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PARIS - The European Union and the United States are on course for a battle over a new US law that would impose entry restrictions on millions of Europeans who today can travel visa-free to the United States.
EU interior ministers next month will be handed a report by the European Commission, outlining options for reprisal that could end 50 years of unhampered access to Western Europe by Americans.
The row is over the electronic travel authorisation (ETA) scheme, signed into law by President George W. Bush after it was approved by Congress on August 3 as part of a tougher, post-9/11 security rules.
It will require people from 15 western EU states who now do not need visas to register online and give details of their passport, travel plans and planned social and business meetings at least two days before departure.
The EU has reacted angrily. The scheme heightens worries about protection of privacy and sparks charges that the United States is blindly abusing the principle of reciprocity.
The 27-nation EU and the United States agreed this year to swap information about passengers travelling to the US.
European states, including Britain, France and Germany, are also upset that the ETA amounts to a de-facto visa.
If the online request is turned down, the applicant can turn to the nearest US embassy or consulate, but without any certainty that he or she will be allowed into the country.
Twelve other EU states, mainly newcomers from central and eastern Europe, are not affected by the ETA because their citizens already require visas for the United States.
But they are angry because Americans get visa-free entry to their countries, yet Washington has refused to return this right.
Last year, EU justice and home affairs commissioner Franco Frattini began to draw up the idea of a European ETA in response to a thwarted plot to blow up 10 transatlantic jetliners by British-based terrorists.
The scheme, inspired by an apparently smooth-running Australian model, was left to gather dust as officials fretted about how to implement it without damaging the reciprocity principle.
But fierce lobbying in Washington to stop the ETA failed and, a commission source says, the idea has received "new impetus".
"We have been pushing for equal treatment for all EU states, old and new, on the question of visas for the US," the source says, adding tartly: "The goal, though, was to get rid of visa requirements for everyone, not the opposite."
The commission has told Washington of its displeasure, warning that its ETA would "of course operate on a reciprocal basis" - in other words, Americans going to Europe would face the same restrictions as Europeans travelling to the US.
European companies are worried the US law will be a bar to business travel and tourism. The flow of foreign visitors to the United States has fallen by 10 per cent since 2000.
The German Industry Federation has attacked other clauses in the law that require all air and sea freight at foreign ports to be screened before being shipped to the United States.
"It is a burden that is not justified by the benefits," it said.
Important aspects of how the new US law will operate have not been established, and the European Commission says it has not made any decision about a counter-strike.
This gives the two sides weeks, or even months, in which to head off another punch-up.
Helle Dale, an analyst with a US thinktank, the Douglas and Sarah Allison Center for Foreign Policy Studies, said the damage the row over entry requirements was doing to the transatlantic relationship was poorly understood by Washington.
It made the country look unwelcoming or bullying, badly damaging its image among its friends.
"The next time the US needs international partners in what the Pentagon calls 'the long war' [on terrorism], they may well be harder to come by," Dale warned.
