war2004

DEC 05, 2004 EDMONTON JOURNAL PAGE: D3

Waging the new cold war

The transatlantic tug of war between Europe and the U.S. goes far beyond pommes frites versus freedom fries. It's a global conflict for moral and economic supremacy, Salon books editorAndrew O'Hehir says, and the Europeans are winning

Andrew O'Hehir
Salon.com
A spectre is haunting America, and it's not communism (however much George W. Bush and company might like to describe it that way).

Barely a decade after the collapse of the Soviet bloc, the U.S. finds itself in a new cold war, one being fought simultaneously on economic, political and cultural fronts, and one it is by no means certain to win. The unipolar world of uncontested American hegemony that we were told to expect into the indefinite future has come to an end.

As Americans are finally beginning to notice, Europeans have reconstituted themselves into an enormous transnational superstate of 25 nations, 455 million people and an $11-trillion economy. This is, of course, the European Union, and its aims have become much broader and deeper than the stuff you've probably heard about, like allowing citizens to drive from Seville to Sicily without a passport, or to use the same currency to buy a pint of Guinness in Cork and a glass of ouzo in Crete.

It might sound alarmist to use a freighted term like "cold war" to describe America's relationship with an entity whose raison d'etre is to avoid all war and resolve all conflict. The European Union's political leaders are willing to be partners with the U.S., and potentially to be friends, too. But elites on both sides of the pond now know what the stakes are, and they're also willing to be competitors, even fierce rivals.

If the original idea behind a united Europe was to redeem the old continent from poverty, devastation and centuries of self-destructive warfare, more recently the goal to build a "good superpower" stands as an economic and ideological counterweight to the American colossus.

Once you grasp that this transatlantic cold war is not only happening but rapidly intensifying -- as Jeremy Rifkin and T.R. Reid, authors of two new books on the European conundrum, agree -- you see the major news events of the last year or two in a different light. Both the Iraq war and this year's presidential election, for instance, start to look like key symbolic episodes in the U.S.-Europe conflict.

What was the contest between Bush and John Kerry, after all, if not a proxy war between pommes frites and freedom fries, a referendum on Europe conducted among the American electorate? Kerry, we were told, spoke French and "looked French." These gibes might have played as humour on Fox News, but they were in deadly earnest.

The French, of course, sank Bush's hopes for a truly international coalition against Iraq and became the American right's chosen exemplar of global treachery and cowardice. (Frenchness, you might say, is the new communism.) The French are also the main architects of the European Union -- suddenly, clearly, America's greatest rival for economic and moral supremacy in the world.

Kerry was an internationalist and a secularist (at least by American standards) running against a man who wrapped himself in the flag and was guided by divine inspiration. Bush didn't just run as an American; he pretty much ran as America, which Rifkin calls a nation "living in two seemingly contradictory realms at the same time," those being the evangelical Protestant faith in salvation and the rationalist drive to accumulate wealth and build industry.

That cast Kerry in the role of Europe -- intellectual and irreligious, faintly stained by the ghosts of socialism and Catholicism, with a belief in universal human rights and negotiated solutions, but not much in the way of a transformative spiritual vision. That might be all anyone needs to know about how the election turned out.

There is a large class of Americans sympathetic to the "European dream" of a managed market economy in which co-operation is emphasized over competition, leisure is privileged over work, and the social costs of capitalism are closely regulated. But to most Americans, "freedom" still means untrammelled private-property rights, open markets, workaholism and the belief that somehow we'll all die rich.

One of the strategic considerations driving the Bush administration's 2003 invasion of Iraq was surely the opportunity it presented to drive a wedge between pro- and anti-American politicians in Europe. By peeling away Britain's Tony Blair, Spain's Jose Maria Aznar and Italy's Silvio Berlusconi from the antiwar EU consensus, the Bushies may have hoped to disrupt the idea of a Europe that spoke with one voice on foreign policy and military action for a generation to come.

As Reid, a Washington Post correspondent, discusses in his book The United States of Europe, the strategy seemed to work, at least at first. Those three prime ministers went along with the American war, and other European leaders hemmed and hawed, trying to split the difference between the Bush-Blair position and the vehement antiwar stance of French President Jacques Chirac and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder.

But then surprising things started to happen. When it came time to twist arms on the UN Security Council over the vote to authorize military action, the Americans were outfoxed. Most of the poorer nations on the council received substantial foreign aid from Europe -- the EU gives almost three times as much aid to developing countries as the U.S. does -- and proved more amenable to lobbying from the French and Germans than from the British and Americans. "Europe's political clout," Reid writes, "proved stronger than American military might."

Further, the Iraq war became a galvanizing and radicalizing event for an entire generation of younger Europeans and, in Reid's judgment, led them to see themselves as Europeans, above and beyond their national identities.

While the European political elites dithered in the spring of 2003, the European people streamed into the streets by the millions, in a nearly unanimous rejection of the Iraq war in particular and the interventionist Bush foreign policy agenda in general. (And, for good measure, what most Europeans perceive as America's promiscuously wasteful culture of burgers, SUVs and obesity.) Opinion polls revealed an explosion of anti-American sentiment, even in nations like Britain, Italy and Poland that remained officially within the "coalition of the willing."

These young Europeans, Reid believes, now have a sense of their own political and economic power, and they have built a pan-continental "Euroculture" that borrows what it likes from American pop culture but now stands independent of it.

"For many Europeans today," he writes, "the familiar concept of 'the West,' the transatlantic alliance with shared values and common enemies, is a relic of the last century." In this century, their goal is to challenge the American claim to global supremacy, at least in moral and political terms.

"Europe's time is almost here," Reid quotes current EU president Romano Prodi as saying. "In fact, there are many areas of world affairs where the objective conclusion would have to be that Europe is already the superpower, and the United States must follow our lead."

It's stuff like that that has Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Vice-President Dick Cheney and the rest of the neo-conservative cohort gnawing on the executive branch's fine European furniture. They're smart enough to know Prodi has a point -- even if they'd scoff at him in public -- and there isn't much they can do about it.

After adding 10 new eastern and central European nations last May, the European Union now has a much larger population than the U.S., and a slightly bigger economy. As Jeremy Rifkin argues in his new tome The European Dream, the U.S. remains ahead in per capita GDP, but the difference is not as significant as it looks.

Much of American "productivity," Rifkin suggests, is accounted for by economic activity that might be better described as wasteful: military spending; the endlessly expanding police and prison bureaucracies; the spiralling cost of health care; suburban sprawl; the fast-food industry and its inevitable corollary, the weight-loss craze.

Meaningful comparisons of living standards, he says, consistently favour the Europeans. In France, the workweek is 35 hours and most employees take 10 to 12 weeks off every year, factors that clearly depress GDP. Yet it takes a heart of stone to say France is worse off for all that time people spend in the countryside downing du vin rouge et du Camembert with friends and family.

I called the European Union a "superstate" earlier, but it isn't a nation-state in conventional terms. It doesn't physically control any territory, it has no authority to tax its citizens, and it has only limited police powers. But it does have an elected legislature and an executive branch, a court system and a central bank, all of which can override the laws of its 25 member nations. It also now has its own military, the 60,000-strong European Rapid Reaction Force, a development that led to much gnashing of teeth in Washington.

At least some of this ambiguity is intentional; the EU looks different depending on who's looking. To the Euro-enthusiasts of France, Germany and the Low Countries, the EU is a grand federal state capable of transcending age-old problems of nationalism and sovereignty. To more standoffish nations like Britain and Sweden (neither of which has adopted the euro), it's a loose confederation of countries that remain largely autonomous. Rifkin calls it "the first really postmodern governing institution."

If the EU has no intention of confronting America's military supremacy, that, Rifkin and Reid would agree, is actually Europe's ace in the hole. Let the Americans pour endless billions in taxpayer dollars down the Pentagon's sinkhole, the Europeans reason. As they see it, the key to future peace and prosperity lies elsewhere, in constructing complex webs of social interaction and economic co-operation that will undermine nationalism and fundamentalism.

It's difficult for any American to read Rifkin's book and not feel ashamed.

The U.S. has fallen significantly behind the EU's western European nations in infant mortality and life expectancy, despite spending more on health care per capita than any of them. (While 40 million Americans are uninsured, no one in Europe lacks some form of health-care coverage.)

European children are consistently better educated; the U.S. would rank ninth in the EU in reading, ninth in scientific literacy, and 13th in math. Twenty-two per cent of American children grow up in poverty, putting the country 22nd out of the 23 industrialized nations, ahead of only Mexico and behind all 15 of the pre-2004 EU countries.

Perhaps more surprisingly, European business has not been strangled by the EU welfare state. In fact, Europe has surpassed the U.S. in several high-tech and financial sectors, including wireless technology and the insurance industry. The EU has a higher proportion of small businesses than the U.S., and their success rate is higher.

American capitalists have begun to pay attention. In Reid's book, Ford Motor Co. chairman Bill Ford explains that the company's Volvo subsidiary is more profitable than its U.S. manufacturing operation, even though wages and benefits are significantly higher in Sweden. Government-subsidized health care, child care, pensions and other social supports, Ford says, more than make up for the difference.

While Rifkin and Reid are unabashed Euro-boosters, both would urge Kerry voters rendered starry-eyed by the EU dream to ponder long and hard before pleading for asylum at the nearest consulate. Europe still has relatively high unemployment and relatively sluggish economic growth. The continent faces major structural problems, most notably a declining birth rate and a long-standing hostility to immigration, so its population is aging much faster than America's. While the European welfare state is certain to remain generous by U.S. standards, significant renegotiation of rights and benefits will be necessary unless this demographic time bomb can be defused.

Despite its deepening inequality, the U.S. remains to a large extent a more dynamic and less class-bound society, and it still offers individuals that opportunity for constant reinvention that lies at the heart of the national dream. Rifkin in particular believes the new cold war with Europe will be good for America in the long run.

While America has been gnawing on its own innards for the last decade or so, feuding internally over White House indiscretions, flawed elections, the threat of terrorism, the ill-fated war in Iraq and a polarized public discourse, Europe has quietly been cohering into an impressive whole, the world's newest superpower. For all its layers of bureaucracy and all the challenges it faces, the EU has forged a harmonious society on a continent that spent most of history at war with itself.

The rise of the European Union may in fact, as Rifkin says, represent a new phase of history.

While the outcome of this new cold war between Europe and America is far from clear, we should feel humbled by the way it's gone so far. The EU has succeeded so dramatically in its ambitious goals that the utopian dreamers of the last century who dared to imagine a peaceful, prosperous, united Europe seem eerily prescient now. If nothing else, it's an object lesson in the power of vision.

"I am a democrat," James Joyce wrote in 1916, while an entire generation of Europe's young men were slaughtering each other in the fields of Flanders. "I'll work and act for the social liberty and equality among all classes and sexes in the United States of the Europe of the future."

People read that and laughed bitterly. Europe seemed poisoned by mustard gas and history; America was the land of liberty, democracy and the future.

Nobody's laughing now.


ILLUS: Cartoon: Maguire / The European Union is no longer a 98-pound weakling in world affairs but is now a fierce rival to the American colossus.

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smilingassassin

Edmonton Journal? Good god a Canadian wrote this crap?!!

Veni Vidi Vici

i know some people are going to scream "patriot' but this is my opinion. The EU IS NOT A NATION. The EU ECONOMY IS NOT ONE ECONOMY. In my opionion this article is a bunch of BS designed for this person to feel better about the fact that his nation is not a world power. This is just me though. Ok I'm done.

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"Our citizenship in the United States is our national character. Our citizenship in any particular state is only our local distinction. By the latter we are known at home, by the former to the world. Our great title is AMERICANS…" -- Thomas Paine

Julie

The US and Europe are in a race that has just begun. Europe is portraying the hare, and the US the tortoise. Does anyone notice EU's Euro is gaining strength much too rapidly? That is not a good thing. When we reach the finish line, let's come back to this topic, shall we.

dalem

Yeah, remember all the hand-wringing about Japan in the 80s? Yammerheads like Gore Vidal were pompously predicting that Japan was going to run the world and we would be reduced to being "their boutique". Meanwhile reality was chugging along nicely and things didn't work out so well for Japan.

The EU will always be the poor cousin to America economically and politically.

-dale

smilingassassin

Lets not forget Europe will always be devided about anything, just look at Iraq!
The UK, Italy and Poland went, but not France and Germany which had former soviet block country's take their place, how sureal is that?

war2004

Well, the two next powers on the planet could easily be China and India. They have the manpower and now have a large manufacturing base. In essence, becoming the subcontractors to the world !

Cordially

dalem

China will never amount to the competitor that a lot of folks are crowing about these days. India on the other hand... I think India, from what little I know of her, has the means and the will to become a Very Important Player.

-dale

war2004

Be careful, I know many Chinese-Canadians and these are very intelligent hard working honest people. Their communist system was their downfall not the people.

Remember, China has 1.4 billion people and India has 1 billion people. If there was a war and killed half, you would still have over 1 billion people to deal with

Bluesman

Productivity is the single greatest determinant to a nation's economic destiny. Americans are far and away the most productive people in the world, and the gap is widening in our favor every year. That pair of Keds the Rest of the World (RoW) sees disappearing around the corner and receding into the far distance is on the feet of the American economy. The RoW has had it's last and best look at competing with Yankee dynamism.

This article is crap. The EUnuchs of EUtopia have no realistic shot at offering meaningful competition to American domination in economic, military, cultural, moral or political power. The article says:

"When it came time to twist arms on the UN Security Council over the vote to authorize military action, the Americans were outfoxed. Most of the poorer nations on the council received substantial foreign aid from Europe -- the EU gives almost three times as much aid to developing countries as the U.S. does -- and proved more amenable to lobbying from the French and Germans than from the British and Americans. "Europe's political clout," Reid writes, "proved stronger than American military might."

But what a complete load of BS. The French/German/Russian/Belgian axis did NOT 'outfox' anybody or anything. Their objective was to halt the US and frustrate our policy, but if you'll notice, the US was NOT stopped, we were NOT frustrated, and the President of the United States is calling the shots all over the Middle East. Europe's so-called 'political clout' certainly did NOT stop US military might from doing what our President ordered them to do, and that military power succeeded with amazing speed and celerity.

This is a classic, too:
"The French, of course, sank Bush's hopes for a truly international coalition against Iraq and became the American right's chosen exemplar of global treachery and cowardice. (Frenchness, you might say, is the new communism.) The French are also the main architects of the European Union -- suddenly, clearly, America's greatest rival for economic and moral supremacy in the world."

That first sentence is utterly false in it's first claim (more countries participated in the Iraq War than participated in the Gulf War, and we didn't have to make use of some of the more odious players like the French and the Syrians this time, either), and is absolutely right in it's second claim, although it is incomplete to cite only the American right's contempt for French perfidy - the feeling is pretty much universal, and for the excellent reason that the French earned it through their hard but ultimately futile work. As for the EU being our economic and moral rivals...the Oil-for-Fraud scandal as well as the dirty dealing with the worst regime on the planet while talking out the other side of their mouths has settled that question as decisively as anything could have.

'Western Europe' is what happens when cowardice and immorality combine with material comfort and safety - both provided by a post-World War II America that unwisely allowed an increasingly smug and resentful population of dependent and immature adult 'children' to avoid the responsibilities that accrue to any sovreign nation. We split the difference between making them stand on their own feet and take the consequences of their disgraceful conduct in WWII (minus Great Britain, of course) and just going ahead and formally making them protectorates of the US.

I despise them as a people. Not as individuals, as I have some of my closest friends in Europe. But as a whole, there is hardly anyone left there that qualifies as a 'man' - they are effete, shrinking, mewling, whining, double-dealing cowards that seek safety for themselves and as much material comfort as they can amass, while avoiding anything strenuous or dangerous, no matter how much good it can do for another. They are weak, but what is far, far lower, in my opinion...they are moral cowards.

There are so many items in this article that I would like to rip apart...but it's just not worth it. So it'll have to suffice for me to say that the entire thing is BS, and easily refuted by anybody with the inclination to do so.

Oh, and I do not include most of Eastern Europe - 'New Europe' - in my condemnation. Those people came up the hard way, and they know a thing or two about the value of liberty and freedom, and the example set by America and her true allies. They got no help when it counted from the likes of France, Germany, Scandanvia, and the same elements of Great Britain that we saw out in the streets protesting the Iraq War that back then were all busy as hell trying to collaborate with the Soviets in the capitualation of the entire continent, and would have succeeded, but for American leadership, money and military power.

Hell with 'em, and if they want to be our competitors, rivals, adversaries or enemies, we can lick the entire lot at whatever level of enmity they'd care to challenge us on.

__________________
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dave angel

you might disagree with the article, but that doesn't make the size and wealth of the EU go away - it will also be funny as hell to prove you wrong!

all countries are forced to invest in the US.inc in order to buy oil - even from others - but if the currency of oil trading changes to the Euro - or the Rupee - then the US is going to find that much of its wealth is based on overdraft and credit, when people aren't forced to give you that overdraft and credit then they will stop doing so.

the US has a fundamental weakness in the polarised nature of american political discourse, while the EU has its internal differences it doesn't have the same schism.

i'm afraid i dismiss your reply as a rant of someone who believes his country has a right to defy history and remain rich, powerful and united forever.

like a thousand year reich.

Veni Vidi Vici

I would have to agree with this. Back in the 80's there was all the Hype about Japan taking over America without firing a shot. Look how that turned out.

Bluesman

And I dismiss that article as complete trash, both in general and in any number of particulars.

I think we are NOT defying history; I think we are the ones writing it. Europe has embraced a credo that is unsustainable. No matter their economic power, they are unable to continue the massive bloat of bureaucracy that inevitably follows any government structure that is as far removed from accountability to The People as Brussels is.

So pin your hopes to the Euro, ignore the trends that foretell the outcome, and drift away to irrelevancy. Old Europe is getting older, browner, and poorer, while the apex of the American trajectory is headed towards an apogee that you can but imagine and envy.

See ya.

Veni Vidi Vici

Well refuted. Europe won't stand as true competition for a veryyyyyy long time centuries at least.

dalem

China itself is the problem, not the Chinese people.

-dale