The capital of Belgium is also the center of the EU, the world's largest and most affluent market. Mark Schapiro confirms the age-old adage: money changes everything

Europe's power cadres—along with some of the lobbyists, journalists, and foreign dignitaries who have suddenly awakened to Brussels' status as the capital of the world's largest political and economic trading bloc—like to gather on weeknights at Balthazar, a small Mediterranean restaurant near the European Commission. I am here meeting Robert Donkers, Europe's first environmental ambassador, for dinner. He has spent the day just down the street with colleagues at the Berlaymont, the huge four-pronged star of concrete and steel that is the headquarters of the executive arm of the European Union. Donkers, who has worked for the EU for more than twenty years, is currently posted in Washington, D.C., where he explains the EU's environmental policies to American industry and government representatives. This extraordinary job puts him at the fulcrum of a changing power dynamic between Europe and the United States.

As the EU evolves from what was primarily a free trade zone of fifteen member countries to a political organism of twenty-five countries with the teeth to back up its actions, the lure of its market—the most affluent in the world—has made Europe an economic and political superpower. The United States seems slowly to be waking up to the fact that big money is at stake. It is no accident that Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice's first foreign trip after her appointment in early 2005 was to Brussels. She too spent a lot of time in the Berlaymont, meeting her counterpart, the EU's High Representative, Javier Solana, and other top officials. Already, some American companies have run afoul of the EU's antitrust laws—General Electric's proposed merger and expansion was blocked and Microsoft was fined $500 million. U.S. manufacturers are also facing the EU's tough environmental health standards. For instance, America's chemical industry is discovering that products cannot be exported to Europe and the cosmetics industry is finding that many of its most popular ingredients are not considered safe by the EU. Donkers's job is to deliver the news: Either adapt to these standards or risk losing the European market, 450 million people.

In researching a book about the EU's environmental policies and the challenges that they present to the United States, I have met with Donkers before but until now never on his home turf. As we settle into Balthazar's red banquettes, appreciating the ambience of yellow walls, dark wood furnishings, and colorful tropical flowers, Donkers recalls that when he moved here in 1982, the restaurants lining this street were still the living rooms of working-class apartments. A Dutchman whose full beard and gregarious personality suggest a ship captain in a suit, Donkers cuts into his filet d'agneau, pungent with red curry, while I dismantle a guinea fowl in a mustard and beer sauce. "You know," he quips, pausing to sip a glass of the fine Bordeaux he selected with relish, "you're either writing the menu, or you're on it." Over the past five years, Donkers has been a key figure in rewriting the environmental part of the metaphoric "menu" of Europe's regulatory policy.