We love to vacation there. But when
we think of institutional Europe, what
comes to mind is an old and creaky set
of governing institutions riding precariously
astride a moribund economy
plagued by anti-market bias, inflexible
labor policies, bloated welfare bureaucracies,
and an aging and pampered
population. Many Americans dismiss
Europe as outdated and out of touch.
The reality on the ground, however,
in neighborhoods and communities, in
corporate boardrooms, and in the corridors
of power, suggests a far different
state of affairs. If the American way of
life is over-hyped, Europe's hidden assets
have been woefully undervalued and undersold.
The long and short of it is that
America is unaware of and unprepared
for the vast changes that are quickly
transforming Europe from a collection
of disparate, and, in the past, warring
nations to a United States of Europe.
Let us begin with some facts. Europe,
with its 455 million consumers, is
now the largest internal market in the
world. It is also the largest exporting
power. And the euro is now stronger
than the dollar - a reality few American
economists would have thought conceivable
just four years ago.
Why then are so few Americans paying
attention to the dramatic changes
taking place in Europe as it moves ever
closer to a political and economic union?
To a great extent, the problem is perceptual.
Americans, and most Europeans,
still compare individual European nations
to the United States when it comes
to relative political and economic power.
But such comparisons make less and less
sense. European states are becoming as
much a part of the European Union as
American states are part of the United
States.
Rather than thinking of Germany,
for example, in comparison to the
United States, we should compare it to
California - Germany being the largest
state in the European economy and California
the largest state in the U.S. economy.
When we begin to shift the way we
make comparisons, we start to grasp the
enormity of what is unfolding and the
potential consequences for America.
Germany's Gross Domestic Product of
$1,866 billion exceeds the $1,344 billion
GDP of California. The UK, the European
Union's second largest economy,
with a GDP of $1.4 trillion, is nearly
twice as large as our second largest state,
New York, with a GDP of $799 billion.
France is nearly 50 percent larger than
our third most powerful state economy,
Texas. Italy is more than twice as big as
our fourth most powerful state economy,
Florida. Spain edges out our fifth biggest
state, Illinois.
Although it may be painful for Germany,
the UK, France, Italy, and Spain to
have their economies compared to California,
New York, Texas, Florida, and Illinois,
this is the new frame of reference
that is emerging as European nations
metamorphose into a larger transnational
political space with a single economy.
The European Union is, indeed, a
new superpower that rivals the economic
power of the United States on the
world stage.
In many of the world's leading industries, European transnational companies
dominate business and trade. European
financial institutions are the
world's bankers. Fourteen of the twenty
largest commercial banks in the world
today are European, including three of
the top four, Deutsche Bank, Credit Suisse,
and BNP Paribas. European companies
outperform their American
counterparts in the chemical industry,
engineering and construction, aerospace,
food and consumer products, the drugstore
retail trade and insurance, to name
just a few fields. Sixty-one of the 140
biggest companies on the Global Fortune
500 rankings are European, while
only 50 are American.
This is not to suggest that European
companies have suddenly leaped way
ahead of their American competitors. In
some industries, European businesses
are clearly the market leaders, while in
others U.S. companies still dominate.
The message is rather that Europeanbased
global companies are able to
match their American counterparts
more often than not.
Much of the European Union's potential
depends on its ability to create a
streamlined and seamless internal commercial
arena. The European Union is in
the early stages of assembling a continental
wide transportation network, an
integrated electricity and energy network,
a common communication grid, a
single financial services market, and a
unified regulatory framework for conducting
business. The European Union
has established what it calls Trans European
Networks (TENS) covering the
transport, energy, and telecommunications
sectors, with the goal of connecting
all of Europe in a single state-of-the-art
high-tech grid. The price tag for uniting
Europe is expected to reach upward of
$500 billion and will be financed by both government and the private sector.
Many difficulties remain in creating
a cohesive internal market across Europe,
including integrating the ten new
Central, Eastern and Southern European
member states whose economies lag far
behind the wealthier Western and
Northern members. Still, the positive accomplishments
far outnumber the remaining
obstacles. Equally important,
with English increasingly becoming the
lingua franca of Europe, Europeans will
be able to exchange their labor, goods
and services with an ease approaching
that of the internal U.S. market by 2020.
English is already the language of choice
in many university and graduate school
courses, especially in the business and
science curriculums.
Americans are so used to thinking of
their country as the most successful on
earth that they might be surprised to
learn that, when it comes to the quality
of life, this is no longer the case. In the
European Union, for example, there are
approximately 322 physicians per
100,000 people, against only 279 in the
United States. The United States ranks
26th among the industrial nations in infant
mortality, well below the EU average.
The average life span in the 15 most
developed EU countries is now 78.2
years compared to 76.9 years in the
United States.
Children in 12 European nations
now rank higher in mathematical skills
than their American peers, and in eight
European countries children outscore
Americans in science.When it comes to
wealth distribution - a crucial measure
of a country's ability to deliver on the
promise of prosperity - the United States
ranks 24th among the industrial nations.
All 18 of the most developed European
countries have less income inequality between
rich and poor. There are now more poor people living in America than
in the sixteen European nations for
which data is available.
America is also more dangerous. The
U.S. homicide rate is four times higher
than that of the European Union. Even
more disturbingly, the rates of childhood
homicides, suicides, and firearms-related
deaths in the United States exceed those
of the 25 other wealthiest nations, including
the 14 wealthiest European
countries. Although the United States
has only four percent of the world's population,
it now contains a quarter of the
world's entire prison population.While
the EU member states average 87 prisoners
per 100,000 people, the U.S. figure is
an incredible 685 prisoners.
Europeans often say that Americans
"live to work while they "work to live.
The average paid vacation time in Europe
is now six weeks a year. By contrast,
the average American gets only two
weeks. Most Americans would also be
shocked to learn that the average commute
to work in Europe takes less than
19 minutes. When one considers what
makes a people great and what constitutes
a better way of life, Europe is beginning
to surpass America.
Europe's rebirth is propelled by a
new European Dream that, in many respects,
contrasts sharply with the older
American Dream. Nowhere is that more
so than when it comes to defining personal
freedom. For Americans, freedom
has long been associated with autonomy.
If one is autonomous, he or she is not
dependent on others or vulnerable to
circumstances beyond his or her control.
To be autonomous one needs to be
propertied. The more wealth one
amasses, the more independent one is in
the world. One is free by becoming selfreliant
and an island unto oneself.With
wealth comes exclusivity and with exclusivity
comes security.
For Europeans, however, freedom is
not found in autonomy but in embeddedness.
To be free is to have access to
many interdependent relationships. The
more communities one can access, the
more options one has for living a full
and meaningful life. It is inclusivity that
brings security - belonging, not belongings.
The American Dream puts an emphasis
on economic growth, personal
wealth, and independence. The new European
Dream focuses more on sustainable
development, quality of life, and
interdependence. The American Dream
pays homage to the work ethic. The European
Dream is more attuned to
leisure. The American Dream is inseparable
from the country's religious heritage
and deep spiritual faith. The
European Dream is secular to the core.
The American Dream depends on assimilation:
We associate success with shedding
our former ethnic ties and
becoming free agents in the great American
melting pot. The European Dream,
by contrast, is based on preserving one's
cultural identity and living in a multicultural
world.
The American Dream is wedded to
love of country and patriotism. The European
Dream is more cosmopolitan
and less territorial. Americans are more
willing to employ military force to protect
what we perceive to be our vital selfinterests.
Europeans are more reluctant
to use military force and instead favor
diplomacy, economic assistance and aid
to avert conflict and peacekeeping operations
to maintain order.
This is not to say that Europe has
suddenly become a utopia. For all their
talk of preserving cultural identity, Europeans
have become increasingly hostile
toward newly arrived immigrants and
asylum seekers. Ethnic strife and gious intolerance continue to flare up in
various pockets across Europe. Anti-
Semitism is on the rise again, as is discrimination
against Muslims and other
religious minorities.
While Europe's people and countries
berate American military hegemony and
what they regard as a trigger-happy foreign
policy, they are more than willing,
on occasion, to let the U.S. armed forces
safeguard European security interests.
Meanwhile, both supporters and critics
say that the European Union's governing
machinery, based in Brussels, is a maze
of bureaucratic red tape. Its officials are
often accused of being aloof and unresponsive
to the needs of the European
citizens they supposedly serve.
The point, however, is not whether
the Europeans are living up to their
dream. We Americans have never fully
lived up to our dream. What is important
is that Europe has articulated a new
vision for the future that differs from
our own in fundamental ways. These
basic differences are crucial to understanding
the dynamic that has begun to
unfold between the 21st Century's two
great superpowers.
Two hundred years ago, AmericaÁÃs
founders created a new dream for humanity
that transformed the world.
Today, a new generation of Europeans is
creating a radical new dream - one they
believe is better suited to meet the challenges
of an increasingly interconnected
and globalizing world in the 21st century.
Perhaps our friends in Europe have
something to teach us.
This article was adapted from Jeremy Rifkin's
new book The European Dream: How Europe's
Vision of the Future is Quietly Eclipsing
the American Dream (Tarcher/Penguin,
2004)
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