Blind to the European Future?

Americans as a rule know little about Europe, possibly even less than Europeans knew about America a half century ago, when Europeans seemed to think Al Capone was still running Chicago and cowboys roamed the West. Well...maybe they were onto something.

Today’s American ignorance is less innocent. Along with the smug complacency and disbelief that we Americans could possibly learn anything from foreign lands, our ignorance of today’s Europe consists of holdover imagery carefully nurtured by big business Repubs, neocons who don’t want their delusions of empire spoiled by the hard-earned insights of Europe, and rabid rightists who certainly don’t want Americans to see European economic successes, particularly the vibrant manufacturing coupled with strong labor unions, universal health care and other social support---and workers with greater job security, shorter work week and more vacations!

A few years ago in The Unconquerable World, Jonathan Schell movingly described how the European Union was forging a system for permanent peace in the region that had put itself through hell for several hundred years, and the rest of the world twice in the twentieth century.

Then last year, in The European Dream, Jeremy Rifkin developed a case for Europe’s vision of the future replacing the American dream that has dominated globalism so far.

I just caught up to Thomas Geoghegan’s July 11 piece in the Nation magazine, just after the “no” votes on the EU Constitution in France and Holland surprised U.S. media into paying Europe some attention. Geoghegan begins by saying that the alarmist talk at the time was excessive, and that in most of Europe “things are pretty nice”---in ways that would make a lot of American envious.

He notes that a 2004 Goldman Sachs study shows that a big chunk of Europe has been doing at least as well economically as the U.S., and when you take a closer look behind the numbers, the picture gets even better.

The higher unemployment rate in France, for example, masks the fact that employed French workers are much more secure, and that over time, a higher proportion of American workers are out of work for significant periods than French workers. European standard of living is going up as fast as America’s by the numbers, but if you put a cash value on the extra leisure Europeans have due to shorter work weeks and more vacations, it’s likely it’s going up faster.

Why do American big business elites deride Europe? Possibly because the top execs don’t make as much there, and in France the income gap between top and bottom is decreasing, not increasing at an obscene rate as it is here.

Figuring in the anomalies of American employment figures, “It’s plausible that in the past ten years most of Europe has done better than the United States---even as Europeans keep working fewer hours.” Though he doesn’t mention it, Europeans also don’t have to spend exorbitant amounts on health care or pensions that their companies conveniently disappear when they get in trouble, while golden parachutes remain open; they don’t worry they might die without medical care, or that the retirement they thought was secure suddenly vanishes.

Geoghegan dismisses the euphoria over China’s economic gains---just catch-up, he maintains, as were Japan’s in the 70s. He derides Friedman’s ‘flat world” theory (i.e. globalized on the American model, with Chinese takeout) and drops this little tidbit that puts the lie to its rightist apologists:

“Last year, according to the WTO, German export goods had a value of more than $915 billion. China’s had a value of about $593 billion. In a so-called flat world, it turns out that the country with the world’s highest labor costs is the world’s champion exporter. Add in France, eta al, and the EU is even further ahead…"

A key to this is that while corporations in the US found it necessary to dismantle the nation’s industrial infrastructure and destroy the middle class to enrich the rich and slowly impoverish the rest (Let them eat Wal-Mart!), Europe held on to its factories and its industrial jobs, which have far more protections for workers than even unionized U.S. plants once did.

In the creation of economics and governments that engender prosperity while providing good jobs, security, health care and a better quality of life; in creating a more perfect union that, despite its ups and downs, is a nearly miraculous model of peace among nations, and even in how it is confronting the difficulties of multicultural societies that the US will also have to face in the 21st century, Europe is worth our close attention over here.

Over there, however, the danger (according to Geoghegan) is partly fostered by over here. “The threat to Europe right now,” he concludes, “is the violence of the rhetoric against the model [of Europe in the last decade], the bizarre gloom and doom when it is actually doing well. The nerve-wracking thing about Europe at the moment is the possibility that ordinary Europeans will lose their nerve and just cave in to their American-wannabe elites.”