[wordup] Europe vs. America

[Adam Shand]

It's long, but it's a take on the differences between Europe and 
America I haven't heard before.

Adam.

From: Brett Shand <brett at earthlight.co.nz>

Europe vs. America
Volume 52, Number 2 · February 10, 2005
By Tony Judt

The United States of Europe: The New Superpower and the End of American 
Supremacy
by T.R. Reid
Penguin, 305 pp., $25.95

The European Dream: How Europe's Vision of the Future Is Quietly 
Eclipsing the American Dream
by Jeremy Rifkin
Tarcher/Penguin, 434 pp., $25.95

Free World: America, Europe, and the Surprising Future of the West
by Timothy Garton Ash
Random House, 286 pp. $24.95

1. Consider a mug of American coffee. It is found everywhere. It can be 
made by anyone. It is cheap—and refills are free. Being largely without 
flavor it can be diluted to taste. What it lacks in allure it makes up 
in size. It is the most democratic method ever devised for introducing 
caffeine into human beings. Now take a cup of Italian espresso. It 
requires expensive equipment. Price-to-volume ratio is outrageous, 
suggesting indifference to the consumer and ignorance of the market. 
The aesthetic satisfaction accessory to the beverage far outweighs its 
metabolic impact. It is not a drink; it is an artifact.

  This contrast can stand for the differences between America and Europe 
—differences nowadays asserted with increased frequency and not a 
little acrimony on both sides of the Atlantic. The mutual criticisms 
are familiar. To American commentators Europe is "stagnant." Its 
workers, employers, and regulations lack the flexibility and 
adaptability of their US counterparts. The costs of European social 
welfare payments and public services are "unsustainable." Europe's 
aging and "cosseted" populations are underproductive and 
self-satisfied. In a globalized world, the "European social model" is a 
doomed mirage. This conclusion is typically drawn even by "liberal" 
American observers, who differ from conservative (and neoconservative) 
critics only in deriving no pleasure from it.

To a growing number of Europeans, however, it is America that is in 
trouble and the "American way of life" that cannot be sustained. The 
American pursuit of wealth, size, and abundance —as material surrogates 
for happiness —is aesthetically unpleasing and ecologically 
catastrophic. The American economy is built on sand (or, more 
precisely, other people's money). For many Americans the promise of a 
better future is a fading hope. Contemporary mass culture in the US is 
squalid and meretricious. No wonder so many Americans turn to the 
church for solace.

  These perceptions constitute the real Atlantic gap and they suggest 
that something has changed. In past decades it was conventionally 
assumed—whether with satisfaction or regret—that Eu-rope and America 
were converging upon a single "Western" model of late capitalism, with 
the US as usual leading the way. The logic of scale and market, of 
efficiency and profit, would ineluctably trump local variations and 
inherited cultural constraints. Americanization (or globalization—the 
two treated as synonymous) was inevitable. The best—indeed the 
only—hope for local products and practices was that they would be swept 
up into the global vortex and repackaged as "international" commodities 
for universal consumption. Thus an archetypically Italian product—caffè 
espresso—would travel to the US, where it would metamorphose from an 
elite preference into a popular commodity, and then be repackaged and 
sold back to Europeans by an American chain store.

But something has gone wrong with this story. It is not just that 
Starbucks has encountere  unexpected foreign resistance to 
double-decaf-mocha-skim-latte-with-cinnamon (except  revealingly, in 
the United Kingdom), or that politically motivated Europeans are 
abjuring high-profile American commodities. It is becoming clear that 
America and Europe are not wa  stations on a historical production 
line, such that Europeans must expect to inherit or replicat  the 
American experience after an appropriate time lag. They are actually 
quite distinct places  very possibly moving in divergent directions. 
There are even those—including the authors o  two of the books under 
review—for whom it is not Europe but rather the United States that i  
trapped in the past

  America's cultural peculiarities (as seen from Europe) are well 
documented: the nation's marked religiosity, its selective 
prurience,[1] its affection for guns and prisons (the EU has 87 
prisoners per 100,000 people; America has 685), and its embrace of the 
death penalty. As T.R. Reid puts it in The United States of Europe, 
"Yes, Americans put up huge billboards reading 'Love Thy Neighbor,' but 
they murder and rape their neighbors at rates that would shock any 
European nation." But it is the curiosities of America's economy, and 
its social costs, that are now attracting attention.

  Americans work much more than Europeans: according to the OECD a 
typical employed American put in 1,877 hours in 2000, compared to 1,562 
for his or her French counterpart. One American in three works more 
than fifty hours a week. Americans take fewer paid holidays than 
Europeans. Whereas Swedes get more than thirty paid days off work per 
year and even the Brits get an average of twenty-three, Americans can 
hope for something between four and ten, depending on where they live. 
Unemployment in the US is lower than in many European countries (though 
since out-of-work Americans soon lose their rights to unemployment 
benefits and are taken off the registers, these statistics may be 
misleading). America, it seems, is better than Europe at creating jobs. 
So more American adults are at work and they work much more than 
Europeans. What do they get for their efforts?

Not much, unless they are well-off. The US is an excellent place to be 
rich. Back in 1980 the average American chief executive earned forty 
times the average manufacturing employee. For the top tier of American 
CEOs, the ratio is now 475:1 and would be vastly greater if assets, not 
income, were taken into account. By way of comparison, the ratio in 
Britain is 24:1, in France 15:1, in Sweden 13:1.[2] A privileged 
minority has access to the best medical treatment in the world. But 45 
million Americans have no health insurance at all (of the world's 
developed countries only the US and South Africa offer no universal 
medical coverage). According to the World Health Organization the 
United States is number one in health spending per capita—and 
thirty-seventh in the quality of its service.

As a consequence, Americans live shorter lives than West Europeans. 
Their children are more likely to die in infancy: the US ranks 
twenty-sixth among industrial nations in infant mortality, with a rate 
double that of Sweden, higher than Slovenia's, and only just ahead of 
Lithuania's—and this despite spending 15 percent of US gross domestic 
product on "health care" (much of it siphoned off in the administrative 
costs of for-profit private networks). Sweden, by contrast, devotes 
just 8 percent of its GDP to health. The picture in education is very 
similar. In the aggregate the United States spends much more on 
education than the nations of Western Europe; and it has by far the 
best research universities in the world. Yet a recent study suggests 
that for every dollar the US spends on education it gets worse results 
than any other industrial nation. American children consistently 
underperform their European peers in both literacy and numeracy.[3]

Very well, you might conclude. Europeans are better—fairer—at 
distributing social goods  This is not news. But there can be no goods 
or services without wealth, and surely the one thin  American 
capitalism is good at, and where leisure-bound, self-indulgent 
Europeans need t  improve, is the dynamic generation of wealth. But 
this is by no means obvious today  Europeans work less: but when they 
do work they seem to put their time to better use. In 197  GDP per hour 
in the EU was 35 percent below that of the US; today the gap is less 
than  percent and closing fast. Productivity per hour of work in Italy, 
Austria, and Denmark i  similar to that of the United States; but the 
US is now distinctly outperformed in this ke  measure by Ireland, the 
Netherlands, Norway, Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany, ...an  France [4]

America's longstanding advantage in wages and productivity—the gift of 
size, location, and history alike—appears to be winding down, with 
attendant consequences for US domination of the international business 
scene. The modern American economy is not just in hock to international 
bankers with a foreign debt of $3.3 trillion (28 percent of GDP); it is 
also increasingly foreign-owned. In the year 2000, European direct 
investment in the US exceeded American investment in Europe by nearly 
two fifths. Among dozens of emblematically "American" companies and 
products now owned by Europeans are Brooks Brothers, DKNY, Random 
House, Kent Cigarettes, Dove Soap, Chrysler, Bird's Eye, Pennzoil, 
Baskin-Robbins, and the Los Angeles Dodgers.

  Europeans even appear to be better at generating small and medium-size 
businesses. There are more small businesses in the EU than in the 
United States, and they create more employment (65 percent of European 
jobs in 2002 were in small and medium-sized firms, compared with just 
46 percent in the US). And they look after their employees much better. 
The EU Charter of Fundamental Rights promises the "right to parental 
leave following the birth or adoption of a child" and every West 
European country provides salary support during that leave. In Sweden 
women get sixty-four weeks off and two thirds of their wages. Even 
Portugal guarantees maternity leave for three months on 100 percent 
salary. The US federal government guarantees nothing. In the words of 
Valgard Haugland, Norway's Christian Democratic minister for children 
and family: "Americans like to talk about family values. We have 
decided to do more than talk; we use our tax revenues to pay for family 
values."

  Yet despite such widely bemoaned bureaucratic and fiscal impediments 
to output, Europeans appear somehow to manage rather well.[5] And of 
course the welfare state is not just a value in itself. In the words of 
the London School of Economics economist Nicholas Barr, it "is an 
efficiency device against market failure"[6] : a prudential impediment 
to the social and political risks of excessive inequality. It was 
Winston Churchill who declared in March 1943 that "there is no finer 
investment for any community than putting milk into babies." To his 
self-anointed disciples in contemporary America, however, this reeks of 
"welfare." In the US today the richest 1 percent holds 38 percent of 
the wealth and they are redistributing it ever more to their advantage. 
Meanwhile one American adult in five is in poverty—compared with one in 
fifteen in Italy.[7] The benefits don't even trickle down anymore. To 
many foreigners today this is a distinctly unappetizing vision: the 
"American way of life" is at a steep discount. As an economic model the 
US is not replicable.[8] As a social model it offers few redeeming 
qualities. One is reminded of Oliver Goldsmith's mordant reflections 
upon an earlier age of private greed and public indifference:
Ill fares the land, to hast'ning ills a prey,
  Where wealth accumulates, and men decay.[9]

2. This is the case put forward by Jeremy Rifkin and T.R. Reid. Rifkin 
is the more ambitious of the two, rather too much so: his book, The 
European Dream, is replete with efforts to summarize everything from 
church history to Enlightenment philosophy, all to the end of 
demonstrating that it is individualist America that is stuck in a time 
warp and cooperative Europe that represents the future. I think he is 
fundamentally right: but the case can only be hurt by the jejune 
summaries of the "Making of the Bourgeoisie" or the "Rise of the 
Nation-State," as well as by a crassly reductionist account of American 
materialism, and a hodgepodge of ill-advised allusions to chaos theory, 
the "Great Chain of Being," Hobbes, Descartes, Hegel, and the Enclosure 
Acts.

  The European Dream isn't as bad a book as some reviewers have 
suggested and it has something important to say. Of contemporary 
America Rifkin writes:
  With only our religious fervor to hold on to, we have become a "chosen 
people" without a narrative—making America potentially a more dangerous 
and lonely place to be.

  But the book would have been a whole lot better had Rifkin stuck to 
what he knows about and not tried so hard to say something "important."

T.R. Reid is a journalist and his account of European superiority, 
which covers much the same territory as Rifkin's, is shorter, sharper, 
more readable, and less pretentious. It has some amusing vignettes: 
notably of American innocents—Jack Welch, George W. Bush (and most 
recently Bill Gates) —caught up in a brave new world of European 
regulations they can neither understand nor ignore. And Reid, like 
Rifkin, demonstrates very effectively just why the European Union, with 
its regulatory powers, its wealth, and its institutional example, is a 
place Americans will need to take extremely seriously in coming 
decades.

  But though their books are timely, neither writer is saying anything 
very new. Their damning bill of particulars regarding the United States 
is fam-iliar to Europeans—it was in 1956 that Jimmy Porter, in John 
Osborne's Look Back in Anger, sardonically observed that "it's pretty 
dreary living in the American age—unless of course you're American," 
and one way or another that thought has echoed down the decades to the 
present day. But just because there is something profoundly amiss in 
the US today, and something no less intuitively appealing about the 
European social compact, this does not license us to tell fairy 
stories.

  Anyone seeking in these books an account of the origins of the EU will 
be led badly astray  Reid and Rifkin trip over themselves to praise the 
founding fathers of Europe for their foresigh  and wisdom in guiding 
Europe to its present eminence. According to Reid, in "the year  
following the Schuman Declaration, the European Movement took the 
continent by storm." Th  European Coal and Steel Community was a 
"rip-roaring economic success." Rifkin goe  further: Europe, he writes, 
is "a giant freewheeling experimental laboratory for rethinking th  
human condition..."(!

  These claims are absurd.[10] The European Union is what it is: the 
largely unintended product of decades of negotiations by West European 
politicians seeking to uphold and advance their national and sectoral 
interests. That's part of its problem: it is a compromise on a 
continental scale, designed by literally hundreds of committees. 
Actually this makes the EU more interesting and in some ways more 
impressive than if it merely incarnated some uncontentious utopian 
blueprint. In the same vein, it seems silly to write, as Rifkin does, 
about the awfulness of American "cookie-cutter housing tracts" as yet 
another symptom of American mediocrity without acknowledging Europe's 
own eyesores. This is a man who has never stared upon the urban 
brutalism of Sarcelles, a postwar dormitory town north of Paris; who 
has not died a little in Milton Keynes; who has avoided the outer 
suburbs of modern Milan. Reid is right to insist that Europe has the 
best roads, the fastest trains, the cheapest plane fares. And yes, the 
EU is indeed closer, as Rifkin notes, "to the pulse of the changes that 
are transforming the world into a globalized society." But it isn't 
perfect by any means.

Indeed, Europe is facing real problems. But they are not the ones that 
American free-market critics recount with such grim glee. Yes, the 
European Commission periodically makes an ass of itself, aspiring to 
regulate the size of condoms and the curvature of cucumbers. The 
much-vaunted Stability Pact to constrain national expenditure and debt 
has broken down in acrimony, though with no discernible damage to the 
euro it was designed to protect. And pensions and other social 
provisions will be seriously underfunded in decades to come unless 
Europeans have more children, welcome more immigrants, work a few more 
years before retiring, take somewhat less generous unemployment 
compensation, and make it easier for businesses to employ young people. 
But these are not deep structural failings of the European way of life: 
they are difficult policy choices with political consequences. None of 
them implies the dismantling of the welfare state.[11]

Europe's true dilemmas lie elsewhere. In the Netherlands, in Paris and 
Antwerp and other cities, antagonism and incomprehension between the 
indigenous local population and a fast-growing minority of Muslims (one 
million in the Netherlands, over five million in France, perhaps 13 
million in the EU to date) has already moved on from graffiti and no-go 
zones to arson, assaults, and assassinations. Turks, Moroccans, 
Tunisians, Algerians, and others have been arriving in Western Europe 
since the 1960s. We are now seeing the emergence of a third generation: 
in large part unemployed, angry, alienated, and increasingly open to 
the communitarian appeal of radical Islam.[12]

For nearly four decades mainstream European politicians turned a blind 
eye to all this: to the impact of de facto segregated housing; isolated 
unintegrated communities; and the rising tide of fearful, resentful 
white voters convinced that the boat was "full." It has taken 
Jean-Marie Le Pen, the assassinated Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn, and a 
flock of demagogic anti-immigrant parties from Norway to Italy to 
awaken Europeans to this crisis—and it augurs badly that the response 
of everyone from Tony Blair to Valéry Giscard d'Estaing has been to cry 
"Havoc!" and wind up the drawbridge.

  For the other problem facing Europe, and the two are of course 
connected, is the pressure on its outer edges. The European Union is 
almost too attractive for its own good—in contrast with the United 
States, which is widely disliked for what it does, the EU appeals just 
by virtue of what it is. Refugees and illegal immigrants from half of 
Africa periodically drown in their desperate efforts to cross the 
Straits of Gibraltar or beach themselves on Italy's southernmost 
islands —or else they land safely, only to get shipped back. Turkey had 
been trying for nearly forty years to gain admission to the European 
club before its application was (reluctantly) taken up last month. 
Ukraine's best hope for a stable democratic future lies inside 
Europe—or at least with the prospect of one day getting there, which 
would greatly strengthen the hand of Viktor Yushchenko and his 
supporters in the aftermath of their recent victory. And the same of 
course is true for the remnant states of former Yugoslavia. But while 
Brussels is all too well aware of the risks entailed in ignoring Africa 
or leaving Ukraine or Bosnia to fes-ter at its gates—much less casting 
70 million Turkish Muslims into the fold of radical Islam—Europe's 
leaders are deeply troubled at the pros-pect (and the cost) of 
committing the EU to extending itself to the edges of Asia.

These are Europe's real challenges. The EU may be, as Reid and Rifkin 
suggest, a luminous model of trans-state cooperation, justice, and 
harmony.[13] But it will not be easy for the EU to integrate its ethnic 
and religious minorities, regulate immigration, or admit Turkey on 
workable terms.[14] Yet should it mismanage the permanent crisis on its 
eastern and southern borders, Europe is going to be in very serious 
difficulties indeed. And that, not some sort of atavistic 
anti-Americanism or rocket-envy, is why many reasonable Europeans and 
their leaders are utterly enraged by President George W. Bush.

  To the Bush administration "Islam" is an abstraction, the politically 
serviceable object of what Washington insiders now call the GWOT: the 
Global War on Terror. For the US, the Middle East is a faraway land, a 
convenient place to export America's troubles so that they won't have 
to be addressed in the "homeland." But the Middle East is Europe's 
"near abroad," as well as a major trading partner. From Tangier to 
Tabriz, Europe is surrounded by the "Middle East." A growing number of 
Europeans come from this Middle East. When the EU begins accession 
talks with Turkey, it will be anticipating its own insertion into the 
Middle East. America's strategy of global confrontation with Islam is 
not an option for Europe. It is a catastrophe.

3. Timothy Garton Ash would probably not dissent from much of the 
preceding analysis. In his engaging new book he actually goes further 
than Rifkin and Reid in certain respects. As an international citizen, 
he notes, the Uni-ted States is irresponsibly delinquent. The EU gave 
away $36.5 billion in development aid in 2003. The US managed just one 
third that amount—and much of that foreign aid either went to Israel or 
else came with strings attached: nearly 80 percent of all American 
"development aid" obliges recipients to spend the money on American 
goods and services. On Iraq alone the US spent eight times the amount 
it gave in overseas aid to everyone else. The US is the meanest of all 
the rich countries on the OECD's Development Assistance Committee. The 
Europeans are by far the most generous.

  There is more. The US contains just 5 percent of the world's 
population (and falling), but it is responsible for 25 percent of the 
world's greenhouse gas output per annum. Each year our atmosphere has 
to absorb twenty metric tons of carbon dioxide for every American man, 
woman, and child; but just nine tons for every European. And the 
American share continues to grow, even as the Bush administra-tion 
blocks any international action on pollution or global warming. The 
real weapons of mass destruction, in Garton Ash's view, are global 
poverty and incipient environmental catastrophe. On these genuine 
threats to our common civilization, the European Union has a strikingly 
superior record. Contemporary American pundits, the "terribles 
simplificateurs" who babble glibly of Mars and Venus or Clashing 
Civilizations, attract Garton Ash's amused disdain. But on the 
insouciant indifference of the present incumbent of the White House he 
is utterly unforgiving: "It was said of ancient Rome that the emperor 
Nero fiddled while the city burned. In the new Rome, the president 
fiddled while the Earth burned."

  All the same, Free World is by no means just another indictment of 
America. Timothy Garton Ash knows Europe—or, rather, he knows the many 
different Europes, the variable geometry of squabbles and interests and 
alliances that limit the EU's capacity to make itself felt in world 
politics. He shares the widespread English suspicion of French 
mischief-making. And he balances his remarks about the US with some 
well-aimed shots at the Common Agricultural Fund—noting that while in 
the year 2000 the EU donated $8 per head to sub-Saharan Africa, it 
managed to set aside, in the form of subsidies, $913 for every cow in 
Europe.

  But for all that Garton Ash is actually quite optimistic about both 
Europe and the United States. More surprisingly, he is optimistic—even, 
as it seems to me, a touch irenic—about the future of the Western 
alliance. In part, to be sure, this is driven by what he sees as urgent 
necessity: the West had better stop squabbling and find a way to work 
together for the common good, because it only has about twenty years 
left before China (and then India) becomes a great power and the 
narcissistic minor differences between Europe and America will be lost 
to view: "In a longer historical perspective, this may be our last 
chance to set the agenda of world politics."

That agenda, in Garton Ash's account, is to set aside recent quarrels 
and "reinvent" the post–cold war West as an example and advocate of 
freedom: freedom from want, freedom from fear, freedom from human and 
ecological oppression (the chapter on global poverty and environmental 
risk is revealingly titled "The New Red Armies"). The Rooseveltian 
echoes are no coincidence—what Garton Ash has in mind really is a new 
Atlantic Alliance and it is not by chance that Winston Churchill 
occupies a prominent place in his argument. For this is a very British 
book. The choice between Europe and America is presented as one that 
the British understand better than anyone else (because they have lived 
it for sixty years); Atlantic reconciliation is thus something that 
London— perched uncomfortably on the edge of continental Europe and 
with half an eye cast permanently on Washington—is best placed to help 
bring about.

But is Britain really, as Garton Ash writes, a "seismograph" or 
"thermometer" o  European–American relations? It is true that the UK 
today manages both to be part of th  European Union and to manifest 
some of the trashier aspects of American commercial culture  but I 
doubt that this is what Garton Ash has in mind. He appears, rather, to 
see London's role a  mitigating the damage done by American 
unilateralism on the one hand and "Euro-Gaullism  on the other ("the 
Chiracian version of Euro-Gaullism leads nowhere"). An internationall  
minded "Euroatlanticism" is his ideal and Tony Blair incarnates it: 
"Tony Blair has grasped an  articulated this British national interest, 
role, and chance better than any of his predecessors.  Of course, 
Garton Ash can hardly deny that Blair has so far ducked the challenge 
of selling th  European Constitution to a skeptical British public. And 
I don't think he harbors any illusion  about the "special 
relationship." Yet he still insists that Great Britain has this vital 
role to pla  in bridging the Atlantic gap

  I find that a very odd claim. Tony Blair is a political tactician with 
a lucrative little sideline in made-to-measure moralizing.[15] But his 
international adventures have alienated Britain from many of its fellow 
EU members without gaining any influence over Washington, where the 
British prime minister's visits are exercises in futility and 
humiliation. Yes, in certain respects the UK today has real affinities 
with America: the scale of poverty in Britain, and the income gap 
between rich and poor, has grown steadily since the 1970s and is closer 
to that of the US than anything found in Western Europe. British hourly 
productivity is well below most West European rates. However, New 
Labour was supposed to combine the best of the European social model 
and American entrepreneurship: Garton Ash himself concedes it has not 
quite managed this.[16]

Free World understates the challenge facing Brits—or other Europeans— 
seeking to draw the US back into any common international project 
beyond the GWOT. Timothy Garton Ash is right to insist that there is 
more to America than neocons and Republican know-nothings and that 
their present dominance will pass. But his book is about the here and 
now. So we can't ignore that the people making policy in Washington 
aren't interested in reading Timothy Garton Ash's "Declaration of 
Interdependence." The very last thing they want is some "common 
initiative" in the Middle East. And they couldn't care less about his 
"New Red Armies." Yes: in its own interest "America should want Europe 
to be a benign check and balance on its own solitary hyperpower." That 
is good advice. But no one in power is listening.

Conservative think tanks in Washington are lobbying against any 
consolidated European international presence—in the words of David 
Frum, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and former Bush 
speechwriter, it "raises important strategic questions" (i.e., we don't 
like it).[17] The new US secretary of state was widely quoted in 2003 
to the effect that the United States intends to "forgive Russia, ignore 
Germany, and punish France." According to the authors of a recent 
Atlantic Council report, the Bush administration regards Europe as 
being "on probation," its future standing with Washington dependent on 
better behavior.[18] For the first time since World War II, influential 
voices are suggesting that a united Europe would be a threat to 
American interests and that the US should block its emergence.

Moreover, the common European-American values upon which Timothy Garton 
Ash's argument rests may not be quite as common as he suggests. In its 
widespread religiosity and the place of God in its public affairs, its 
suspicion of dissent, its fear of foreign influence, its unfamiliarity 
with alien lands, and its reliance upon military strength when dealing 
with them, the US does indeed have much in common with other countries: 
but none of them is in Europe. When the international treaty to ban 
land mines was passed by the UN in 1997 by a vote of 142–0, the US 
abstained; in company with Russia and a handful of other countries we 
have still not ratified it. The US is one of only two states (the other 
is Somalia) that have failed to ratify the 1989 Convention on 
Children's Rights. Our opposition to the international Biological 
Weapons Convention is shared by China, Russia, India, Pakistan, Cuba, 
and Iran.

  Abolition of the death penalty is a condition for EU membership, 
whereas the US currently executes prisoners on a scale matched only in 
China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the Congo. American opposition to an 
International Criminal Court has been supported in the UN and elsewhere 
by Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, Indonesia, Israel, and Egypt. The American 
doctrine of "preventive war" now finds its fraternal counterpart in 
Muscovite talk of "preventive counterrevolution."[19] And as for the 
United Nations itself, the jewel in the crown of international agencies 
set in place after World War II by an earlier generation of American 
leaders: as I write, a scurrilous, high-decibel campaign is being 
mounted from Washington to bring down Kofi Annan, the UN 
secretary-general, and cripple his institution.

  So what can Europe do? In the first place, resist the temptation to 
make a virtue of th  present tensions. It is pointless to deny their 
existence. In past eras the role of Europe's "other" —the close 
neighbor against whom Europeans measure their own distinctive 
identity—wa  variously occupied by Turkey and Russia; today that role 
is being filled by the United States  But like Garton Ash, I think it 
would be a mistake to follow Jürgen Habermas's advice and tr  to build 
European unity around "transatlantic value differences." Europeans 
certainly need t  find a purpose and define their common role, but 
there are better ways to do it

  One would be to get on with ratifying their proposed constitution. 
This document arouses paranoia and anxiety in Washington (and London); 
but it is actually quite dull and anodyne. Much of it consists of 
practical prescriptions for decision-making procedures in a cumbersome 
body of twenty-five-plus separate sovereign states. The constitution 
also strengthens the role of European courts and extends the EU's 
cross-border competence in criminal law and policing (a wholly laudable 
objective for anyone serious about fighting terrorists). But otherwise 
it just gives substance and application to the EU's claim to 
"coordinate the economic and employment policies of the member states." 
It is not a very inspiring document—its leading drafter, Valéry Giscard 
d'Estaing, is no Thomas Jefferson—but it will do much practical good.

Above all, it will enable Europe to continue playing to its 
international strengths in spite of American obstruction[20] and the 
Bush administration's efforts to pick off or otherwise pressure 
individual EU member states. For the EU today isn't just an interesting 
blueprint for interstate governance without the drawbacks of 
supranational sovereignty. Europe experienced the twentieth 
century—invasion, occupation, civil war, anarchy, massacres, gen- 
ocide, and the descent into barbarism —to a degree unmatched anywhere 
else. The risks inherent in a "war of choice" (Iraq), or the 
abandonment of international agencies in favor of unilateral 
initiative, or an excessive reliance on military power, are thus 
clearer to Europeans than to most other peoples: "Europeans want to be 
sure that there is no adventure in the future. They have had too much 
of that."[21] The United States, by contrast, had no direct experience 
of the worst of the twentieth century—and is thus regrettably immune to 
its lessons.

American-style belligerent patriotism, as Garton Ash notes, is rare in 
contemporary Europe. This dislike of bellicosity goes well beyond 
traditional pacifism: Europeans no longer even think about interstate 
relations in martial terms. But pace American critics, this makes 
Europeans and their model more rather than less effective when it comes 
to addressing international crises. The US is still rather good at the 
old-fashioned art of making war. But war-making is the exception in 
modern international affairs. The real challenge is preventing war, 
making peace—and keeping it. And this is something at which Europe is 
going to be increasingly adept.

The countries of the EU already provide the largest share of the 
world's peacekeepers an  international policemen. Europeans have a 
real, if limited, military capacity—though they wil  need to commit 
more resources to the planned 60,000-man "Euro-force" if it is to be 
effective  The best European troops—for example, the British army—have 
been trained for decades t  work with occupied and warring civil 
populations, a skill with which the US Army i  shockingly unfamiliar. 
It will be a long time before the EU develops and implements  common 
foreign policy—though the new constitution would facilitate that, if 
only by creating  European foreign minister authorized to speak for the 
whole union. But when it does at las  speak with a single voice in 
international affairs, the EU will wield a lot of power

  The reason is not that the EU will be rich or big—though it already is 
both. The US is rich and big. And one day China may be richer and 
bigger. Europe will matter because of the cross-border template upon 
which contemporary Europe is being constructed. "Globalization" isn't 
primarily about trade or communications, economic monopolies or even 
empire. If it were it would hardly be new: those aspects of life were 
already "globalizing" a hundred years ago.[22] Globalization is about 
the disappearance of boundaries—cultural and economic boundaries, 
physical boundaries, linguistic boundaries—and the challenge of 
organizing our world in their absence. In the words of Jean-Marie 
Guéhenno, the UN's director of peacekeeping operations: "Having lost 
the comfort of our geographical boundaries, we must in effect 
rediscover what creates the bond between humans that constitute a 
community."[23]

To their own surprise and occasional consternation, Europeans have 
begun to do this: to create a bond between human beings that transcends 
older boundaries and to make out of these new institutional forms 
something that really is a community. They don't always do it very well 
and there is still considerable nostalgia in certain quarters for those 
old frontier posts. But something is better than nothing: and nothing 
is just what we shall be left with if the fragile international 
accords, treaties, agencies, laws, and institutions that we have 
erected since 1945 are allowed to rot and decline—or, worse, are 
deliberately brought low. As things now stand, boundary-breaking and 
community-making is something that Europeans are doing better than 
anyone else. The United States, trapped once again in what Tocqueville 
called its "perpetual utterance of self-applause," isn't even trying.

—January 12, 2005

Notes

[1] The US television network that recently broadcast a passing glimpse 
at Janet Jackson's anatomy was excoriated for its wanton lapse of 
taste; but the avalanche of accompanying commercials for products 
designed to enhance male potency passed quite without comment. The 
female breast, it seems, can rot a nation's moral core; but 
malfunctioning penises are wholesome family fare.

[2] See Robin Blackburn, Banking on Death: Or, Investing in Life: The 
History and Future of Pensions (Verso, 2002) p. 201, Table 3.2.

[3] For the 2003 PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) 
report, issued by the OECD on December 6, 2004, see www.pisa.oecd.org.

[4] See Andrew Sharpe, Appendix Table 2, "Output per House Levels in 
the OECD Countries Relative to the United States" for 2003; Centre for 
the Study of Living Standards, International Productivity Monitor, No. 
9 (Fall 2004), at www.csls.ca/ipm/9/sharpe-tables.pdf.

[5] Note, too, that the steadily rising cost of private medical 
insurance in the US puts at least as much of a burden on American firms 
as social taxation and welfare privileges place upon their European 
counterparts—while providing none of the attendant social benefits.

[6] Katrin Benahold, "Love of Leisure, and Europe's Reasons," The New 
York Times, July 29, 2004.

[7] Following the OECD definition of a family income, less than 50 
percent of the mean personal income of the nation.

[8] Appetizing or not, the American economic model could never be 
replicated anywhere else. Americans are the world's consumers of last 
resort. But their national deficits on budget and current account are 
reaching unprecedented levels. The collapsing dollar is sustained only 
by foreigners' willingness to hold it: Americans are currently spending 
other people's money on other people's products. Were the US any other 
country it would by now be in the unforgiving hands of the 
International Monetary Fund.

[9] The Deserted Village (1770).

[10] As is Reid's description of David Beckham as "Europe's Michael 
Jordan." Beckham is a journeyman footballer with a first-class hairdo 
and a celebrity wife. He would never have made the cut in the days of 
Pele, Johann Cruyff, or Ferenc Puskas. His prominence on European 
sports pages illustrates the power of transcontinental marketing, but 
in this as other respects Beckham is just a depressing monument to the 
spirit of our age: he is, in Camus's phrase, a "prophète vide pour 
temps médiocre." The pertinent analogy here is not Michael Jordan but 
Dennis Rodman.

[11] In any case, America's present indebtedness is at least as much a 
lien on the future as Europe's welfare commitments. And Americans who 
point fingers at the European pension gap should recall that were 
United Airlines, General Motors, or any other semisolvent company to 
abandon its unfundable pension commitments, it is US taxpayers who 
would be left with the tab.

[12] For a thoughtful and rather more optimistic account of the French 
case, see Herman Lebovics, Bringing the Empire Back Home: France in the 
Global Age (Duke University Press, 2004).

[13] Perhaps not so very harmonious: already West European leaders are 
asking why they should make generous budget transfers to new members 
like Slovakia, only to see the latter use these subsidies to hold down 
their local corporate tax rates and thereby steal business and 
factories from their more expensive Western colleagues.

[14] The Turkish dilemma is complicated, and well-meaning European 
liberals can find themselves on both sides of the debate. For a 
sensitive and cogently reasoned summary of the case for keeping Turkey 
at a certain distance, see the interview with Robert Badinter, a former 
French minister of justice and longstanding Europhile, in Le Figaro, 
December 13, 2004.

[15] At the last Labour Party conference, rather than try to defend his 
reasons for going to war in Iraq, Blair simply informed the audience 
that he "believes," that they must share his "faith," and that in any 
case (like Martin Luther: "Here I stand, I can do no other") he would 
not budge.

[16] Indeed he cites a popular joke: Britain was promised that Blair's 
Third Way would bring it American universities and German prisons— what 
it is actually getting are American prisons and German universities.

[17] Frederick Studemann, "US Conservatives Cast Wary Eye at EU 
Treaty," Financial Times, November 5, 2004. The new tone of anxiety 
about a renascent Europe can even be found in august journals of 
mainstream foreign policy debate. See, for example, Jeffrey L. Cimbalo, 
"Saving NATO from Europe," in Foreign Affairs, November/December 2004.

[18] See Bowman Cutter, Peter Rashish, and Paula Stern, "Washington 
Wants Economic Reform in Europe," Financial Times, November 22, 2004.

[19] The phrase is used by Kremlin adviser Gleb Pavlovski to describe 
President Putin's emerging strategy for addressing "containment" 
challenges at Russia's edges. I am indebted to Ivan Krastev of the 
Central European University in Budapest for this reference, in his 
unpublished essay on "Europe's Fatal Attraction."

[20] The US continues to impede European efforts to reach a nuclear 
settlement with Iran. Even on such a volatile issue, Washington has 
been more concerned about the risks of a successful European initiative 
than the benefits of a regional settlement.

[21] Alfons Verplaetse (governor of the National Bank of Belgium).

[22] On this, see the magisterial opening paragraphs of John Maynard 
Keynes's essay The Economic Consequences of the Peace (Penguin, 1995).

[23] Jean-Marie Guéhenno, The End of the Nation-State, translated by 
Victoria Elliott (University of Minnesota Press, 1995), p. 139.