The European Dream

by Jeremy Rifkin

  The genius of the founding fathers lay in translating extremely high political ambitions . . . into a series of more specific, almost technical decisions. This indirect approach made further action possible. Rapprochement took place gradually. From confrontation we moved to willingness to cooperate in the economic sphere and then on to integration.36

  For Prodi and other European leaders, superpower status is derived from expanding cooperation rather than enlarging sovereignty. It’s not force of arms, but negotiating skills and openness to dialogue and conflict resolution that are the distinguishing characteristics of this new kind of superpower. That’s why “process” is so important to the new politics. The essence of the European Dream is the overcoming of brute power and the establishment of moral conscience as the operating principle governing the affairs of the human family.

  Most Americans find such sentiments a bit gooey and unrealistic. Europeans say that the opposite is the case. The new Europe was not born of naïveté and inspired by Pollyannaish fantasies but, rather, developed out of a sense of utter repugnance at the kind of barbaric behavior human beings are capable of inflicting on their fellow human beings. The new European experiment is an attempt to transcend the worst vestiges of humanity’s past and is guided not by wishful thinking but by a sober assessment of the human condition.

  Now that Europe has shown that its new approach to politics can work for twenty-five nations, representing 455 million human beings, it is anxious to share its experience with the rest of the world. President Prodi’s idea of a European superpower is something quite new and extraordinary. He believes that the European Union “has a role to play in world ‘governance’ ”—to make the European experience a model for the rest of the world to emulate. Prodi notes with pride that in Europe, “the rule of law has replaced the crude interplay of power . . . power politics have lost their influence.” He believes that by “making a success of integration we are demonstrating to the world that it is possible to create a method for peace.”37

  In a survey of public opinion over whether the European Union should become a superpower, 65 percent of the European public said they favor the EU becoming a peer of the United States. But when asked why they favor such a course, the answer they gave was that it would allow Europe to more effectively cooperate rather than compete with the United States. Even in France, a country most Americans feel to be occasionally at odds with the U.S., 90 percent of the public favored the EU becoming a superpower, and the overwhelming majority said that if it were on a more equal footing with America, Europe would be able to work much more closely with the United States.38

  Americans, by contrast, have a very different attitude on the question of whether the EU should be a superpower. Fifty-two percent of Americans say the U.S. should be the world’s only superpower, and only 33 percent say they favor the European Union enjoying a superpower status.39 While Europeans see their superpower status as a way to deepen cooperation on the world stage, Americans perceive superpower status as a potential threat to American dominance in the world.

  Robert Kagan, of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, sums up the growing schism in the way Europeans and Americans view their roles in the world. He writes,

  On the all-important question of power—the efficacy of power, the morality of power, the desirability of power—American and European perspectives are diverging. Europe is turning away from power, or to put it a little differently, it is moving beyond power into a self-contained world of laws and rules and transnational negotiation and cooperation. It is entering a post-historical paradise of peace and relative prosperity, the realization of Immanuel Kant’s “perpetual peace.” Meanwhile, the United States remains mired in history, exercising power in an anarchic Hobbesian world where international laws and rules are unreliable, and where true security and the defense and promotion of a liberal order still depend on the possession and use of military might.40

  Understandably, when Europeans are asked about spending money on defense, only 19 percent favor increasing expenditures, while 33 percent would like to cut military spending and 42 percent want to maintain the current low defense budgets. Forty-four percent of Americans, on the other hand, are willing to increase military spending.41 That doesn’t mean that Europeans aren’t willing to spend money—but they want the funds to be used to support their very different idea about how to conduct foreign and security policies.

  Chris Patten, the EU commissioner in charge of external relations, outlined the European vision of a twenty-first-century foreign policy in a speech delivered in June 2000. He said that the EU foreign policy should be true to values that animate its domestic relations and that it should play to its strengths. Patten reminded his fellow Europeans that the EU, for all of its exalted rhetoric about building bridges to peace, was powerless to stop the fighting in neighboring Bosnia or Kosovo in the 1990s, and had to rely on American military intervention to stop the conflict. How does Europe prevent future Bosnias and Kosovos from occurring? Patten says the answer is to be more pre-emptive in the future and draw troubled countries and regions into effective dialogue and active cooperation with the EU before hostilities break out. “This requires,” says Patten, “the application of tools such as trade, external assistance, environmental cooperation, competition policy and so on, which are matters of Community competence.”42

  Like Prodi, Patten believes that the European Union should apply its regional experience of multilateral cooperation on a wider world stage. Patten notes that the European model of integration “is inspiring regional experiments from Asia to Latin America,” and says that “the EU’s ambition must be to reflect abroad what is best about our own model. Our sense of civil society.”43

  American foreign policy analysts don’t buy the idea that bad guys can always be reasoned with, and they ask how Mr. Patten would suggest dealing with rogue regimes like North Korea and Iraq, or trouble spots where long-held prejudices and animosities are so deeply entrenched that they appear irremediable, such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Patten counters by using Europe’s own past experience as an example. He makes the rather convincing argument that “European integration shows that compromise and reconciliation is possible after generations of prejudice, war and suffering.”44

  Harvard professor Joseph Nye Jr. describes Europe’s new approach to a common foreign and security policy as the exercise of “soft power,” which he defines as co-opting people rather than coercing them. Nye says that when it comes to conducting foreign policy,

  a country may obtain the outcomes it wants in world politics because other countries want to follow it, admiring its values, emulating its example, aspiring to its level of prosperity and openness. In this sense, it is just as important to set the agenda in world politics and attract others as it is to force them to change through threat or use of military or economic weapons.45

  For a long time, America’s soft power was a magnet for the rest of the world. Our democratic values, our multicultural origins, our openness, our can-do attitude, our optimism, our innovation and creativity, our prosperity, drew the world to our shores. We served as an inspiration for others. Today, much of America’s soft-power assets have begun to depreciate in value. Others began to lose faith in the American model during the Vietnam War. In the post-9/11 era, world public opinion has turned dramatically against the American government’s policies in the world. Many see America, whether justified or not, as an arrogant bully, insensitive to other voices and opinions and unresponsive to a range of concerns that affect the rest of the world. According to a TimeEurope.com poll, 87 percent of Europeans think the U.S. “poses the greatest danger to world peace in 2003.”46 Similarly, a Gallup International poll conducted in thirty-three countries in 2002 reports that in twenty-three of the countries surveyed, “the population is more likely to say U.S. foreign policy has a negative rather than a positive effect on their country.”47 Most Americans are blown away by such attitudes. We’ve always thought o
f ourselves as champions of justice, as peacemakers. How could the whole world be so wrong in their assessment of us?

  It should be noted that while world public opinion is overwhelmingly negative in its assessment of the U.S. government, it is more favorable to the American people and our way of life, although even here, our soft power is eroding. While there is much that attracts others to America, there is a growing unease over what is perceived to be American selfishness and brutishness. I am forever asked by Europeans, for example, why Americans insist on driving big, gas-guzzling automobiles that pollute the world. Or why America, the richest country on Earth, does so little to help the poor. Or why Americans have so many guns, and why there is so much violence and bloodshed on American streets.

  It goes without saying that people all over the world enjoy American music, American movies and television, American dress and consumer lifestyles, and American education. They are less favorably disposed, however, to the way America gets on with the rest of the world and are leery of what they perceive to be a sense of narcissism and lawlessness permeating American culture.

  Europe’s soft power, by contrast, appears to be appreciating in value. Even many of my American friends will occasionally say, “Why can’t we be more like the Europeans in our values and attitudes?” It’s not all that simple. There are plenty of things not to admire in Europe. Scratch the surface, and one can detect a sense of elitism and superiority among many Europeans, especially among the professional class, that is absent among their professional peers in America. And while there is far less violence on the streets of Europe, youth gangs are becoming more prevalent and crime is escalating. And when it comes to discrimination against minorities, Europeans more than hold their own with Americans. The dramatic increase in anti-Semitism and intolerance of immigrant populations is unsettling. Still, Europeans appear to be closer to the pulse of the changes that are transforming the world into a globalized society. More than two hundred years ago, it was the young United States that captured the world’s attention with its dream of democracy and the inalienable right of every human being to pursue happiness. Today, the world’s attention is being drawn more to the new European Dream with its emphasis on inclusivity, cultural diversity, universal human rights, quality of life, sustainable development, and peaceful coexistence.

  A New Kind of Military

  European foreign and security policy rests on two operational pillars: first, redefining the role of military engagement away from the old nation-state idea of territorial defense and toward the new transnational idea of peacekeeping and humanitarian intervention; second, employing economic assistance as a foreign policy tool to secure greater cooperation among peoples and countries.

  Crisis conflict resolution is the centerpiece of European military preparedness. Over the past half century, EU member states have provided 80 percent of the peacekeeping forces in conflicts around the world, as well as 70 percent of the funds for reconstruction.48 The aim of European military operations, sometimes called “robust peacekeeping” or “second-generation peacekeeping,” is to stop the violence between the warring parties and create the conditions for establishing a workable peace accord. This kind of military intervention requires a complete rethinking of military strategies. New military terms such as “safe havens,” “no-fly zones,” and “humanitarian corridors” have become part of the lexicon in recent years.

  The new military formula starts from the opposite assumption of conventional military engagement. In the old military scheme, the idea was to impose maximum casualties on the enemy. In the new military scheme, the goal is to minimize casualties on all sides of the conflict. The soldier’s orders are no longer to risk his or her life and to kill the enemy. Peacekeeping troops have a different mission—risking their lives in order to save the lives of civilians. Mary Kaldor, professor of Global Governance and Human Rights at the London School of Economics, puts it succinctly: “Whereas the legitimate bearer of arms, the soldier, had to be prepared to die for his country, the peacekeeper risks his or her life for humanity.”49 The EU member countries contribute ten times the number of peacekeeping troops as the U.S., belying the oft-heard American contention that Europe lets America shoulder, alone, the task of being the world’s policeman.50

  The very idea that the European Union could dispatch troops to any member state’s territory to restore order if it were in violation of the European Convention on Human Rights is revolutionary. The purpose of military action is no longer to confiscate land, indenture populations, and accumulate property but, rather, to protect people’s universal human rights. Writing in the journal Foreign Affairs, Leslie H. Gelb and Justine Rosenthal point out the historical significance of this new kind of military thinking. States and governing institutions such as the EU are signaling a fundamental change in how they perceive the very purpose of the military. “Just think of it,” say the authors of the article, “states endorsing the principle that morality trumps sovereignty.”51

  The other pillar of the European Union’s foreign and security policy is development assistance. Most Americans believe that the U.S. is far and away the most generous country in the world when it comes to assisting the less fortunate in developing countries. Not true. U.S. foreign aid is a mere 0.1 percent of our Gross National Income (GNI), or one-third of European levels.52 Europeans now provide more than 50 percent of all civilian development assistance in the world.53 The EU also provides 47 percent of all the humanitarian assistance in the world. (The U.S. only contributes 36 percent.)54 In 2002, EU humanitarian aid amounted to nearly €1.2 billion. Humanitarian assistance includes aid to refugees and displaced persons and emergency aid to assist victims of natural disasters and civil and ethnic conflicts. The U.S., however, is the leading provider of food aid.55

  An increasing proportion of European development assistance is being transferred from the member states to the EU itself. The EU now administers 17 percent of all the development assistance funds generated by its member countries.56

  It’s not only the amount of economic aid that’s important but also the quality of the assistance. The U.S., for example, has long been criticized for tying its aid programs to strategic military objectives rather than just to need. In 2003, the Center for Global Development and Foreign Policy magazine published the results of a lengthy study ranking the world’s richest countries according to how much their development assistance helps or hinders the economic and social development of poor countries. The Commitment to Development Index, or CDI, is designed to look beyond foreign aid programs and examine how generous is their aid-giving, how hospitable are their immigration policies, how sizable are their peacekeeping operations, and how hefty is their foreign direct investment in developing countries. The index also penalizes financial assistance to corrupt regimes, practices that harm the environment, and barriers to imports from developing countries.57

  The United States ranks near the bottom of the index. Of the twenty-one richest countries, only Japan fares worse than the U.S. Sixteen of the top nineteen countries are all European. Nine European nations rank in the top ten countries in the index. There are a number of reasons for the dismal performance of the U.S. vis-à-vis European countries in the Development Index. While the U.S. distributes a high amount of foreign aid to developing countries, it ties nearly 80 percent of its aid resources to agreements to purchase U.S. goods and services. The U.S. also performs poorly on environmental policies and contributions to peacekeeping.58

  For all of its talk about fielding a different kind of military force—one dedicated to conflict resolution and peacekeeping functions—Europe has, at best, enjoyed a spotty record. By and large, European forces have fallen short in conflict intervention and the ability to actually stop hostilities, while they’ve been shown to be more effective in policing the peace once overt hostilities ended.

  The intervention into the Bosnia conflict in 1992 and the Kosovo War at the end of the last decade proved embarrassing. European military fo
rces were virtually powerless to impose their will on a ragtag army of thugs under the command of Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic. The Kosovo conflict was particularly painful for the European military command. Were it not for U.S. military intervention, it’s unlikely that Europe could have mustered the military might necessary to stop the hostility. Having to rely on American military forces for what was essentially a low-grade military action was humiliating. If Europe could not keep the peace in its own backyard against a less than formidable foe, how could the EU expect to maintain the peace and security of 455 million people living in twenty-five different nations?

  The Kosovo War demonstrated just how lame the European military machine had become. The European forces were so ill trained, their weaponry so outmoded, and their surveillance and command-and-control structures so inadequate that they couldn’t even be effectively integrated into what was essentially an American-led war effort. In the end, the European contribution to the war effort actually hindered the execution of the war.

  The American military command was frustrated not only by the military shortcomings of the Europeans but also by what it perceived to be battlefield ineptness by European generals. Politics often got in the way, sending ambiguous messages to Milosevic about the Allies’ intentions and willingness to fight. General Wesley Clark, the commander of NATO forces, complained that military decisions were continually being second-guessed and put on hold as Europeans fretted over the legal and political ramifications. “It was always the Americans who pushed for the escalation to new, more sensitive targets,” said Clark, “. . . and always some of the Allies who expressed doubts and reservations.”59 Clark offered a sobering assessment of the “joint” NATO operation in Kosovo: “We paid a price in operational effectiveness by having to constrain the nature of the operation to fit within the political and legal concerns of NATO member nations.” 60 As for the Europeans, they wondered out loud what they would do in some future conflict on European soil if the United States were not there to bail them out and take command.