Those other united states

On Oct. 29, the leaders of the European Union’s 25 member countries gathered to sign their first constitution. It still must be ratified by each nation’s government, but the signing was, nevertheless, a highly significant moment. The people of Europe are now more united than at any time since Rome’s golden age in the 2nd century. The EU has become the “great civilian power,” as its founding father Jean Monnet predicted in 1947 -- and represents the most far-reaching political experiment since another group of Europeans signed a constitution to create the United States of America in 1787.

Comparisons between the EU and the United States are inevitable. Both are heavily imbued with the sense that their common heritage is the foundation of freedom and democracy, of enlightenment, prosperity and science. Both are massive economic powers -- the two largest trading blocs in the world. Depending on how you do the sums, the EU, with a gross domestic product of $10.5 trillion, is slightly ahead of the U.S. From 1957, when the Common Market came into being, until the collapse of communism in 1989, both pursued much the same political objectives. Since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and the invasion of Iraq, however, Europe and America seem divided into two hostile camps.

T.R. Reid, formerly the Washington Post’s London bureau chief, and economist Jeremy Rifkin have written new books offering highly sympathetic portraits of Europe and the EU’s objectives, as they understand them. Rifkin’s “The European Dream” is almost elegiac: The EU could deliver what America’s Founding Fathers (those Francophile Englishmen) promised -- a “second enlightenment,” which Rifkin says their heirs have consistently failed to achieve -- but only if the Europeans can overcome their cynicism about the future of the EU. Reid’s “The United States of Europe,” a highly engaging personal survey of the history and present state of the EU, concludes that even if Europe is not exactly the fulfillment of that dream, Americans should “be happy to learn from the example of the united states across the sea.”

Both books assume that the EU wants to become a superpower to rival the United States. Citing an anti-Americanism he believes is rampant in Europe, even in Britain, the oldest and closest U.S. ally, Reid claims that the “familiar concept of ‘the West’ ... is a relic of the last century.” Today, he writes, “Europe is determined to challenge American claims to global supremacy and gain equal standing with the United States on the world stage.”

A third book, Timothy Garton Ash’s powerful, persuasive and beautifully written “Free World,” aims to demonstrate that this is wrong and that those who argue that the EU should become a rival to the United States are pursuing a “half-baked dream.” True, there does exist what Garton Ash calls “Euro-Gaullism” -- after the late French President Charles de Gaulle, who hoped to use the new Europe to make France into a rival for U.S. power. Garton Ash, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and director of the European Studies Centre at St. Antony’s College, Oxford, calls this “European nationalism,” which he says is pernicious and divisive, like all forms of nationalism. Its most vocal supporters, he says, are those who cannot distinguish one American from another, or the nation from the administration in office, just as U.S. nationalists cannot distinguish between one European people and another or between Europeans and their elected governments.

But there is also what Garton Ash calls “Euro-Atlanticism,” which encompasses both “Euro-patriotism” and “American patriotism.” Though it may not play quite so well in the tabloid press, it represents what the majority of thoughtful Europeans (and thoughtful Americans) are hoping for most of the time. This includes not only such figures as Tony Blair but also less obvious ones such as Bernard-Henri Levy, whom Garton Ash calls “the most famous living Parisian intellectual,” and Regis Debray, a former Socialist minister who recently, and only half ironically, called for a new “United States of the West” that would embrace in one federal union both the United States and the EU.

“Euro-Atlanticism” has a lot more going for it than “Euro-Gaullism.” The U.S. was, after all, a European invention, and without U.S. support the EU would hardly have been possible. For centuries, both continents have stood -- sometimes uncertainly, it is true -- for freedom, rights, representative government and free trade. In one form or another these have been called the values of “the West,” which, though radically changed since the end of the Cold War, certainly is no “relic.”

Despite the apparent isolationism of the Bush administration, neither the EU nor the U.S. can go it alone. For one thing, the two economies are inseparably intertwined. To illustrate this point, Reid describes an imaginary journey taken by a typical American family from Syracuse, N.Y., to Chicago. The fast food they eat on the trip (at Dunkin’ Donuts), the motel in which they stay the night (Travelodge), the cellular phone network they use (Verizon), the gas station where they fill their tank (Texaco), even their car (the quintessentially American Jeep), all are owned or manufactured by subsidiaries of European companies. A similar story could be told of a journey from, say, London to Edinburgh or Milan to Naples, but the companies would be American, not European. European firms hold roughly two-thirds of all foreign-based assets in the U.S.

Nearly 6 million Europeans owe their livelihoods to U.S. investors, and some 7 million Americans depend on European investors. For all the present hostility over Iraq, a close look at almost any aspect of the supposed dichotomy between “a European model and an American model, European values and American values” reveals what Sigmund Freud archly called “the narcissism of small differences.”

This makes any serious or prolonged conflict between the two economic powers highly unlikely. Absence of conflict, however, is not the same thing as cooperation. Garton Ash says the future demands a pooling of experience and resources, not only to mend the alliance but to use it to improve the entire world. This, he contends, can be the West’s “surprising future.” We in a revived “West” have it within our power, as most U.S. administrations since Truman have claimed, to bring freedom to the entire world, but not as long as so many remain in abject poverty. Freedom, he says, is the creature of prosperity; poverty breeds despair, oppression, even terrorism. To create a free world, then, the U.S. must increase its miserly contribution to development. (In 2002-03, Garton Ash says, the U.S. contributed 0.13% of its GDP in development aid, “the lowest proportion of GDP spent by any of the twenty-three rich donor countries.”)

The EU, for its part, must abandon highly protective agriculture policies that keep most poorer countries from competing in EU markets, Garton Ash writes. And both must unite to compel by persuasion, example and aid -- rather than brute force, as in Iraq -- the world’s remaining autocratic governments to step aside in favor of true democracies. These changes, he believes, can be accomplished by the “thousand million citizens” of the West, who can form pressure groups, join demonstrations and speak loudly against injustices perpetrated by our various governments. When we hear people speaking of “the Americans” or “the Europeans,” we can ask, “Which Europeans? Which Americans?” By so doing, Garton Ash says we can break down the “mind-walls” that he contends divide “free men and women from each other, and the free from the unfree.”

Garton Ash has written a powerful and morally compelling tract, not merely for our times but for the next half-century, not merely for our world but for the world our children and our children’s children will have to inhabit. *