U.S. Proposes Trade Alliance With Europe : Commerce: Christopher calls for study of transatlantic zone to remove economic barriers.

Concerned that the Clinton Administration’s focus on trade with Asia and the Pacific has eroded traditional ties to Europe, Secretary of State Warren Christopher on Friday proposed “a transatlantic economic initiative” leading eventually to a North America-Europe free-trade zone.

Although he stopped short of endorsing proposals for immediate creation of a free-trade area, Christopher called for a study to be completed in the next six months.

“By the end of the year, we should have developed a broad-ranging transatlantic agenda for the new century--an agenda for common economic and political action to promote democracy, expand prosperity and increase stability,” he said in a speech to two Spanish think tanks.

U.S. officials described the speech as a major Administration policy statement, intended to counteract concerns in Europe that Washington is moving away from its traditional Eurocentric foreign policy.

“These are our chief allies,” a senior State Department official said. “The United States is a global power. We have very significant interests in Europe.”

But U.S. officials tried to fend off a negative reaction in Asia, insisting that efforts to create an Asia-Pacific free-trade zone by 2020 and a Western Hemisphere zone by 2005 will continue apace.

“Although our ties have expanded with the Asia-Pacific region and Latin America, it is important to recall that the United States and Europe enjoy the largest combined external trade and investment relationship in the entire world,” Christopher said.

He chose Madrid for his speech because Spain will hold the rotating European Union presidency for the last half of 1995.

Officials said transatlantic trade will be discussed between President Clinton and top EU officials later this month as part of a twice-a-year schedule of U.S.-EU summits. By the next meeting in December, he said, preliminary work on the proposed transatlantic free-trade pact should be completed.

Meantime, Christopher said the United States and Europe should take less sweeping steps to integrate economies on both sides of the Atlantic.

The United States, for instance, and the EU should “eliminate barriers to trade that result from differences in product standards and testing systems.”

U.S. business people have long complained that European standards make it difficult to export some products.

“We should undertake a transatlantic economic initiative to multiply trade, investment and the creation of new, high-paying jobs,” he said. “It will make us an even more powerful engine of the global economy.”

He said the first half-century after World War II was dominated by the military and security relationship between the United States and Western Europe, when the North Atlantic Treaty Organization opposed the Soviet Union in the Cold War.

But with the Cold War over, Christopher said, isolationist elements have appeared on both sides of the Atlantic.

He said the United States and its European allies must ensure that they remain engaged in world affairs.

“Together, the Old World and the New World have created a genuinely better world,” Christopher said. “But we must not take this relationship for granted. It cannot be sustained by nostalgia.”