Reappraisals (64 page)

But something has gone wrong with this story. It is not just that Starbucks has encountered unexpected foreign resistance to double-decaf-mocha-skim-latte-with-cinnamon (except, revealingly, in the United Kingdom), or that politically motivated Europeans are abjuring high-profile American commodities. It is becoming clear that America and Europe are not way stations on a historical production line, such that Europeans must expect to inherit or replicate the American experience after an appropriate time lag. They are actually quite distinct places, very possibly moving in divergent directions. There are even those—including the authors of two of the books under review—for whom it is not Europe but rather the United States that is trapped in the past.

America’s cultural peculiarities (as seen from Europe) are well documented: the nation’s marked religiosity, its selective prurience,
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its affection for guns and prisons (the EU has 87 prisoners per 100,000 people; America has 685), and its embrace of the death penalty. As T. R. Reid puts it in
The United States of Europe
, “Yes, Americans put up huge billboards reading ‘Love Thy Neighbor,’ but they murder and rape their neighbors at rates that would shock any European nation.”
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But it is the curiosities of America’s economy, and its social costs, that are now attracting attention.

Americans work much more than Europeans: According to the Organization for Economic Coorporation and Development (OECD), a typical employed American put in 1,877 hours in 2000, compared to 1,562 for his or her French counterpart. One American in three works more than fifty hours a week. Americans take fewer paid holidays than Europeans. Whereas Swedes get more than thirty paid days off work per year and even the Brits get an average of twenty-three, Americans can hope for something between four and ten, depending on where they live. Unemployment in the U.S. is lower than in many European countries (though since out-of-work Americans soon lose their rights to unemployment benefits and are taken off the registers, these statistics may be misleading). America, it seems, is better than Europe at creating jobs. So more American adults are at work, and they work much more than Europeans. What do they get for their efforts?

Not much, unless they are well off. The U.S. is an excellent place to be rich. Back in 1980 the average American chief executive earned forty times as much as the average manufacturing employee. For the top tier of American CEOs, the ratio is now 475:1 and would be vastly greater if assets, not income, were taken into account. By way of comparison, the ratio in Britain is 24:1, in France 15:1, in Sweden 13:1.
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A privileged minority has access to the best medical treatment in the world. But forty-five million Americans have no health insurance at all (of the world’s developed countries, only the U.S. and South Africa do not offer universal medical coverage). According to the World Health Organization, the United States is number one in health spending per capita—and thirty-seventh in the quality of its service.

As a consequence, Americans live shorter lives than Western Europeans. Their children are more likely to die in infancy: The U.S. ranks twenty-sixth among industrial nations in infant mortality, with a rate double that of Sweden, higher than Slovenia’s, and only just ahead of Lithuania’s—and this despite spending 15 percent of U.S. gross domestic product on “health care” (much of it siphoned off in the administrative costs of for-profit private networks). Sweden, by contrast, devotes just 8 percent of its GDP to health. The picture in education is very similar. In the aggregate, the United States spends much more on education than the nations of Western Europe; and it has by far the best research universities in the world. Yet a recent study suggests that for every dollar the U.S. spends on education it gets worse results than any other industrial nation. American children consistently underperform their European peers in both literacy and numeracy.
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Very well, you might conclude. Europeans are better—fairer—at distributing social goods. This is not news. But there can be no goods or services without wealth, and surely the one thing American capitalism is good at, and where leisure-bound, self-indulgent Europeans need to improve, is the dynamic generation of wealth. But this is by no means obvious today. Europeans work less: but when they do work they seem to put their time to better use. In 1970 GDP per hour in the EU was 35 percent below that of the U.S.; today the gap is less than 7 percent and closing fast. Productivity per hour of work in Italy, Austria, and Denmark is similar to that of the United States; but the U.S. is now distinctly out-performed in this key measure by Ireland, the Netherlands, Norway, Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany, . . . and France.
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America’s long-standing advantage in wages and productivity—the gift of size, location, and history alike—appears to be winding down, with attendant consequences for U.S. domination of the international business scene. The modern American economy is not just in hock to international bankers with a foreign debt of $3.3 trillion (28 percent of GDP); it is also increasingly foreign-owned. In the year 2000, European direct investment in the U.S. exceeded American investment in Europe by nearly two-fifths. Among dozens of emblematically “American” companies and products now owned by Europeans are Brooks Brothers, DKNY, Random House, Kent Cigarettes, Dove Soap, Chrysler, Bird’s Eye, Pennzoil, Baskin-Robbins, and the Los Angeles Dodgers.

Europeans even appear to be better at generating small and medium-sized businesses. There are more small businesses in the EU than in the United States, and they create more employment (65 percent of European jobs in 2002 were in small and medium-sized firms, compared with just 46 percent in the U.S.). And they look after their employees much better. The EU Charter of Fundamental Rights promises the “right to parental leave following the birth or adoption of a child,” and every Western European country provides salary support during that leave. In Sweden women get sixty-four weeks off and two-thirds of their wages. Even Portugal guarantees maternity leave for three months on 100 percent salary. The U.S. federal government guarantees nothing. In the words of Valgard Haugland, Norway’s Christian Democratic minister for children and family: “Americans like to talk about family values. We have decided to do more than talk; we use our tax revenues to pay for family values.”

Yet despite such widely bemoaned bureaucratic and fiscal impediments to output, Europeans appear somehow to manage rather well.
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And of course the welfare state is not just a value in itself. In the words of the London School of Economics economist Nicholas Barr, it “is an efficiency device against market failure:”
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a prudential impediment to the social and political risks of excessive inequality. It was Winston Churchill who declared in March 1943 that “there is no finer investment for any community than putting milk into babies.” To his self-anointed disciples in contemporary America, however, this reeks of “welfare.” In the U.S. today the richest 1 percent hold 38 percent of the wealth, and they are redistributing it ever more to their advantage. Meanwhile, one American adult in five is in poverty—compared with one in fifteen in Italy.
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The benefits don’t even trickle down anymore. To many foreigners today this is a distinctly unappetizing vision: The “American way of life” is at a steep discount. As an economic model the U.S. is not replicable.
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As a social model it offers few redeeming qualities. One is reminded of Oliver Goldsmith’s mordant reflections upon an earlier age of private greed and public indifference:

This is the case put forward by Jeremy Rifkin and T. R. Reid. Rifkin is the more ambitious of the two, rather too much so: His book,
The European Dream
, is replete with efforts to summarize everything from church history to Enlightenment philosophy, all to the end of demonstrating that it is individualist America that is stuck in a time warp and cooperative Europe that represents the future.
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I think he is fundamentally right, but the case can only be hurt by the jejune summaries of the “Making of the Bourgeoisie” or the “Rise of the Nation-State,” as well as by a crassly reductionist account of American materialism, and a hodgepodge of ill-advised allusions to chaos theory, the “Great Chain of Being,” Hobbes, Descartes, Hegel, and the Enclosure Acts.

The European Dream
isn’t as bad a book as some reviewers have suggested, and it has something important to say. Of contemporary America Rifkin writes: “With only our religious fervor to hold on to, we have become a ‘chosen people’ without a narrative—making America potentially a more dangerous and lonely place to be.” But the book would have been a whole lot better had Rifkin stuck to what he knows about and not tried so hard to say something “important.”

T. R. Reid is a journalist, and his account of European superiority, which covers much the same territory as Rifkin’s, is shorter, sharper, more readable, and less pretentious. It has some amusing vignettes: notably of American innocents—Jack Welch, George W. Bush (and most recently Bill Gates)—caught up in a brave new world of European regulations they can neither understand nor ignore. And Reid, like Rifkin, demonstrates very effectively just why the European Union, with its regulatory powers, its wealth, and its institutional example, is a place Americans will need to take extremely seriously in coming decades.

But though their books are timely, neither writer is saying anything very new. Their damning bill of particulars regarding the United States is familiar to Europeans—it was in 1956 that Jimmy Porter, in John Osborne’s
Look Back in Anger
, sardonically observed that “it’s pretty dreary living in the American age—unless of course you’re American,” and one way or another, that thought has echoed down the decades to the present day. But just because there is something profoundly amiss in the U.S. today, and something no less intuitively appealing about the European social compact, this does not license us to tell fairy stories.

Anyone seeking in these books an account of the origins of the EU will be led badly astray. Reid and Rifkin trip over themselves to praise the founding fathers of Europe for their foresight and wisdom in guiding Europe to its present eminence. According to Reid, in “the years following the Schuman Declaration, the European Movement took the continent by storm.” The European Coal and Steel Community was a “rip-roaring economic success.” Rifkin goes further: Europe, he writes, is “a giant freewheeling experimental laboratory for rethinking the human condition. . . . ”(!)

These claims are absurd.
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The European Union is what it is: the largely unintended product of decades of negotiations by Western European politicians seeking to uphold and advance their national and sectoral interests. That’s part of its problem: It is a compromise on a continental scale, designed by literally hundreds of committees. Actually, this makes the EU more interesting and in some ways more impressive than if it merely incarnated some uncontentious utopian blueprint. In the same vein, it seems silly to write, as Rifkin does, about the awfulness of American “cookie-cutter housing tracts” as yet another symptom of American mediocrity without acknowledging Europe’s own eyesores. This is a man who has never stared upon the urban brutalism of Sarcelles, a postwar dormitory town north of Paris; who has not died a little in Milton Keynes; who has avoided the outer suburbs of modern Milan. Reid is right to insist that Europe has the best roads, the fastest trains, the cheapest plane fares. And yes, the EU is indeed closer, as Rifkin notes, “to the pulse of the changes that are transforming the world into a globalized society.” But it isn’t perfect by any means.

Indeed, Europe is facing real problems. But they are not the ones that American free-market critics recount with such grim glee. Yes, the European Commission periodically makes an ass of itself, aspiring to regulate the size of condoms and the curvature of cucumbers. The much-vaunted Stability Pact to constrain national expenditure and debt has broken down in acrimony, though with no discernible damage to the euro it was designed to protect. And pensions and other social provisions will be seriously underfunded in decades to come unless Europeans have more children, welcome more immigrants, work a few more years before retiring, take somewhat less generous unemployment compensation, and make it easier for businesses to employ young people. But these are not deep structural failings of the European way of life: They are difficult policy choices with political consequences. None of them implies the dismantling of the welfare state.
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Europe’s true dilemmas lie elsewhere. In the Netherlands, in Paris and Antwerp and other cities, antagonism and incomprehension between the indigenous local population and a fast-growing minority of Muslims (one million in the Netherlands, over five million in France, perhaps thirteen million in the EU to date) has already moved on from graffiti and no-go zones to arson, assaults, and assassinations. Turks, Moroccans, Tunisians, Algerians, and others have been arriving in Western Europe since the 1960s. We are now seeing the emergence of a third generation: in large part unemployed, angry, alienated, and increasingly open to the communitarian appeal of radical Islam.
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For nearly four decades mainstream European politicians turned a blind eye to all this: to the impact of de facto segregated housing; isolated uninte-grated communities; and the rising tide of fearful, resentful white voters convinced that the boat was “full.” It has taken Jean-Marie Le Pen, the assassinated Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn, and a flock of demagogic anti-immigrant parties from Norway to Italy to awaken Europeans to this crisis—and it augurs badly that the response of everyone from Tony Blair to Valéry Giscard d’Estaing has been to cry “Havoc!” and wind up the drawbridge.