The New European Superpower: Europe
Salon has a review of two new books about the rise of the European Union that makes for some interesting reading (I'm putting both of them on my library reading list):

• The European Dream: How Europe's Vision of the Future Is Quietly Eclipsing the American Dream by Jeremy Rifkin
• The United States of Europe: The New Superpower and the End of American Supremacy by T.R. Reid

Salon is a subscription service (though you can wait through a web ad to see the entire 4-page article--and as I always mention, the subscription price is worth it), so I'll be a bit liberal with my copying and pasting:

"Old Europe," to borrow Donald Rumsfeld's famous quip, is back, and it's looking pretty spry for its age. As Americans are finally beginning to notice, Europeans (or most of them, anyway) 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 anonymous-looking currency to buy a pint of Guinness in Cork and a glass of ouzo in Crete.

[...]

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 humor 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 principal architects of the European Union -- suddenly, clearly, our greatest rival for economic and moral supremacy in the world -- and if Karl Rove and Karen Hughes weren't thinking about that consciously, the thought wasn't far below the surface.

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.

[...]

"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 Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and the rest of the neoconservative cohort gnawing on the executive branch's fine European furniture late at night. They're smart enough to know that 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 United States, and a slightly bigger economy. As Jeremy Rifkin argues in his dense and contentious new research-driven tome "The European Dream," the United States 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 spiraling cost of healthcare; suburban sprawl; the fast-food industry and its inevitable corollary, the weight-loss craze. Meaningful comparisons of living standards, he says, consistently favor the Europeans. In France, for instance, the work week is 35 hours and most employees take 10 to 12 weeks off every year, factors that clearly depress GDP. Yet it takes a John Locke heart of stone to say that France is worse off as a nation for all that time people spend in the countryside downing du vin rouge et du Camembert with friends and family.

[...]

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 money sink, 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 cooperation that will undermine nationalism and fundamentalism of all stripes. While the United States foots the bill for the intractable conflict in Iraq and piles up huge budget and trade deficits, Europe has spent money on other priorities.

Whatever your intellectual and emotional responses may be to this burgeoning transatlantic conflict, 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 healthcare per capita than any of them. (While 40 million Americans are uninsured, no one in Europe -- I repeat, not a single person -- lacks some form of healthcare coverage.)

[...]

While America has been gnawing on its own innards for the last decade or so, feuding internally over White House blow jobs, flawed elections, the threat of terrorism, the ill-fated war in Iraq and an angrily 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.

I'm looking forward to seeing this new utopia up close during my honeymoon in Paris next year (even with a low dollar exchange). And trying to figure out ways to bring back the tolerance and rationalism of Europe back to America--I'm not giving us up to the fundamentalist zealots yet.