US officials are adopting a wait-and-see attitude to the demands by the European Commission (EC) that it takes on the right to negotiate air service agreements with the USA on behalf of the European Union (EU).
US assistant secretary of transportation for aviation and international affairs Read Van de Water says the USA is watching closely while EU states decide if they will give the EC the mandate it needs to centralise negotiating authority.
The EC's move follows the European court ruling that aspects of current bilaterals were not legal. The EC has since called for all existing deals to be renunciated - a view not welcomed in Washington. "We believe that all bilateral agreements should remain in effect," said Van de Water, speaking at a seminar held by the Airports Council International-North America (ACI-NA). A colleagues points out that progress will be hampered until the USA has a clearly defined party with which to negotiate.
Jeffrey Shane, an associate deputy secretary for international policy at the US transportation department, says that Washington has not been opposed to the EC winning a mandate. Shane told an American Bar Association aviation law forum: "We might have saved a lot of time and money if we could have negotiated with the Commission in Brussels instead of conducting talks with the member states one by one."
Others are more pointed in their reaction to the subsequent demand that the EU states set aside their bilaterals. FedEx managing director of regulatory affairs Nancy Sparks called the demand "a power play without power". EC transport commissioner Loyola de Palacio "is not there yet, she doesn't have a mandate yet," said Sparks, at the ACI-NA seminar. "The EC has put at risk some very reasonable agreements and suggested that chaos, which I define as the absence of bilaterals, would be preferable while the EC works out what is sure to be a very complicated open skies agreement."
She predicts that the EC will gets its negotiating mandate in June 2003, although Ludolf van Hasselt, who heads air service agreements at the EC transport directorate, thinks it could come by the end of January. Hasselt says: "The risk is that if there would be no renunciation the negotiations could drag on for a long time. That would be unfortunate."
Virgin Atlantic's director of external affairs Barry Humphreys says: "It's no longer a question of if the EC should get a mandate but when." But he calls the "aggressive" move to push for renunciation of existing agreements misguided: "I don't think it's necessary to tear up all these bilaterals." Humphreys hopes a new EU/US multi-lateral agreement can be achieved within 12 to 18 months. Like others, he says ownership and nationality restrictions are key areas for a pan-EU/US pact. Virgin has long talked about a US subsidiary but the nation's limit on non-US ownership has blocked the move.
DAVID FIELD WASHINGTON
Source: Airline Business
