In the event, the only costs on the European side - apart from postage and telephones - were the travelling costs of a very few participants in the annual meetings, such as academics, who did not represent organisations able to support them.

The inaugural gathering took place in 1988 at St Anthony's College, Oxford at the invitation of Professor Ralph Dahrendorf. There was a strong American presence which ratified the serious and unique nature of the programme. The Europeans, too, were present in weight, thanks in large part to David Gore-Booth, Head of Policy at the Foreign Office. I found it intensely moving to see these makers of history joining not only in friendly debate but vindicating WWA's distinct feature: the free flow of information and influential but unpublicised opinion. Over successive years, until 2002, annual meetings were held alternately in Europe and the USA under the co-chairmanship of former Secretaries of Defense Frank Carlucci (to 1994) and James Schlesinger (1995-2002) and, on the European side, Michael Heseltine MP (1990), Lord Howe of Aberavon (1991-94) and Lord (David) Owen (1995-2002). The organisation rested on two small high-level committees, under the respective US and European Co-Chairmen and their Co-ordinators, lvo Lederer and John Leech, with the London-based Committee co-ordinating a fully European participation.

After Oxford, the annual meetings alternated between Washington and London, then Berlin, Salzburg, NATO HQ in Brussels, and a final meeting in 2002 in Washington and Wye.The agendas, with rather all-embracing titles reflecting the major concerns on the transatlantic horizon, provided a framework for a miscellany of speakers to highlight different approaches and provoke spontaneous reaction. These face-to-face encounters of policy makers and others with substantial inputs to it were complemented with individual private communication between them, continuing on a bilateral level the contacts established in the plenaries. The significance of this process became even greater as events moved towards the emancipation of Eastern Europe, and onwards to German reunification. West-West was eminently suited to help with integrating the new eastern leaders into an international world of which they had little knowledge.

In time, one began to recognise similarities of ideas voiced in these discussions with subsequent governmental agreements on substantive policy issues. Then, inevitably, it became clear that the magic circle could not last long into the new century. One by one, the men who had shaped the post-war world, who knew who had sat where in Potsdam, who were the Third Men that saved the streets of Vienna for the West, the golden words that resolved the Cuban missile crisis, went to their rest. Deprived of this memory, the class of 2000 began to lack the dramatic backdrop against which new history was being played out. With that also went the authority that had lent force to their opinion. The demise of lvo Lederer in New York and Malcolm Rutherford in London had also meant the loss of two of the prime movers in WWA's engine room. The appointment of Prof. Daniel Hamilton as US co­ ordinator came too late to stem the loss of vigour on the American side. It had been a brave endeavour, perhaps not without significance in keeping the West together through times of turbulent adjustments; but the new age had to find its own strategies. Everyone who had played a part in West-West has remained deeply grateful for the privilege of having known and worked with some of the truly historic figures of the 20th century.