ABSTRACT
It would be difficult to overstate the significance of relations between the European Union (EU) and the USA for the development of international governance broadly defined, and for global governance in particular. As the Editors of this handbook note in their Introduction, the EU can be seen as a kind of laboratory experiment in international, and indeed supranational governance, in which there have been significant transfers of authority to institutions established at the European level. In this process, the USA has frequently been seen as the EU’s most ‘significant other’, a constant presence and influence in the development of the European project. At the same time, relations between the EU and the USA reflect a complex form of ‘transatlantic governance’ (McGuire and Smith 2008: chapter 2; Pollack and Shaffer 2001; Steffenson 2005), which has led some to conclude that in this relationship we can begin to see what the nature of a ‘deep’ form of global governance might be. Finally, the EU and the USA both separately and together are key actors in processes of global governance, forming part of governance processes and at the same time constituting major ‘powers’ in a wide variety of international organizations or other contexts (Smith and Steffenson 2005).
