Reappraisals

by Tony Judt

  Europeans even appear to be better at generating small and medium-sized 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 U.S.). 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 Western 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 U.S. 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 U.S. today the richest 1 percent hold 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 U.S. 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

  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.22 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 familiar 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 U.S. 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 foresight and wisdom in guiding Europe to its present eminence. According to Reid, in “the years following the Schuman Declaration, the European Movement took the continent by storm.” The European Coal and Steel Community was a “rip-roaring economic success.” Rifkin goes further: Europe, he writes, is “a giant freewheeling experimental laboratory for rethinking the human condition. . . . ”(!)

  These claims are absurd.10 The European Union is what it is: the largely unintended product of decades of negotiations by Western 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 thirteen 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 uninte-grated 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 th
at 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 fester at its gates—much less casting seventy million Turkish Muslims into the fold of radical Islam—Europe’s leaders are deeply troubled at the prospect (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 U.S., 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.

  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.23 As an international citizen, he notes, the United States is irresponsibly delinquent. The EU gave away $36.5 billion in development aid in 2003. The U.S. 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 U.S. spent eight times the amount it gave in overseas aid to everyone else. The U.S. 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 U.S. 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 administration 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 U.S. 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” of European-American relations? It is true that the UK today manages both to be part of the 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 as 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 internationally minded “Euroatlanticism” is his ideal, and Tony Blair incarnates it: “Tony Blair has grasped and 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 the European Constitution to a skeptical British public. And I don’t think he harbors any illusions about the “special relationship.” Yet he still insists that Great Britain has this vital role to play 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, the invasion of Iraq in particular, have alienated Britain from many of its fellow EU members without gaining any influence over Washington, where the British prime minister’s visits have been 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 U.S. than anything found in Western Europe. British hourly
productivity is well below most Western 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 U.S. 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 hyper-power.” That is good advice. But is anyone 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 Condoleezza Rice 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 futurestanding 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 U.S. should block its emergence.