The American administration, with its taste for inspiring sound-bites, calls it the "freedom agenda". The European Union, with its preference for bureaucratic obscurity, calls it the "Barcelona process". But both are, in their different styles, talking about the idea that they should find ways to promote democratic change in the Middle East. After the London bombings, could this become a common theme that helps to reunite hitherto squabbling transatlantic partners? Recent history is not encouraging. American officials still shudder over the sudden haste with which Spain withdrew its troops from Iraq soon after the March 2004 election that followed the Madrid train bombs. They know that the divisions and ill feelings provoked by the Iraq war remain. Yet at a dinner in Brussels a few days after the London bombings, organised by the German Marshall Fund, Daniel Fried, the American assistant secretary of state for Europe, struck a more hopeful note.
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