The European Dream

by Jeremy Rifkin

  God is not the only consideration to be given short shift. There is only a single reference to private property, tucked deep inside the document, and barely a passing mention of free markets and trade. The Union’s objectives, however, include a clear commitment to “sustainable development . . . based on balanced economic growth,” “a social market economy,” and “protection and improvement of the quality of the environment.”40 The Union’s other objectives are to “promote peace . . . combat social exclusion and discrimination . . . promote social justice and protection, equality between men and women, solidarity between generations, and protection of children’s rights.”41

  Much of the constitution is given over to the issue of fundamental human rights. It might even be said that human rights are the very heart and soul of the document. Giscard d’Estaing declared with pride, on the unveiling of the document, that “of all the men and women in the world, it is the citizens of Europe who will have the most extensive rights.”42

  The rights outlined in the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union go far beyond the rights contained in our own Bill of Rights and subsequent constitutional amendments. They include the Right of Life: “no one should be condemned to the death penalty, or executed.” Everyone has the right to have his or her physical and mental activity respected. In the fields of medicine and biology, the individual’s right to free and informed consent is protected. Eugenics practices are prohibited, “in particular, those aiming at the ‘selection’ of a person.” Selling human body parts is also prohibited, as is the reproductive cloning of human beings. Everyone has “the right to the protection of personal data concerning him or her.” Similarly, “everyone has the right to access the data which has been collected concerning him or her, and the right to have it rectified.” Everyone has “the right to marry and the right to found a family.” Everyone has “the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his or her interests.” “Everyone has the right to education and to have access to vocational and continuing education.” While discrimination based on sex, race, color, and ethnic or religious background is prohibited, other discriminations, based on genetic features, language, and opinions, are also prohibited. The Union “shall respect cultural, religious, and linguistic diversity” as well. Children are granted the conventional rights “to such protection and care as is necessary for their well-being,” but they are also guaranteed the right to “express their views freely.” “Such views shall be taken into consideration on matters which concern them in accordance with their age and maturity.” In addition, “every child shall have the right to maintain, on a regular basis, a personal relationship and direct contact with both his or her parents, unless that is contrary to his or her interests.”43

  There are still other rights that do not exist in our U.S. Constitution. For example, the EU Constitution grants everyone “the right of access to a free placement service,” as well as “the right to limitation of maximum working hours, to daily and weekly rest periods, and to an annual period of paid leave.” The constitution also guarantees the right to paid maternity leave and parental leave following the birth or adoption of a child. The Union “recognizes the right to social and housing assistance so as to ensure a decent existence for all those who lack sufficient resources.” The constitutional guarantees also include “the right of access to preventive health care and the right to benefit from medical treatment.” The EU even guarantees “a high level of environmental protection and the improvement in the quality of the environment . . . in accordance with the principle of sustainable development.”44

  Many of the rights guaranteed by the new European Constitution remain controversial in the United States. While they have their advocates, and enjoy some measure of popular support, public sentiment remains far too divided to elevate them to the status of universal human rights. And the U.S. is not alone. Few countries outside Europe would likely subscribe to most of the universal human rights guaranteed by the new EU Constitution. To this extent, the EU has become the undisputed leader in championing new human rights among the governing regimes of the world.

  The EU Constitution is something quite new in human history. Though it is often weighty—even cumbersome—and does not enjoy the eloquence of, say, the French and U.S. constitutions, it is the first document of its kind to expand the human franchise to the level of global consciousness, with rights and responsibilities that encompass the totality of human existence on Earth. (While the United Nations Charter and subsequent United Nations human rights conventions also speak to universal human rights, the UN itself is not a governing institution representing individual citizens, as is the EU.)

  The language throughout the text is one of universalism, making it clear that its focus is not a people, or a territory, or a nation, but rather the human race and the planet we inhabit. If we were to sum up the gist of the document, it would be a commitment to respect human diversity, promote inclusivity, champion human rights and the rights of nature, foster quality of life, pursue sustainable development, free the human spirit for deep play, build a perpetual peace, and nurture a global consciousness. Together, these values and goals, which appear in many different forms throughout the constitution, represent the warp and woof of a fledgling European Dream.

  10

  Government Without a Center

  DREAMS REFLECT HOPES, not achievements. To this extent, the European Constitution represents a future to be filled in. And, like the U.S. Constitution of more than two hundred years ago, one can point to the many hypocrisies and contradictions that belie the noble sentiments contained in the new European covenant. Nonetheless, the framers of the European Constitution have forthrightly set to paper a vision of the kind of world they aspire to and would like to live in and the rules to oversee the journey.

  For the past half century, Europe’s political elites have engaged in a running struggle to define the limits of power of the emerging European Community. While the federalists have argued for ceding more power to the Union, the confederalists have attempted to retain power in the hands of the member states and have thought of the European Union more as an intergovernmental forum to coordinate national objectives and strengthen each member’s own self-interests. Former French prime minister Lionel Jospin put the confederalist position this way: “I want Europe, but I remain attached to my nation. Making Europe without unmaking France, or any other European nation, that is my political choice.”1 In other words, the Union is to be a “Europe of States.” All of the compromises along the way have reflected the tensions between these two divergent forces.

  While the powers that be continue to jostle back and forth between federalism and confederalism, the very technological, economic, and social realities that gave rise to the European Community and that continue to push it along its journey to union have created a political dynamic of a different sort. Rather than becoming a superstate or a mechanism to represent the enlightened national self-interests, the EU has metamorphosed into a third form. It has become a discursive forum whose function is to referee relationships and help coordinate activity among a range of players, of which the nation-state is only one. The EU’s primary role has become orchestral. It facilitates the coming together of networks of engagement that include nation-states but also extend outward to transnational organizations and inward to municipal and regional governments, as well as civil society organizations.

  The EU is a response to a peculiar kind of globalization—one that the visionaries of the post-World War II era never anticipated. Between 1945 and the late 1980s, the world was divided into two powerful political blocs, the United States and the Soviet Union. Each attempted to expand its sphere of influence by exercising a measure of centralized control over countries, regions, and global commercial forces. Likewise, the post-World War II era saw the rise of several hundred transnational corporations who sought to extend their reach and influence by transborder mergers and acquisitions and the establishment of vast g
lobal value chains. This was the era of centralized and hierarchical command-and-control operations, at both the political and economic levels.

  What neither the politicians nor business leaders foresaw was the advent of a new kind of technology revolution whose modus operandi is, at the same time, both highly connective and decentralized. The software revolution, the digitalization of media, personal computers, the World Wide Web, and wireless information flows transformed communications from a vertical to a horizontal plane and from centralized command-and-control to decentralized interactivity. Similarly, the shift in the global energy regime, which is just now getting under way, from elite energy sources such as oil, coal, natural gas, and nuclear, which are centrally organized and vertically distributed, to more dispersed renewable energy sources such as the sun, wind, biomass, geothermal, and hydro stored in the form of hydrogen, and generated locally at end sites in a decentralized fashion, is changing the very nature of how energy is shared. Power, both literally and figuratively, will be increasingly decentralized in the coming century.

  The EU was born into the old world of vertical organization and centralized control. The community was an effort to pool nation-states’ economic, social, and political resources and create “economies of scale” that could compete with the larger political and commercial forces around it. While one of the two political superpowers still exists and transnational corporations continue to expand their reach to every corner of the globe, counterforces at the local and regional levels are emerging that are both challenging global, political, and commercial hegemony and, at the same time, attempting to assert their places in an increasingly connected world.

  The new decentralized technologies are being exploited in two opposite directions—toward greater concentration as well as greater dispersion of power. For example, while Microsoft has attempted to be the gatekeeper to cyberspace by imposing its operating system on most owners of personal computers, the scrappy upstart company Linux, a firm started by social activists dedicated to the free sharing and sourcing of code between computer users, is now threatening Microsoft’s dominance.

  Likewise, while global corporations are using the new decentralized forms of communication to create business-to-business partnerships and establish a tighter grip on their respective industries and the communities in which they do business, local activists around the world use the same connective communication technologies to organize global resistance movements to what they regard as unbridled corporate power.

  The point is, the rise of the new decentralized information and communication technologies in the late 1980s unleashed powerful new forces and countervailing forces and brought many new players onto the public stage. The new connective technologies helped corporations transcend national boundaries and disperse their production and distribution activities around the globe. The same connective technologies, however, helped cities and regions, cultural and ethnic groups, and social and environmental movements to leapfrog national boundaries and begin exercising influence on a broader global playing field.

  The EU suddenly found itself in the midst of a whirlwind of contending forces vying for power and recognition, each with its own resources to bring to bear and its own agenda, and none powerful enough to dominate the political process alone. This was a far more complicated political game.

  Previously, the EU merely had to negotiate its external relationships with the two superpowers, the U.S. and USSR, and its internal relationships among the contending member states. The member states, in turn, contained the myriad of subnational forces within their own territories. The global information and communication revolutions decimated nation-state boundaries just as the cannon once toppled the city-state walls of the feudal era. And, like the former era, new forces were let loose onto the political landscape, this time beyond the reach of the nation-state itself.

  The Feedback Revolution

  The first inkling that politically centralized command-and-control mechanisms were too antiquated to accommodate the vast changes in spatial and temporal orientation brought on by the new information and communication technologies came with the sudden fall of the Soviet Empire. The new technologies ran havoc over the rigid bureaucratic style of governance in Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. The inability of Communist governance, at every level, to respond to the liberating power of decentralized global information and communication technologies helped seal its doom. The old walls of repression and censorship were too thin to withstand the media invasion. The penetration of MTV (Music Television), rock music, and Western lifestyles behind the iron curtain, via the new information and communication technologies, proved too much for a creaky governmental apparatus whose methods of governance were borrowed from technologies and organizational styles popular in the early twentieth century.

  The old centralized forms of governance—both in the Soviet Union and in the West—were modeled after Frederick Taylor’s Principles of Scientific Management. Taylor, whom we touched on in chapter 4, was the first to introduce a rationalized, hierarchical command-and-control mechanism into American industry in the first decade of the twentieth century. His model was quickly taken up by governments around the world.

  Taylor argued that management should assume complete authority over how work is carried out on the factory floor and front office. He reasoned that if laborers retained some control over how their work was to be executed, they would conspire to work as little as necessary to perform the tasks assigned to them. Taylor’s organizational model depended on severing any independent judgment on the part of the workers and giving them exact orders along with precise instructions on how they were to perform their work.

  The work of every workman is fully planned out by the management at least one day in advance, and each man receives in most cases complete written instructions, describing in detail the task which he is to accomplish, as well as the means to be used in doing the work. . . . This task specifies not only what is to be done, but how it is to be done and the exact time allowed for doing it. . . . Scientific management consists very largely in preparing for and carrying out these tasks.2

  Governments, like companies, relied on this kind of top-down bureaucratic model of governance for most of the twentieth century. In this schema, the ideas, feelings, and expertise of those delivering government services, as well as the affected citizenry, are largely ignored. The most efficient organization is deemed to be the one where the civil servants perform like soldiers and the citizenry are treated as passive recipients. The old form of rationalized command-and-control mirrored the machine mentality of the era. Both machines and men were thought of as passive instruments wound up by an outside prime mover and made to repeat simple actions over and over again. The rationalized model made little or no room for input from those executing the tasks or from those receiving the services. It was assumed that they had little value to contribute up the line of command.

  The introduction of intelligent information and communication machines with feedback loops changed the nature of technology and created new metaphors for rethinking the art of governance.

  The philosophical inspiration for the new technology revolution dates back to the early years of the twentieth century and the scientific writing of Alfred North Whitehead, the father of process philosophy. He was the first to eliminate the ancient wall separating space and time—being and becoming—and reduce all phenomena to pure activity. Before Whitehead, most philosophers believed that phenomena was divided into two realities: what something was and what it did. There was structure and function, the “being” of a thing and its “becoming.” Whitehead, one of the first modern philosophers to live during the transition to electricity, came to view behavior as pure process in which space and time melded together into a single extended field of pure activity. What something is, proclaimed Whitehead, can’t be differentiated from what it does. All phenomena represent continuous patterns of activity responding to changes in the patterns
of activity around them. Because everything is in continuous flux, novelty is present at every instant. Whitehead believed that all living things are continuously anticipating novelty in their surrounding environment and making adjustments to those changes in order to secure their duration—what we now call “feedback.” Whitehead called this anticipation-response mechanism “subjective aim” and said that it was really what “mind” was about.

  A half century after Whitehead’s insight, Norbert Wiener introduced a mechanical analogue of process philosophy with the concept of cybernetics. Wiener and his colleagues were working on improving the sighting and targeting of anti-aircraft gunnery in World War II. Wiener’s engineering insights on how machines and humans communicate transformed process philosophy into a new technological format, which soon thereafter gave birth to modern information and communications technology.