Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Introduction
NEW LESSONS from the OLD WORLD
Chapter 1 - The Slow Death of the American Dream
Chapter 2 - The New Land of Opportunity
Chapter 3 - The Quiet Economic Miracle
THE MAKING of the MODERN AGE
Chapter 4 - Space, Time, and Modernity
Chapter 5 - Creating the Individual
Chapter 6 - Inventing the Ideology of Property
Chapter 7 - Forging Capitalist Markets and Nation-States
THE COMING GLOBAL ERA
Chapter 8 - Network Commerce in a Globalized Economy
Chapter 9 - The “United States” of Europe
Chapter 10 - Government Without a Center
Chapter 11 - Romancing the Civil Society
Chapter 12 - The Immigrant Dilemma
Chapter 13 - Unity in Diversity
Chapter 14 - Waging Peace
Chapter 15 - A Second Enlightenment
Chapter 16 - Universalizing the European Dream
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ALSO BY JEREMY RIFKIN
Common Sense II
Own Your Own Job
Who Should Play God? (with Ted Howard)
The Emerging Order
The North Will Rise Again (with Randy Barber)
Entropy (with Ted Howard)
Algeny
Declaration of a Heretic
Time Wars
Biosphere Politics
Beyond Beef
Voting Green (with Carol Grunewald) The End of Work
The Biotech Century
The Age of Access
The Hydrogen Economy
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Rifkin, Jeremy.
The European dream : how Europe’s vision of the future is quietly eclipsing the American dream / Jeremy Rifkin. p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
eISBN : 978-1-101-11857-3
1. Economic development—Social aspects—Europe. 2. Economic development—Social aspects—United States. 3. Quality of life—Europe. 4. Quality of life—United States. 5. Europe—Social policy. 6. Europe—Economic policy.
7. United States—Social policy. 8. United States—Economic policy. I. Title. HC240.R.3’094—dc22
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
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FOR CAROL
And for
the Erasmus generation
of college students in Europe
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I WOULD LIKE to thank Sarah E. Mann for a masterful job in directing the research for the book. Coordinating the sheer volume of material that went into the preparation of the book was a daunting challenge. Nevertheless, under Sarah’s stewardship, the process was always keenly focused and discerning. I have great admiration for Sarah’s organizational skills and her ability, under fire, to keep the research mission in hand, on track, and up to date.
I would also like to thank the following people for their help at various stages of the project: Clara Mack, Alexia Robinson, Michelle Baker, Loring Katawala, Jennifer Brostek, Sima Habash, Peter Kossakowski, Ryan Levinson, Vanessa Mambrino, Alex Merati, Jay Parekh, Jiehae Park, Boris Schwartz, Alex Taylor, and Audren Zmirou.
I would also like to thank my father-in-law, Ted Grunewald, for valuable research-related contributions along the way. I’d also like to thank Ted and my mother-in-law, Dorothy Grunewald, for the many lively and provocative conversations that helped provide perspective for the book.
I’d also like to thank my longtime literary agent Jim Stein for his encouragement and support.
I’d like to thank the Tarcher group for ten years of collaboration on five different books. Special thanks to my old friend Jeremy Tarcher, for making a place for me in his publishing fold. I would also like to thank Joel Fotinos, my publisher, for his unwavering support over the years with regard to our various publishing ventures. My thanks also to Ken Siman, my publicist, for always going the extra mile, Lance Fitzgerald for his help in securing our foreign markets, and Mark Birkey for his excellent copyediting of the book.
I’d like to thank my editor Mitch Horowitz for the many long and fruitful discussions that helped shape so much of the thinking and direction of the book. Every author hopes to work with an editor who is collaborator and friend, prod and enthusiast. I consider myself fortunate to have such an editor.
Finally, I’d like to thank my wife, Carol Grunewald, for her inspiration. Doing this book was her idea. We have both spent a great deal of time shuttling back and forth to Europe over the years, meeting diverse people and experiencing the depth and richness of what Europe has to offer. In the process, we have come to know Europe together. Her insights are woven throughout the book.
INTRODUCTION
I WAS A YOUNG ACTIVIST in the 1960s. Like many of my contemporaries, I found myself caught up in “The Great Social Upheaval.” African Americans were demanding their right to sit at the front of the bus in Montgomery, Alabama, and marching on the streets of Chicago with raised clenched fists, chanting “Black Power.” American boys were coming home from Vietnam in body bags, first in dribbles, then in waves. College students were demanding an end to an unjust American war in Southeast Asia and barricading themselves in university administration offices in protest against an undemocratic educational system that denied them a voice and vote in academic decisions that affected their lives.
Liberation was in the air. You could smell it. Tired of nuclear air-raid drills, cold wars, men in gray flannel suits, and the stultifying sameness of American suburban life, young people everywhere were in revolt. Free speech, open sex, rock and roll, drugs, and flower power made their way across the country and into every American town and city. The rebellion kept metamorphosing: at times, it was difficult staying abreast or even holding on. Class politics gave way to cultural politics, then sexual politics, and, finally, ecological politics. Che Guevara and Huey Newton posters were put up on walls and then taken down to make room for posters of the Beatles and Rolling Stones, and then they, in turn, were taken down to make room for posters showing the Earth’s photo taken from outer space.
The Old Left gave way to the New Left. Historical consciousness and abstract talk of dialectics, materialism, and imperialism began to lose resonance to therapeutic consciousness. Instead of quoting from Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto or Mao’s Little Red Book, young people were more likely to share their own innermost feelings and talk about the dynamics of their interpersonal relationships as politics became group therapy. Talk of political revolution gave way to the quest for more personal spiritual transformation. By the early 1970s, process had all but tru
mped ideology. In the wings, however, were new movements ready to make their mark. The women’s movement, the environmental movement, the human rights and animal rights movements, the gay movement, all broke through and began to command the public’s attention.
Everyone, it seemed, was demanding the right to be recognized. People were coming out of closets, opening doors, beating down on fences and barricades, pushing before microphones and cameras, in a mass adrenaline rush whose only apparent purpose, at times, was to eliminate boundaries and borders of every conceivable kind. It was madness of a particular ilk. At the eye of the storm were two crosscutting currents: the first, a restless yearning for some kind of higher personal calling in what was perceived to be an increasingly materialistically oriented world; the second, the need to find some sense of shared community in a society grown remote and uncaring. We all dreamed of a new age where each person’s rights were respected, no one was left behind, cultural differences were welcomed, everyone could enjoy a good quality of life and still live sustainably with the Earth, and people could live together in peace and harmony.
Most of us railed against the American empire, which was blamed for just about every ill besetting society. Some even reverted to terrorist activity in the vain hope of bringing the system down. A similar social upheaval was taking place at the same time in Europe and elsewhere around the world.
But through it all, virtually every young American activist I knew believed, deep down, that if fundamental changes were to occur, they would start here in America and spread to the rest of the world. That’s because even in the darkest days of our disbelief, we kept the belief in the American Spirit—that unflagging conviction that America is a special place with a special calling. Although not one of my friends in the “movement” would dare admit it, we all retained the unique American sense that here in this country anything and everything is possible to achieve if only we feel strongly enough and are determined enough to make a difference. European youth were far less convinced that anything they did would really ever make a difference. Their politics were motivated more by defiance than by reform.
Now, more than thirty years later, the tables have turned. Much of the feelings we once had about what’s wrong with the world and what needs to be done to remedy it failed to take root and mature here in America. Yes, we have our fair share of public interest groups advancing any one of a number of ideas and causes whose lineage can be traced back to the restless yearnings bubbling up from the ghetto streets and college campuses more than a generation ago. But, curiously, it is in Europe where the feelings of the sixties generation has given rise to a bold new experiment in living—one whose shadowy outline was just barely perceptible to us back then in the days of our youth.
One could point to many reasons why Europeans seem to be leading the way into the new era. But among all the possible explanations, one stands out. It is the cherished American Dream itself, once the ideal and envy of the world, that has led America to its current impasse. That dream emphasizes the unbridled opportunity of each individual to pursue success, which, in the American vernacular, has generally meant financial success. The American Dream is far too centered on personal material advancement and too little concerned with the broader human welfare to be relevant in a world of increasing risk, diversity, and interdependence. It is an old dream, immersed in a frontier mentality, that has long since become passé. While the American Spirit is tiring and languishing in the past, a new European Dream is being born. It is a dream far better suited to the next stage in the human journey—one that promises to bring humanity to a global consciousness befitting an increasingly interconnected and globalizing society.
The European Dream emphasizes community relationships over individual autonomy, cultural diversity over assimilation, quality of life over the accumulation of wealth, sustainable development over unlimited material growth, deep play over unrelenting toil, universal human rights and the rights of nature over property rights, and global cooperation over the unilateral exercise of power.
The European Dream exists at the crossroads between post-modernity and the emerging global age and provides the suspension to bridge the divide between the two eras. Post-modernity was never meant to be a new age but, rather, was more of a twilight period of modernity—a time to sit in judgment about the many shortfalls of the modern era. If the sixties generation of protests and experimentation was aimed at both knocking down old boundaries that constrained the human spirit and testing new realities, it came with an intellectual companion in the form of postmodern thought.
The post-modernists asked how the world came to be locked into a death chant. What were the reasons that led to the dropping of the atomic bombs over the Japanese cities of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, and the establishment of Nazi death camps in Europe, detention camps in the Gulag, and Maoist re-education camps in the Chinese countryside? How did we end up in a world more divided than ever between rich and poor? Why were women, people of color, and ethnic minorities around the world discriminated against or, worse yet, held in conditions of bondage? Why were we destroying the environment and poisoning our biosphere? Why were some nations continually bullying other nations and seeking hegemony through war, conquest, and subjugation? How did the human race come to lose its innate sense of deep play and become machinelike drones, even to the point of making ceaseless work the very definition of a person’s existence? When and why did materialism become a substitute for idealism and consumption metamorphose from a negative to a positive term?
The post-modernists looked to modernity itself as the culprit. They placed the blame for much of the world’s ills on what they regarded as the rigid assumptions underlying modern thought. The European Enlightenment, with its vision of unlimited material progress, came in for particular rebuke, as did market capitalism, state socialism, and nation-state ideology. Modernity, argued the post-modernist thinkers, was at its core deeply flawed. The very ideas of a knowable objective reality, irreversible linear progress, and human perfectibility were too rigidly conceived and historically biased, and failed to take into consideration other perspectives and points of view of the human condition and the ends of history.
The new generation of scholars was leery of overarching grand narratives and single-minded utopian visions that attempted to create a unified vision of human behavior. By locking humanity into the “one right way” of thinking about the world, post-modernists contend, modern thought became dismissive of any other points of view and ultimately intolerant of opposing ideas of any kind. Those in power—be they capitalists or socialists, conservatives or liberals—continue to use these meta-narratives to keep people contained and controlled, argue the post-modernists. Modern thought, according to the critics, has been used to justify colonial ventures around the world and keep people divided from one another and in conditions of subservience to the powers that be.
It was the stifling nature of these all-encompassing grand visions and single-minded utopian ideas about how people were expected to behave and act in the world that the sixties generation rebelled against. The post-modernists provided the rationalization for the revolt, arguing that there is no one single perspective but, rather, as many perspectives of the world as there are individual stories to tell. Post-modern sociology emphasizes pluralism and tolerance of the different points of view that make up the totality of the human experience. For the post-modernists, there is no one ideal regime to which to aspire but, rather, a potpourri of cultural experiments, each of value.
The post-modernists engaged in an all-out assault on the ideological foundations of modernity, even denying the idea of history as a redemptive saga. What we end up with at the end of the post-modern deconstruction process are modernity reduced to intellectual rubble and an anarchic world where everyone’s story is equally compelling and valid and worthy of recognition.
If the post-modernists razed the ideological walls of modernity and freed the prisoners, they left them with no particular place to g
o. We became existential nomads, wandering through a boundaryless world full of inchoate longings in a desperate search for something to be attached to and believe in. While the human spirit was freed up from old categories of thought, we are each forced to find our own paths in a chaotic and fragmented world that is even more dangerous than the all-encompassing one we left behind.
Post-modern thought didn’t make significant inroads into what we call middle America. It has always been more influential in Europe. Over half of all Americans are devoutly religious—more so than any other industrialized people—and they just don’t buy the idea of a relativist world. Religious Americans still believe in a grand scheme of things and live their beliefs intimately each day. More secular Americans, while not wedded to an overarching religious frame of reference, are generally committed to another all-encompassing social vision—the Enlightenment idea of history as the steady and irreversible advance of material progress. There is, however, a third, smaller grouping in America, which is made up largely of the activist and counterculture generation of the 1960s, and their now grown children, who are far more comfortable with post-modernity. They tend to view the world less in terms of absolute values and ironclad truths and more in terms of relative values and changing preferences and are generally more tolerant of other points of view and multicultural perspectives.
Political analysts divide America into two cultural camps, the reds and the blues, and argue that the former reflect America’s strongly held conservative religious values while the latter are far more liberal and cosmopolitan in their orientation. The red population, according to pollsters, is geographically concentrated in the Southeast, Middle-west, prairie states, Rocky Mountain states, and the southwest region of the country. The blue part of the population is clustered more in the Northeast, upper Middle-west, and the West Coast.
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