1. What is your current assessment of the 'state' of transatlantic relations?

Concerning politics it is a strategic alliance but recently just a bit problematic, with hopes to overcome it. I hint at the recently cold US-German foreign political relations, the first. On the other side recent events concerning e.g. the US-Hungarian foreign political relations show that a republican US government can strategically meet in political issues a Hungarian government based on social democratic-free democratic alliance and develop a, hopefully, rapidly progressing co-operation, for the benefit of both partners.

Concerning trade I only mention one element, that repeatedly returning debates are to expect in relation to such cutting edge technologies, as the biotech in its application to agriculture. The reason, at its deepest level, is the different value approach to the possible "costs and benefits" of these technologies that can only be assumed but not surely known previously. This different value approach is intimately connected to assumptions about rationality of action, e.g. tradebility of goods with unknown risks. I guess, a mutual readiness to learn from the experiences so far is appropriate.

Concerning cultural contact I guess a much stronger effort should be made on both sides of the Atlantic to acquire cultural goods, than it is mostly done trough recent mass tourism. But more than that this requirement is of mutual learning about cultures of each other to accomodate them at home. I mean by that examples of hosting visitors by Canadian families at the last olimpic games in Canada, 1976 that made the games partly a type of family issue and of folks festivity. Or learning such initiatives from each other that led to the paraolimpic games. Europeans, having a good development, especially in France of the 18th century or England in the second half of the 19th century, with which contributed to women equity of their time could learn much from women movements in the USA after the second world war, getting requested by this "best case" practice to follow them. But also to learn about extremistic forms of feminism, to avoid them. For my country, having an important gipsy part of population, there are important things to learn from the Canadian and US practice of leaving together of different people, and, I think especially from Canada, how to support cultures of minorities. To learn to accept differences and through this learning about the most basic unity of mankind seems one of the most urgent tasks to solve.

Concerning turism. I do take turism separately, for recent mainstream of turism, I guess, is not about deepening cultural understanding. It is still much more about acquiring something, what you could buy at the visited place, on a 'reasonable' price and, mostly, partly leads to reinforcement of prejudices about each other and does not help in the emergence of a need of any sort of doing something together. This turism, with very limited consumer goals, also of "consuming" cultural goods, instead of acquiring culture and accomodating it, does not help much in bringing people together, even when it seems the recent main possibility to get further to more valuable purposes. /The movie twenty years ago, "If today is Tuesday the name of the land is Belgium" was a pretty representation of the problem. It praises some Americans that they shout it, for Europeans have not made its counterpart about turists in America./ Recent mass turism is not only not based on interest in, does scarcely include, say interest in living conditions of different layers of people, or getting friends. So the urgent question of why do we still have a threatening growing measure of powerty and despair in our world, also reappearing in "most advanced" societies as ours in the US and Europe?, are avoided by the purpose of mass turism from the very beginning. Recent mass turism is typically a reinforcement of the individualistic consumer behaviour and through it the selfisheness that strategically threatens the world society in the 21st century. Through mass turism both citizens of the US and Europeans seem mostly to try to experience their belonging together as "haves" and learn their difference from the rest when they visit these countries.


2. Do you think that the next decade will bring positive news in the two ‘historical’ pillars of the US-EU relations: security and trade?

If the question is about the first ten years of the 21st century, as I guess, the answer seems in both relations certainly positive. The recent immediate threatening world terrorism brings together both continents to solve the most urgent common task of providing security. The worldwide security from terrorism seems, in my opinion, the very first task for the decade. And I think, even when any war should only be the last immediate tool, annihilating the mass destroying arsenal of countries ready to use them is the most urgent immediate task. Many people think that peace as a most basic value should be kept on every price. It is important to see, I believe, that anihilating mass detroying arsenal of countries must preceed anything. But, of course, it can only be the first step toward a peaceful co-development and it is also obvious that terrorism could not have its potential when the North -South problem, first of all that of powerty would not feed it. And there is not much sign by the North to seriously incalculate in politics a reorientation of the world economy. On he other side democratic countries have a major part to find a way of handling the problem how to abolish hate speech and ideologies feeding it, all over the world. In this case cultural differences between the US and Europe favorise different approaches.

Concerning world trade, it is not very risky to forecast a strong raise of trade between the US and Europe /and Japan/, based on rather fair exchange rates, under conditions of globalisation. It is a further question how this will be connected to trade relations to other parts of the world. It seems certain that the world trade relations should lead the less developed and poor countries to be able to diminish they accelerating running into debt. Recent globalisation tendencies show into the opposite direction and they help reviving the search for /new/ terroristic "solutions". One of the elements to constrain a changing attitude by the most developed countries is in the hand of the public through changing customer relations, rasing public consciousness, developing and using both immediate person to person connections as well as movemental tools.

3. You support the organization of the congress 'Reshaping Transatlantic Relations for the XXIst century: the citizens' perspective' to be held in Miami on November 14th-16th. Do you think that such an event can bring new fresh ideas on the present debate over the transatlantic relations?

As it was mentioned in answering the previous question networking by people through person to person relations as movemental tool seem most important in shaping global relations. Certainly, the Internet is a main tool of connecting people all over the world. Through it, they may immediately personally learn about each other. /I do not deal here with either the problem of language differences or the problem of cultural hegemony mediated by using English, mostly working as tacit mediator of American culture./ Networking may have a couple of effects, such as mutual information. Being a robust but simultaneously flexible connection networking gives some sort of enhanced security, meanwhile providing for a huge resource of creativity, innovativity. Both new ideas and new modes of communication may emerge through such communication and they may lead to some new power in shaping political relations.

4. Is the ‘people-to-people’ cooperation able to open new fields of constructive US-EU cooperation in the coming years? In which way?

In answering this question I consciously reduce my interest to one topic, I professionally deal with. It is the need for an ongoing public discourse on coming new technologies. It is certain, that some sort of new "social contract" should be developed in issues of coming cutting edge technologies. The reason is that any coming basic new technology brings with itself a possibility of ambivalent social utilisation and we live our life more and more through technologies. Just to mention one element of the needed new "social contract", we have to include in it the development and utilisation of new technological possibilities for addressing the rich - poor divide. To leave the driving force role for new technologies to the market only, would leave the utilisation of this huge new potential, the new technologies to let develop into the direction where individuals have paying capacities, reinforcing this way the unequality on the market. Some sort of procurement policy by the rich countries, especially say concerning detectation and fighting of most widespread genetic deseases is a global task of the richest countries. Open, ongoing social discourses by the public over technological potential are needed to have an impact on changing the recent basic directions of technology policies of the richest countries. And the participation in research, say, on utilisation of genetic engineering for human medical purposes, especially the cloning story, show that the topic of assessement and evaluation of strategic lines of technology policy is very complex. It does not have any simply calculable optimum and is in need of fine differentiations. That means that it is in need of ongoing discourse, leading to learning and co-evolution of the "parties" taking part in it. This ongoing discourse may give a strongly needed legitimation to coming new technologies.

The US and the EU has a decade old co-operation, say, in issues of biotech research. It unifies a co-operation for enhancing competitivity on the market as well as main elements of social value considerations. I think developing an accompanying US-EU citizen discourse on strategic orientation of technological research is a timely task.

Let me make a side remark. One has not to forget about experiences with these sorts of evolving connections. The hidden expectation behind them is to reach some sort of consensus over the basic goals and perhaps even tools of cooperation. But, as experiences show, they first learn differences about each other. This way people-to-people cooperation will have its difficulties with its initiating phase. I do think that the most important is that citizens of both sides of the Atlantic make connections to each other to learn about their everyday life, with an empathy for the different values they have. We both live in multicultural, democratic societies, with rather high tolerance for value differences. We have to learn even more tolerance and abandon any trial to develop a strong common value system except the very basic./Irradicating terrorism as tool of solution of problems is one of the elements of this very basic value system to share, I believe./

All this has the purpose of learning to understand and influence global issues. There is some basic task to solve at this point and a basic prejudice about its impossibility. It is already partly accepted even by many "aristocratic" thinkers that people know quite well their local situations and are able to manage accomodation to changes in them. It is important further to learn how to develop an understanding of local differences that can lead to a better comprehensive understanding of global issues. The media may have a decisive role in it, beside those person-to-person relations this congress tries to think of. In this relation, it seems to me through my scarce experiences in the US, that the media in the US still have a lot to do and have quickly to raise their programmes helping to make understood people of other worlds. /You know so that the taxidriver of Pulp fiction can get a different picture of the Europeans than that they just eat hamburger with different sauce./

Another side remark: This recent, very valuable initiative will really be 'Transatlantic' when South America and Africa will also be included. And if not only "Internet people" but also the poor get included into a global discourse, the topics and the perspectives on them may change quite a lot. So, the foreseen widening of the discourse in the near future is a very important purpose, indeed.

5. Being the two richest and most democratic areas on the planet, do you think that both the EU and the US societies face a special responsibility regarding globalization on the one hand; and on the other hand, do you think that they will face a growing number of similar challenges in their way towards the next decades?

I do think that these societies, the US and Europe face a special responsibility regarding globalization. /It is a different question, not to discuss here, that the South has also its duties to realise./ First of all, on the long run, and for really democratic societies, there is no way out of redistributing tools of producing wealth. This question gives me the occasion to mention a partial but I think only seemingly minor point. It is how to describe and evaluate globalisation and globalisation of health and environmental issues? It is about the recently still typical striving for a unique metric, a typical, standardising modernistic approach that puts a biased answer already in questioning about issues. /Just as casual examples: Indoor radiation can not be a common metricthe same way for describing and evaluating environmental problems in a developed and underdeveloped country, DDT had a different role in Florida when fighting malaria then now, it still has different importance for many poor countries than for reach countries./ That means striving for a unique metric misleads both in time as well as geographic and social dimension.

Well, it is true the US and Europe both have a big number of similar challenges. But also a big number of very important differences as well. Only one remark to the later. It is about the "ageing Europe", a tendency that seems to continue for decades, with all of its consequences.An element of recent trials to solve the problem is brain drain from the Third World, just adding a further element to the continuing brain drain chain, e.g. also from Europe to the US. /NB this remark is not about the individual rationality of the decisions of all those who willingly follow the way opened for them. It is about the global responsibility of accounting with the whole, with the countries through strenghtening co-operation from where they come from./

6. Beyond treaties, organizations, common interests, ... the cooperation between Europeans and Americans is, in the end, a matter of people cooperating with people (politicians, civil servants, businessmen, executives, professors, activists,). How do you assess this 'human factor' today? Should it be improved?
The development of the 'human factor' through connecting each other, to use the reifying language of burocrates, the possibility of everyday connection among everyday people is terribly retarded, in comparison to the need for its correcting force in global issues. To anticipate changes in complex issues belongs to wisdom. The development of 'human factor' in this direction certainly is one of them. Learning through own experiences belongs to this development, as US students have done also at my university, the Budapest University of Technology and Econmics /BUTE/ in the cruel days on the 11th of September 2OO1 and after, being abroad, when they could learn a deep sympathy for them and the immediate readiness to help them feeling themselves in security among Hungarians. So, it is important that politicians, civil cervants, etc make connections to each other, they make perhaps friendship, but the most important is that simple persons learn about each other, first of all about their everyday life.

If the question, should the cooperation of 'human factor' be improved?, means some sort of direct organisational action, I attribute less importance to this even when accept that organisationed actions can help a lot as some direct actions, as marathonies. Most important is, I think that it should be improved by people themselves. The needed organisational activities should be background activities, such as helping best cases to know, or just providing for networking on the Internet, or occasional personal meetings at festivities.

Developing immediate networking of citizens through Internet is a very-very important step. But it is not to forget: developing communication and cooperation among people through Internet is in some way the issue of a still "fashionable society", of fortunate people. Of those who can visit each other, at least on Internet. Not including the recently excluded poor majority into this cooperation necessarily leads to some benevolent ideas and action plans from above, a type of "remote" expertise, now paradoxically to realise by those who are for public participation. To be able to formulate the correct questions it is already urgent to involve the poor into the discussion of global issues by developing a co-evolutionary learning by simple, everyday people, it is a further task to realise even when a special responsibility falls on the "fashionable public" of rich countries able to connect each other through Internet.