Recently, a U.S. State Department paper warned that the EU's anti-death penalty campaign doesn't help European-American relations. Europe's emphasis on the death penalty issue reflects "an emerging EU moral consensus" that "has already generated transatlantic friction" on issues ranging from the International Criminal Court to Iraq, and "is likely to foreshadow even more," wrote John R. Schmidt in the latest issue of Survival , the publication of the International Institute of Strategic Studies, a leading London think tank.
05 January 2008: World Policy Review
By Roland Flamini
A constant bone of contention between the United States and the European Union is the death penalty. All EU member-states have abolished capital punishment as a prerequisite for membership, and the Europeans aggressively lobby Americans to do the same, on humanitarian and human rights grounds. When an execution is scheduled anywhere in the United States, European ambassadors in Washington routinely write official letters of protest with the White House and the State Department.
Recently, a U.S. State Department paper warned that the EU's anti-death penalty campaign doesn't help European-American relations. Europe's emphasis on the death penalty issue reflects "an emerging EU moral consensus" that "has already generated transatlantic friction" on issues ranging from the International Criminal Court to Iraq, and "is likely to foreshadow even more," wrote John R. Schmidt in the latest issue of Survival , the publication of the International Institute of Strategic Studies, a leading London think tank.
Yet European hostility towards the death penalty is not the result of a wave of popular indignation, but is driven by the political elite, said Schmidt, an analyst in the Office of Intelligence and Research at State. The European Union has fastened on to the death penalty as a way to seize the moral high ground, and to establish an identity. "The irony" of this new fervor in Europe, Schmidt observes, is that in the Cold War years the United States had to prod many of its reluctant European allies into condemning human rights violations by the Soviet Union.
Roland Flamini is World Politics Review's editor-at-large. He writes Corridors of Power every week.
