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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