Welcome to the new cold war It's Chirac vs. Cheney, SUVs vs. minicars, and pommes frites vs. freedom fries in the new transatlantic culture war. But here's what you don't know: In the global conflict for moral and economic supremacy, Europe is winning. - - - - - - - - - - - - By Andrew O'Hehir Nov. 15, 2004 | A specter is haunting America, and it ain't the specter of communism (however much George W. Bush and company might like to describe it that way). Barely a decade after the definitive collapse of the Soviet bloc, the United States finds itself in a new cold war, one being fought simultaneously on economic, political and cultural fronts, and one it is by no means certain to win. The unipolar world of uncontested American hegemony that we were told to expect into the indefinite future has come to an end; it lasted just about long enough for us to scratch our heads and wonder what was happening next. Yes, "Old Europe," to borrow Donald Rumsfeld's famous quip, is back, and it's looking pretty spry for its age. As Americans are finally beginning to notice, Europeans (or most of them, anyway) have reconstituted themselves into an enormous transnational superstate of 25 nations, 455 million people and an $11 trillion economy. This is, of course, the European Union, and its aims have become much broader and deeper than the stuff you've probably heard about, like allowing citizens to drive from Seville to Sicily without a passport, or to use the same anonymous-looking currency to buy a pint of Guinness in Cork and a glass of ouzo in Crete. American heavyweights like Alan Greenspan and Henry Kissinger, by the way, publicly predicted that the euro, now the common currency of 12 European countries (with many more to follow), would never work. This week the euro is trading at an all-time high of about $1.30 against an ever weaker Bush-economy dollar. Other confident-sounding things that you hear Americans say about the EU -- that it's plagued by a sclerotic bureaucracy, that it squelches entrepreneurship and initiative with overregulation, that its cradle-to-grave welfare states are dragging down its economy -- should be viewed with similar skepticism. It might sound alarmist to use a freighted term like "cold war" to describe our relationship with an entity whose raison d'être is to avoid all war and resolve all conflict. The political leaders of the European Union are certainly willing to be partners with the United States, and potentially to be friends as well. (Realpolitik dictates that both sides will continue to insist that the relationship is warm even when, as now, it is anything but.) But elites on both sides of the pond now know what the stakes are, and they are also willing to be competitors, even fierce rivals. If the original idea behind a united Europe was to redeem the old continent from poverty, devastation and centuries of self-destructive warfare, more recently the goal has been to build a "good superpower," one that stands as an economic and ideological counterweight to the American colossus. Once you grasp that this transatlantic cold war is not only happening but rapidly intensifying -- as Jeremy Rifkin and T.R. Reid, the authors of two almost simultaneous books on the European conundrum, agree -- you see the major news events of the last year or two in a different light. Both the Iraq war and this year's presidential election, for instance, start to look like key symbolic episodes in the U.S.-Europe conflict. What was the contest between Bush and John Kerry, after all, if not a proxy war between pommes frites and freedom fries, a referendum on Europe conducted among the American electorate? Kerry, we were told, spoke French and "looked French." These gibes might have played as humor on Fox News, but they were in deadly earnest. The French, of course, sank Bush's hopes for a truly international coalition against Iraq and became the American right's chosen exemplar of global treachery and cowardice. (Frenchness, you might say, is the new communism.) The French are also the principal architects of the European Union -- suddenly, clearly, our greatest rival for economic and moral supremacy in the world -- and if Karl Rove and Karen Hughes weren't thinking about that consciously, the thought wasn't far below the surface. Kerry was an internationalist and a secularist (at least by American standards) running against a man who wrapped himself in the flag and was guided by divine inspiration. Bush didn't just run as an American; he pretty much ran as America, which Rifkin calls a nation "living in two seemingly contradictory realms at the same time," those being the evangelical Protestant faith in salvation and the rationalist drive to accumulate wealth and build industry. That cast Kerry in the role of Europe -- intellectual and irreligious, faintly stained by the ghosts of socialism and Catholicism, with a belief in universal human rights and negotiated solutions, but not much in the way of a transformative spiritual vision. That might be all anyone needs to know about how close the election was, or how it turned out. There is a large class of people in this country who are sympathetic to the "European dream" of a managed market economy in which cooperation is emphasized over competition, leisure is privileged over work, and the social costs of capitalism are closely regulated -- and you know who you are, gentle readers. But to most Americans "freedom" still means untrammeled private-property rights, open markets, workaholism and the belief that somehow we'll all die rich. Going back 18 months, one of the strategic considerations driving the Bush administration's 2003 invasion of Iraq was surely the opportunity it presented to drive a wedge between pro- and anti-American politicians in Europe. By peeling away Britain's Tony Blair, Spain's José Maria Aznar and Italy's Silvio Berlusconi from the antiwar EU consensus, the Bushies may have hoped to disrupt the idea of a Europe that spoke with one voice on foreign policy and military action (an expressed EU goal) for a generation to come. As Reid, a longtime Washington Post correspondent, discusses in his book "The United States of Europe," the strategy seemed to work, at least at first. Those three prime ministers agreed to go along with the American war, and various other European leaders hemmed and hawed, trying somehow to split the difference between the Bush-Blair position and the vehement antiwar stance of French President Jacques Chirac and German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder. But then surprising things started to happen. When it came time to twist arms on the U.N. Security Council over the vote to authorize military action, the Americans were outfoxed. Most of the poorer nations on the council received substantial foreign aid from Europe -- the EU gives almost three times as much aid to developing countries as the U.S. does -- and proved more amenable to lobbying from the French and Germans than from the British and Americans. Bush and Blair needed nine votes and could never get more than four; at least in that limited arena, Reid writes, "Europe's political clout proved stronger than American military might." Furthermore, the Iraq war became a galvanizing and radicalizing event for an entire generation of younger Europeans and, in Reid's judgment, led them to see themselves as Europeans, above and beyond their national identities. While the European political elites dithered in the spring of 2003, the European people streamed into the streets by the millions, in a nearly unanimous rejection of the Iraq war in particular and the interventionist Bush foreign policy agenda in general. (And, for good measure, what most Europeans perceive as America's promiscuously wasteful culture of burgers, SUVs and obesity.) Opinion polls revealed an explosion of anti-American sentiment, even in nations like Britain, Italy and Poland that remained officially within the "coalition of the willing." In several European countries, the United States is viewed as more dangerous to world peace than Iran and North Korea, and George W. Bush may be even less popular in Scandinavia, for example, than he is in the Arab world. These young Europeans, Reid believes, now have a sense of their own political and economic power, and they have built a pan-continental "Euroculture" that borrows what it likes from American pop culture but now stands independent of it. "For many Europeans today," he writes, "the familiar concept of 'the West,' the transatlantic alliance with shared values and common enemies, is a relic of the last century." In this century, their goal is to challenge the American claim to global supremacy, at least in moral and political terms. Indeed, what struck me on a recent visit to Germany is how un-American Europe still feels, despite all the stories we hear to the contrary. Sure, you can eat at Pizza Hut or shop at Wal-Mart in Hamburg, and teenagers affect last year's hip-hop fashions and wear Yankee caps. (Sorry, Boston -- your triumph has not penetrated the Old World.) But those things, removed from their original context, have become, like Madonna or David Beckham, floating signifiers of a global culture that transcends nationality. The organic rhythms of the place feel nothing like the fevered consumption overdrive of American cities and suburbs: Bars and cafes remain busy long past midnight seven nights a week, but if there's any place in Hamburg where you can buy groceries or children's toys or paperback books after lunchtime on Saturday, I didn't find it. "Europe's time is almost here," Reid quotes current EU President Romano Prodi as saying. "In fact, there are many areas of world affairs where the objective conclusion would have to be that Europe is already the superpower, and the United States must follow our lead." It's stuff like that that has Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and the rest of the neoconservative cohort gnawing on the executive branch's fine European furniture late at night. They're smart enough to know that Prodi has a point -- even if they'd scoff at him in public -- and there isn't much they can do about it. After adding 10 new Eastern and Central European nations last May, the European Union now has a much larger population than the United States, and a slightly bigger economy. As Jeremy Rifkin argues in his dense and contentious new research-driven tome "The European Dream," the United States remains ahead in per-capita GDP, but the difference is not as significant as it looks. Much of American "productivity," Rifkin suggests, is accounted for by economic activity that might be better described as wasteful: military spending; the endlessly expanding police and prison bureaucracies; the spiraling cost of healthcare; suburban sprawl; the fast-food industry and its inevitable corollary, the weight-loss craze. Meaningful comparisons of living standards, he says, consistently favor the Europeans. In France, for instance, the work week is 35 hours and most employees take 10 to 12 weeks off every year, factors that clearly depress GDP. Yet it takes a John Locke heart of stone to say that France is worse off as a nation for all that time people spend in the countryside downing du vin rouge et du Camembert with friends and family. "The European Dream" is the richer of the two books, as Rifkin -- the author of such previous big-idea volumes as "The End of Work" and "The Biotech Century" -- mines deep lodes of history and sociology in search of the origins of the cross-pond cold war. But if you just want a reader-friendly survey of how the European Union was born (out of a modest Franco-German coal and steel accord after World War II), how it grew into the titan we see today, and what it's really like, Reid's personable "United States of Europe" is the better choice. To the question of what the European Union actually is, neither author offers more than a conditional answer, largely because Europeans aren't quite sure themselves. I called the EU a "superstate" earlier, but it isn't a nation-state in conventional terms. It doesn't physically control any territory, it has no authority to tax its citizens, and it has only very limited police powers. It does, however, have an elected legislature and an executive branch, a court system and a central bank, all of which can override the laws of its 25 member nations. (It also now has its own military, the 60,000-strong European Rapid Reaction Force, or "EuroArmy," a development that led to much gnashing of teeth in Washington.) At least some of this ambiguity is intentional; the EU looks different depending on who's looking. To the Euro-enthusiasts of France, Germany and the Low Countries, the EU is a grand federal state capable of transcending age-old problems of nationalism and sovereignty. To more standoffish nations like Britain and Sweden (neither of which has adopted the euro), it's a loose confederation of countries that remain largely autonomous. Rifkin calls it "the first really post-modern governing institution," amplifying that at another point to "the first post-territorial governing region in a network-linked global economy." (Much as I enjoyed his excursions through the historical and philosophical framework of the U.S.-EU clash, his tendency to wax lyrical with business-school buzzwords made me want to check whether I still had my wallet.) If the EU has no intention of confronting America's military supremacy, that, Rifkin and Reid would agree, is actually Europe's ace in the hole. Let the Americans pour endless billions in taxpayer dollars down the Pentagon's money sink, the Europeans reason. As they see it, the key to future peace and prosperity lies elsewhere, in constructing complex webs of social interaction and economic cooperation that will undermine nationalism and fundamentalism of all stripes. While the United States foots the bill for the intractable conflict in Iraq and piles up huge budget and trade deficits, Europe has spent money on other priorities. Whatever your intellectual and emotional responses may be to this burgeoning transatlantic conflict, it's difficult for any American to read Rifkin's book and not feel ashamed. The U.S. has fallen significantly behind the EU's Western European nations in infant mortality and life expectancy, despite spending more on healthcare per capita than any of them. (While 40 million Americans are uninsured, no one in Europe -- I repeat, not a single person -- lacks some form of healthcare coverage.) European children are consistently better educated; the United States would rank ninth in the EU in reading, ninth in scientific literacy, and 13th in math. Twenty-two percent of American children grow up in poverty, which means that our country ranks 22nd out of the 23 industrialized nations, ahead of only Mexico and behind all 15 of the pre-2004 EU countries. What's more horrifying: the statistic itself or the fact that no American politician to the right of Dennis Kucinich would ever address it? Perhaps more surprisingly, European business has not been strangled by the EU welfare state; in fact, quite the opposite is true. Europe has surpassed the United States in several high-tech and financial sectors, including wireless technology, grid computing and the insurance industry. The EU has a higher proportion of small businesses than the U.S., and their success rate is higher. American capitalists have begun to pay attention to all this. In Reid's book, Ford Motor Co. chairman Bill Ford explains that the company's Volvo subsidiary is more profitable than its U.S. manufacturing operation, even though wages and benefits are significantly higher in Sweden. Government-subsidized healthcare, child care, pensions and other social supports, Ford says, more than make up for the difference. The new EU constitution, currently being considered by the member states, is an unwieldy, jargon-laden document that runs to 265 pages in English (and even more in Spanish and French). It should also serve as an inspiration to progressives around the world. It bars capital punishment in all 25 nations and defines such things as universal healthcare, child care, paid annual leave, parental leave, housing for the poor, and equal treatment for gays and lesbians as fundamental human rights. Most of these are still hotly contested questions in the United States; as Rifkin says, this document all by itself makes the European Union the world leader in the human rights debate. It is the first governing document that aspires to universality, "with rights and responsibilities that encompass the totality of human existence on Earth." While Rifkin and Reid are unabashed Euro-boosters, both would urge Kerry voters rendered starry-eyed by the EU dream to ponder long and hard before pleading for asylum at the nearest consulate or scouring your family tree for relevant European ancestry. (Speaking as a dual-passport holder myself, I'm sticking it out -- at least for now.) For all the grandeur of its new vision, Europe still has relatively high unemployment and relatively sluggish economic growth. The continent faces major structural problems, most notably a declining birth rate and a long-standing hostility to immigration, which has led to a population that is aging much faster than America's. While the European welfare state is certain to remain generous by American standards, significant renegotiation of rights and benefits will be necessary unless this demographic time bomb can somehow be defused. Despite its deepening inequality, the United States remains to a large extent a more dynamic and less class-bound society, and it still offers individuals that opportunity for constant reinvention that lies at the heart of our national dream. Rifkin in particular believes that the new cold war with Europe will be good for America in the long run and may help rejuvenate the American left (even if the next four years are likely to get pretty ugly). Americans may need to be taught, by example, that unfettered corporate capitalism, regressive taxation and a bare-minimum social safety net are not the only way to guarantee prosperity -- and perhaps that our definition of what constitutes prosperity could stand some scrutiny. While America has been gnawing on its own innards for the last decade or so, feuding internally over White House blow jobs, flawed elections, the threat of terrorism, the ill-fated war in Iraq and an angrily polarized public discourse, Europe has quietly been cohering into an impressive whole, the world's newest superpower. For all its layers of bureaucracy and all the challenges it faces, the EU has forged a harmonious society on a continent that spent most of history at war with itself. The rise of the European Union may in fact, as Rifkin says, represent a new phase of history, and we barely saw it coming. While the outcome of this new cold war between Europe and America is far from clear, we should feel humbled by the way it's gone so far. The EU has succeeded so dramatically in its ambitious goals that the utopian dreamers of the last century who dared to imagine a peaceful, prosperous, united Europe seem eerily prescient now. If nothing else, it's an object lesson in the power of vision. "I am a democrat," James Joyce wrote in 1916, while an entire generation of Europe's young men were slaughtering each other in the fields of Flanders. "I'll work and act for the social liberty and equality among all classes and sexes in the United States of the Europe of the future." People read that and laughed bitterly. Europe seemed poisoned by mustard gas and history; America was the land of liberty, democracy and the future. Nobody's laughing now. http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2004/11/15/europe/print.html
i didn't get past the first paragraph, this article is so clearly biased. old europe has about as much relevance as the UN, the geneva convention, the kyoto treaty, health care, education and the environment.
gary, do you really believe that, or did it make a good "sound bite?" And you're not an intern for Donnie Rumsfeld, are you?? Keep D&D Civil!! It's hard, but we've got to do it! (damn, either my wife or I said something like that recently)
Managed market economy? Cooperation emphasized over competition? Leiser is privileged over work? That is an absolutely beautiful and peachy sounding scenario, but its called socialism or in a more extreme form, communism. And it failed. Do you know where the most decrepit environments in the world are? In ex-communist nations. These notions are decreasing productivity in Europe at a staggering rate, which is why the standard of living is falling dramatically in Europe. Whenever societies become advanced the people become lazy and expect the government to take care of them or that they as 'citizens' DESERVE certain benefits. This is the beginning of the end in that the government cannot sustain subsidizing a population and the government and economy will eventually crumble. You guys are a little late. The communist revolution happened in the early 20th century. And hate to break it to you but it failed. Competition breeds excellence, socialism breeds weak economies and ultimately a worse environment, lower standard of living for everyone and less opportunity.
Can you cite your sources for Europe's "staggering" decrease in productivity and "dramatic" drop in standard of living?
http://www.feasta.org/documents/papers/oil1.htm Cóilín Nunan: Oil, Currency and the War on Iraq It will not come as news to anyone that the US dominates the world economically and militarily. But the exact mechanisms by which American hegemony has been established and maintained are perhaps less well understood than they might be. One tool used to great effect has been the dollar, but its efficacy has recently been under threat since Europe introduced the euro. The dollar is the de facto world reserve currency: the US currency accounts for approximately two thirds of all official exchange reserves. More than four-fifths of all foreign exchange transactions and half of all world exports are denominated in dollars. In addition, all IMF loans are denominated in dollars. But the more dollars there are circulating outside the US, or invested by foreign owners in American assets, the more the rest of the world has had to provide the US with goods and services in exchange for these dollars. The dollars cost the US next to nothing to produce, so the fact that the world uses the currency in this way means that the US is importing vast quantities of goods and services virtually for free. Since so many foreign-owned dollars are not spent on American goods and services, the US is able to run a huge trade deficit year after year without apparently any major economic consequences. The most recently published figures, for example, show that in November of last year US imports were worth 48% more than US exports1. No other country can run such a large trade deficit with impunity. The financial media tell us the US is acting as the 'consumer of last resort' and the implication is that we should be thankful, but a more enlightening description of this state of affairs would be to say that it is getting a massive interest-free loan from the rest of the world. While the US' position may seem inviolable, one should remember that the more you have, the more you have to lose. And recently there have been signs of how, for the first time in a long time, the US may be beginning to lose. One of the stated economic objectives, and perhaps the primary objective, when setting up the euro was to turn it into a reserve currency to challenge the dollar so that Europe too could get something for nothing. This however would be a disaster for the US. Not only would they lose a large part of their annual subsidy of effectively free goods and services, but countries switching to euro reserves from dollar reserves would bring down the value of the US currency. Imports would start to cost Americans a lot more and as increasing numbers of those holding dollars began to spend them, the US would have to start paying its debts by supplying in goods and services to foreign countries, thus reducing American living standards. As countries and businesses converted their dollar assets into euro assets, the US property and stock market bubbles would, without doubt, burst. The Federal Reserve would no longer be able to print more money to reflate the bubble, as it is currently openly considering doing, because, without lots of eager foreigners prepared to mop them up, a serious inflation would result which, in turn, would make foreigners even more reluctant to hold the US currency and thus heighten the crisis. There is though one major obstacle to this happening: oil. Oil is not just by far the most important commodity traded internationally, it is the lifeblood of all modern industrialised economies. If you don't have oil, you have to buy it. And if you want to buy oil on the international markets, you usually have to have dollars. Until recently all OPEC countries agreed to sell their oil for dollars only. So long as this remained the case, the euro was unlikely to become the major reserve currency: there is not a lot of point in stockpiling euros if every time you need to buy oil you have to change them into dollars. This arrangement also meant that the US effectively part-controlled the entire world oil market: you could only buy oil if you had dollars, and only one country had the right to print dollars - the US. If on the other hand OPEC were to decide to accept euros only for its oil (assuming for a moment it were allowed to make this decision), then American economic dominance would be over. Not only would Europe not need as many dollars anymore, but Japan which imports over 80% of its oil from the Middle East would think it wise to convert a large portion of its dollar assets to euro assets (Japan is the major subsidiser of the US because it holds so many dollar investments). The US on the other hand, being the world's largest oil importer would have to run a trade surplus to acquire euros. The conversion from trade deficit to trade surplus would have to be achieved at a time when its property and stock market prices were collapsing and its domestic supplies of oil and gas were contracting. It would be a very painful conversion. The purely economic arguments for OPEC converting to the euro, at least for a while, seem very strong. The Euro-zone does not run a huge trade deficit nor is it heavily endebted to the rest of the world like the US and interest rates in the Euro-zone are also significantly higher. The Euro-zone has a larger share of world trade than the US and is the Middle East's main trading partner. And nearly everything you can buy for dollars you can also buy for euros - apart, of course, from oil. Furthermore, if OPEC were to convert their dollar assets to euro assets and then require payment for oil in Euros, their assets would immediately increase in value, since oil importing countries would be forced to also convert part of their assets, driving the prices up. For OPEC, backing the euro would be a self-fulfilling prophesy. They could then at some later date move to some other currency, perhaps back to the dollar, and again make huge profits. But of course it is not a purely economic decision. So far only one OPEC country has dared switch to the euro: Iraq, in November 2002,3. There is little doubt that this was a deliberate attempt by Saddam to strike back at the US, but in economic terms it has also turned out to have been a huge success: at the time of Iraq's conversion the euro was worth around 83 US cents but it is now worth over $1.05. There may however be other consequences to this decision. One other OPEC country has been talking publicly about possible conversion to the euro since 1999: Iran2,4, a country which has since been included in the George W. Bush's 'axis of evil'. A third OPEC country which has recently fallen out with the US government is Venezuela and it too has been showing disloyalty to the dollar. Under Hugo Chavez's rule, Venezuela has established barter deals for trading its oil with 12 Latin American countries as well as Cuba. This means that the US is missing out on its usual subsidy and might help explain the American wish to see the back of Chavez. At the OPEC summit in September 2000, Chavez delivered to the OPEC heads of state the report of the 'International Seminar on the Future of Energy', a conference called by Chavez earlier that year to examine the future supplies of both fossil and renewable energies. One of the two key recommendations of the report was that 'OPEC take advantage of high-tech electronic barter and bi-lateral exchanges of its oil with its developing country customers'5, i.e. OPEC should avoid using both the dollar and the euro for many transactions. And last April, a senior OPEC representative gave a public speech in Spain during Spain's presidency of the EU during which he made clear that though OPEC had as yet no plans to make oil available for euros, it was an option that was being considered and which could well be of economic benefit to many OPEC countries, particularly those of the Middle East6. As oil production is now in decline in most oil producing countries, the importance of the remaining large oil producers, particularly those of the Middle East, is going to grow and grow in years to come7. Iraq, whose oil production has been severely curtailed by sanctions, is one of a very small number of countries which can help ease this looming oil shortage. Europe, like most of the rest of the world, wishes to see a peaceful resolution of the current US-Iraqi tensions and a gradual lifting of the sanctions - this would certainly serve its interests best. But as Iraqi oil is denominated in euros, allowing it to become more widely available at present could loosen the dollar stranglehold and possibly do more damage than good to US economic health. All of this is bad news for the US economy and the dollar. The fear for Washington will be that not only will the future price of oil not be right, but the currency might not be right either. Which perhaps helps explain why the US is increasingly turning to its second major tool for dominating world affairs: military force.
Actually, I believe Europes productivity has been increasing while its SOL has stagnated or decreased; though in many countries it is higher than ours.
Hmmmmm.... They don't actually have a 60,000 person EU army. Several different proposals, the leading of which is a Franco-German force, are still in the works. Despite the rosy picture of a harmonious EU, the member countries still can't agree on the composition of such a force, and who's going to pay for it (suprise suprise). While they have aspirations in this area (and its about time) they still can't deal with conflicts in their own borders (see Bosnia/Serbia; Cyprus) much less assume the scope of projects undertaken by a 'superpower.' Claims of a 'peaceful Europe' seem a little premature to this reader. And in the end the whole federated system is merely a copy of what we already achieved - 150 years ago. Drive from LA to NY with no passport? Aren't we progressive... SJC and others can probably speak more on point as far as the economics, but from my experience the plethora of regulations in the EU has stifled (comparatively) investment and advancement in many sectors including high technology, so I'm not sure how the author of the article draws his conclusions. There are 400 investments in US high tech companies by venture capital groups for every one in the EU. If the EU is more productive than the US because we spend all the money on their defense, and now they're taking over their own defense, isn't the trend going to go the opposite direction than the article suggests? Won't the US be able to spend more on healthcare etc while the EU spends more on defense (necessitating less on healthcare etc)? Sounds like someone is missing the obvious. I believe the latest comprehensive studies show the US is more productive, but that is because we work more. Go figure. Working hard is what made us great to begin with. Human rights? No doubt the EU presents a solid front on this issue, but look at the Turks in Germany or the Muslims in France, for example. Hardly a problem they have a handle on. Not saying Europe is bad. Necessarily. Just that a claim that we should be 'ashamed' in comparison is a little silly.
you make some valid points but the author isn't suggesting that you should feel ashamed, just that american hegemony is not absolute. he states the following: Despite its deepening inequality, the United States remains to a large extent a more dynamic and less class-bound society, and it still offers individuals that opportunity for constant reinvention that lies at the heart of our national dream. i think it is more of a warning, a worst case scenario he is discussing rather than a degrading of america. he holds dual passports and may sit somewhat on the fence but he does say: OUR national dream.
He also says "Whatever your intellectual and emotional responses may be to this burgeoning transatlantic conflict, it's difficult for any American to read Rifkin's book and not feel ashamed." Its not that he says all bad things about the US, he also points out a short list of problems in the EU. But the article clearly is not about problems in the EU and those caveats only serve as a backstop for the author when called on it. Hegemony is not absolute. Agree on that. But I'm more worried about the PRC than the EU.
IMHO, this article paints a somewhat imbalanced picture of European economic growth. The way it's working, all of the new EU countries are providing almost all of the growth. Germany, for instance, is having horrible troubles generating any domestic growth. See, for instance, the recent closure of GM plants in Germany. Additionally, some of the member states have begun violating central banking rules, so the Euro is under some strain. All of the gains in the Euro recently are a result of the US deficit devaluing the dollar, not a result of intrinsic strength in the Euro. Furthermore, there has always been a virtual fist when it comes to setting some of the more controversial EU policy decisions. Discussion of the French farm subsidies, in particular, seems to cause every policy meeting to devolve into a screaming match. The growth that the EU can generate by incorporating the undeveloped Eastern European countries is clearly finite, and even that isn't a sure thing (see the horrible state of the former East Germany). Furthermore, the extreme degree of autonomy among member states makes the body unwieldy and unable to adapt quickly. While it certainly will impart some advantages to it's member states, for it to become truly effective the body would need more power, and most of the member states are unwilling to give up any more autonomy at all.
