BERLIN, Feb 24 (AFP) - George W. Bush's visit to Germany will only have been a success if the US president takes the message home with him that Europe wants to assert itself anew in transatlantic relations, analysts and the press said on Thursday.
Bush and Schroeder put on a show of being friends again when they met in the snow in Mainz on Wednesday, but their performance did not convince everyone in a country which still flatly refuses to send troops to Iraq.
The conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine newspaper summed up the general feeling in Germany when it said that Bush's visit showed that after the Iraq invasion "nothing will ever be the same again".
But the paper believed "Bush has realised that the key to Europe is in Germany. To have good relations with Europe, the United States must have good relations with Germany."
Ivo Daalder, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute, and Charles Kupchan, a professor at Georgetown University in Washington, said in a joint opinion piece for the conservative broadsheet Die Welt that the United States would have to accept the newly discovered European self-confidence and rebuild its half of the transatlantic bargain.
Bush must "recognise the fact that there can be no return to the days when the United States, due to its dominant position within NATO, could tell the Europeans exactly what to do."
Schroeder set the tone for that reassessment earlier this month when he called for a high-level panel to suggest ways of reforming NATO, a suggestion given a frosty reception by Washington.
Die Welt itself said Bush's meetings with European leaders this week resembled a "separated couple who know it is over but are trying one more time for the sake of the children."
The centre-left Sueddeutsche Zeitung compared the president's visit to Mainz unfavourably with a landmark trip there by his father, George Bush senior, in 1989, shortly before the Berlin Wall fell.
"Bush's praise for 'Gerhard' and this 'great nation' did not conceal the fact that he did not by any means intend to repeat his father's offer of a 'partnership in leadership,'" the paper said.
"In the long term, there will not be a special relationship between Germany and the United States like the US relationship with Britain and Israel... but Bush needs the Germans and above all their weight in the EU."
The left-wing Frankfurter Rundschau said "in style terms, the German-American relationship has been normalised but neither should we read into the show of friendship in Mainz a deep consensus."
The staunchly pro-American Bild meanwhile scolded Germans for a poll published to coincide with Bush's visit showing that two thirds of them believe they owe the United States nothing.
"How short memories can be," an editorial said. "Without the Americans there would still be walls and barbed wire. Without the Americans we would still have the Nazis at our throats."
"The Americans are sometimes mad, but also damn good friends."
02/24/2005 11:52 GMT - AFP