Where one sees a European establishment being founded in America.

Europeans, with Spaniards and Portuguese in the lead, first colonised Central and South America where they found the precious metals a growing European economy needed. It was only later that the Spanish, soon facing competition from France and England, turned their attention to North America. The vast continent that is today divided between the United States and Canada soon became an arena in which competing European powers vied for supremacy. The British, strengthened by unbending support from London, would eventually emerge victorious.

An extension of Europe, the thirteen British colonies in North America are at first a laboratory where Europeans transplanted there are testing, under the admiring gaze of all the enlightened minds of the Old World, the ideas and ideals of its Philosophers. After they have been successfully put to the test in the wake of the American revolution, these ideas and ideals then travelled back to Europe and inspired the French revolutionaries of 1789, then, through them, the whole of Europe. If Locke and Montesquieu dictated, so to speak, to the Americans their Constitution, Jefferson helped the French to write their own Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen.

In the meantime, as a powerful symbol that united in one single gesture philosophy and political action, Voltaire and Franklin embraced at the Academy to the rapturous applause of an enthusiastic crowd.

Where one sees the young American republic freeing itself from European bonds.

The Statue of Liberty, a gift from the French to the American people (1886) symbolises the “long” nineteenth century – from the end of the War of Independence to the First World War. A nation the size of a continent is born, then sinks into a devastating civil war before emerging even stronger thanks to the genius of its institutions, the activities of its citizens, the inexhaustible wealth of a huge country… and the steady flow of immigrants from Europe, which sends her successive waves of its poor, its persecuted, its destitute and its adventurers.

Half-admiring and half-contemptuous, Europe is fascinated by America, but only a few great minds, above all Tocqueville, realise that what America is doing today will be its future tomorrow.

But Europe also fascinates America, which seeks in the capitals of the Old World what it still lacks at home : history and sophistication.

First part (1917-1941) : “Lafayette, we are here !”

Where one sees the Americans coming back to Europe in order to make war and try to impose peace.

This famous phrase, pronounced on July 4, 1917 by an officer of the American Expeditionary Force on the grave of the French hero of the U.S. independence struggle, sums up the first half of the twentieth century, which leads from one World War to another. The United States has become a great nation, but still uncertain of its power and not really sure what to do with it.

America incessantly hesitates between isolationism and interventionism. It seeks to impose a world order (Fourteen points, League of Nations), but withdraws from it straight away and by doing so, dooms it to failure even before it came to the world.

The major European powers still rule the planet, but in an already globalised world (this is the time of the big World Fairs and, right in the middle of the period, the Great Depression), America begins to export its material (Taylorism) and artistic (jazz, cinema, literature) civilization on a massive scale. Its writers haunt the bars of the Old World and embrace its bloody feuds (Spanish Civil War, the struggle against Nazism), while its universities, orchestras and film studios are filled with Europeans driven from their countries by the dictatorships that are suffocating Europe.

Second Part (1941-1989) : “This time, there are here to stay”

Where one sees the Americans, back in Europe for the second time within in a quarter of a century, taking the lead of its Western half.

The surrender of democratic Europe to Nazi aggressions (Munich, 1938) ended up fulfilling Churchill’s prophecy : “You were given the choice between war and dishonour. You chose dishonour and you will have war.” And once again the United States has to intervene on the Old Continent. Without much enthusiasm : if it supported Britain’s war effort (Lend-Lease program) after the French debacle left the British alone facing Hitler, it joined in the fighting only after the Japanese aggression against its fleet at Pearl Harbor. But this time the GI’s will remain.

They have little choice. A completely different world is born from the defeat of the Axis powers : a bipolar world, organised around a stand-off between nuclear superpowers, the U.S. and the Soviet Union. The European colonial empires collapse one by one and Europe, divided by what Churchill christens the “Iron Curtain”, is little but a pawn in the global struggle between the superpowers.

Between the end of WWII and the end of the Cold War, the Unites States is no longer a great world power, but the great world power – a title that it shares with the Soviet Union (it is an illusion, but nobody knows it yet).

The Europe master of the world of 1900 has become a Europe divided into spheres of influence, a Marshall Plan assisted (Western) Europe, a (Western) Europe subordinate to NATO. The American student has evolved into master, revered by many, reviled by some, imitated by everyone.

Where one sees an America more powerful than ever and a Europe in search of its unity, trying to redefine their relationship.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States is seen as the only real “superpower”. The only global power, militarily, economically as well as culturally hegemonic, America provokes fierce resistance, sometimes violent. The European Union, on the other hand, progresses along the bumpy road to unification by adopting a single currency and successfully taking in the former communist countries of Eastern Europe.

At the same time, Europeans adopt more than ever the American way of life. Here like everywhere, they are hooked on the Internet, Facebook and iPod, Pixar and American TV series. And the interweaving of the European and American economy and financial system, made Europe more vulnerable than other parts of the world to the global downturn triggered by the American subprime crisis.

With one world order dead and another slowly emerging through crises and conflicts, the two Atlantic partners struggle to define their new relationship.

One fact remains certain: Europe and America are both each other’s main partners. We have seen it negatively, as the interweaving of European and American economies and financial systems made Europe more vulnerable than other parts of the world to the crisis born in the United States. We see it above all positively, through the volume of trade, the existence of a strong business community across the Atlantic, and the vitality of the scientific, academic and cultural bonds. But this fact is a result of history, not destiny. In a multipolar world, other alliances are emerging. This is not necessarily a bad thing, as long as transatlantic unity does not suffer as a result. What will this alliance be made of tomorrow? What “new Atlanticism” should we build? What conditions are needed, here and there, to reach this goal?

We have no ready-made answers. Our approach is just to encourage the visitor to ask the right questions, here and now. And to stimulate the mingling of ideas one needs to have a real debate. In the great tradition of the Enlightenment.