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"The American Dream is far too centered on personal material advancement and too little concerned with the broader human welfare to be relevant in a world of increasing risk, diversity, and interdependence. It is an old dream, immersed in a frontier mentality, that has long since become passé... a new European Dream is being born... "The European Dream emphasizes community relationships over individual autonomy, cultural diversity over assimilation, quality of life over the accumulation of wealth, sustainable development over unlimited material growth, deep play over unrelenting toil, universal human rights and the rights of nature over property rights, and global cooperation over the unilateral exercise of power" (3) ... "The post-modernists looked to modernity itself as the culprit. They placed the blame for much of the world's ills on what they regarded as the rigid assumptions underlying modern thought. The European Enlightenment, with its vision of unlimited material progress, came in for particular rebuke, as did market capitalism, state socialism, and nation-state ideology. Modernity, argued the post-modernist thinkers, was at its core deeply flawed. The very ideas of a knowable objective reality, irreversible linear progress, and human perfectibility were too rigidly conceived and historically biased, and failed to take into consideration other perspectives and points of view of the human condition and the ends of history" (4)... "Post-modern thought didn't make significant inroads into what we call middle America. It has always been more influential in Europe. Over half of all Americans are devoutly religious--more so than any other industrialized people--and they just don't buy the idea of a relativist world. Religious Americans still believe in [the myth of] a grand scheme of things and live their beliefs intimately each day. More secular Americans, while not wedded to the overarching religious frame of reference, are generally committed to another all-encompassing social vision--the Enlightenment idea of history as the steady and irreversible advance of material progress... "Europeans, in comparison, have been much more eager to critique the basic assumptions of modernity and embrace a post-modern orientation. Their willingness has much to do with the devastation wrought by two world wars and the specter of a continent lying in near ruins in 1945 as a result of blind adherence to utopian visions and ideologies" (6)... "The American and European dreams are, at their core, about two diametrically opposed ideas of freedom and security. Americans hold a negative definition of what it means to be free and, thus, secure. For us, freeedom has long been associated with autonomy. If one is autonomous, he or she is not dependent on others or vulnerable to circumstances outside of his or her control. To be autonomous, one needs to be propertied. The more wealth one amasses, the more independent one is in the world... "The new European Dream, however, is based on a different set of assumptions about what constitutes freedom and security. For Europeans, freedom is not found in autonomy but in embeddedness. To be free is to have access to a myriad of interdependent relationships with others. The more communities one has access to, the more options and choices one has for living a full and meaningful life. With relationships comes inclusivity, and with inclusivity comes security. "The American Dream puts an emphasis on economic growth, personal wealth, and independence. The new European Dream focuses more on sustainable development, quality of life, and interdependence. The American Dream pays homage to the work ethic. The European Dream is more attuned to leisure and deep play... The American Dream is deeply personal and little concerned with the rest of humanity. The European Dream is more expansive and systemic in nature and, therefore, more bound to the welfare of the planet" (13-14)... "...the European Dream might be better positioned to accommodate the many forces that are leading us to a more connected and interdependent globalized society" (15)...
America: A Chosen People"One can only pursue the American Dream on American soil... makes it increasingly suspect and inappropriate in a world that is beginning to forge a global consciousness..."The notion of a "chosen people"... the leitmotif of the American Dream... Many Americans continue to see themselves as a chosen people and America as the promised land... and that the American way is God's way. Our very success seems proof positive that we were in fact chosen... has been the driving engine behind the American sense of confidence--many Europeans might say arrogance" (17-19)... "Many Europeans no longer believe in God. While 82 percent of Americans say that God is very important to them, approximately half of all Danes, Norwegians, and Swedes say that God does not matter to them. When it comes to religious beliefs, American views are much lcoser to the views of [backward, uneducated] people in developing countries and very much at odds with the rest of the [better educated] industrialized world" (21)... Americans, like all backward, uncivilized peoples, see things in a simplistic way... "we tend to see the world itself as a battleground where good and evil forces are continually at play" (21)... "Although Europeans cringe at America's use of religious language to define the global struggle, the White House rhetoric finds a willing audience in the American heartland. "The belief that we are a chosen people has made Americans the most patriotic people in the whole world... far more willing to fight for their country... "...among Europeans and people of other regions around the world, national pride is declinging with each successive generation. America is the exception [again, backward]... "...for many... the nation-state is no longer the only platform for expressing one's beliefs and convictions and for fulfilling one's aspirations" (22-23)...
American Work Ethic"Today, a growing number of younger Americans have broken with the work ethic. For them, the American Dream has less to do with faith and perseverance and more to do with luck and chutzpah..."...the consumer ethos had gained such a deep hold on the American psyche... the pursuit of self-interest, formerly identified with the rational pursuit of gain and the accumulation of wealth, has become a search for pleasure and psychic survival... To live for the moment is the prevailing passion--to live for yourself... "... [America's is] a media culture... idea of instant gratification... everyone feels entitled, and far less willing to put off happiness until tomorrow... a credit-card culture that allows us to enjoy now and pay later" (26-7)...
Getting Something for Nothing"Americans have always been risk-takers... Today, for a growing number of Americans, risk-taking has been reduced to little more than gambling..."American are now spending more money on gambling than on movies, videos, DVDs, music, and books combined... "Gambling has fast become the national pastime... "Gambling, like drugs, has become a dangerous addiction... Both cater to the need for instant gratification... "The desire for instant success has become p[ervasive across American culture. Legal gambling... the stock market... the new genre of TV reality shows... "We... spend much of our time wishing for success but are unwilling to "pay our dues" with the kind of personal commitment required" (28-30)... "..the American Dream would seem to be cocooning even further into the promotion of narrow self-interest"...
Land of Opportunity"Up until the 1960s, upward mobility was at the core of the American Dream. Then, the dream began to unravel, slowly at first, but picking up momentum in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. Today, the US can no longer claim to be the model of upward mobility for the world..."And what of that Old World, that caste-bound, class-defined purgatory so many millions of people fled from to start over in the American Eden? It is slowly becoming the new land of opportunity. More and more emigrants are choosing Europe over America... "Europe is a more promising place for those anxious to move on up. According to the data collected by the Luxembourg Income Study, the most authoritative database in the world on income distribution, the United States ranks twenty-fourth amont the developed nations in income inequality. Only Russia and Mexico rank lower. All eighteen of the most developed European countries have less income inequality between rich and poor... "...the US was dead last in the growth rate of total compensation to its workforce in the 1980s... 0.1 percent growth after that... at the same time, corporate profits, as a percentage of national income, reached their highest level since the 1960s... "...income mobility appears to be LOWER in the United States than in other OECD [Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development] countries. "America, it appears, is the land of opportunity for a small segment of high-income earners and a land of misfortune for many others. There are more poor people living in poverty in America than in the sixteen European nations for which data is available" (38-40)... "the sink-or-swim mentality [of the US]... The World Values Survey found that 71 percent of Americans "believe that the poor have a chance to escape from poverty," while only 40 percent of Europeans believe that's the case. Strange, indeed, coming from a country that now has the largest percentage of its population in poverty of any major developed nation... "Undoubtedly, the frontier mythology plays a significant role in understanding American attitudes about inequality and poverty. But there is also likely a more unsavory side to the issue. Racism... we find that many American associate poverty with black America, even though in terms of raw numbers, there are more whites living under the poverty line... "White America can't afford to believe that the American way of life might, in some way, be to blame for the destitute conditions many black Americans find themselves in... "Europeans... belief that market forces, if left to their own devices, are often unfair and, therefore, need to be tamed. Government redistribution, in the form of transfers and payments to those less fortunate, is considered an appropriate antidote to unrestrained market capitalism. That is why in Europe the notion of creating social democracies.... has flourished since World War II... "The US is particularly stingy when it comes to helping the working poor. The legal minimum wage in the US in the 1990s was only 39 percent of the average wage, whereas in the European Union it was 53 percent of the average wage. In the United States, unemployment benefits are also less generous than in the European Union" (40-43).
Productivity"Productivity... Between 1820 and the end of World War II, US output per hour did indeed grow faster in the US than in Europe... attributed to... an unhindered capitalist marketplace... but there were also other advantages America enjoyed..."...the sheer expanse of the continent provided the largest single internal geographic market in the world. A common language allowed Americans to carry on commerce with relative ease... there was always a labor shortage, which kept wages high compared to Europe... The introduction of a transcontinental rail grid and the laying down of telegraph lines across the country sped up commercial transactions still more... "...abundant natural resources... two great oceans kept America relatively isolated from the kind of warfare that periodically engulfed Europe. Our high tariffs, in turn, encouraged the development of our own internal market. "Despite all of these natural advantages, the US productivity lead began to erode after World War II... "What is so remarkable is how fast Europe caught up to the United States... By 2002, however, Europe had virtually closed the productivity gap with the US... European productivity growth outperformed the US during virtually the entire half century following World War II... "...the French and five other European nations are actually better at conducting commerce than we are... "Funding basic research has always been the key to advancing productivity... Europe surpassed the United States in the mid-1990s as the largest producer of scientific literature" 44-46).
Grid Computing"...the next great technology revolution, grid computing..."When the Swiss pharmaceutical company Novartis needed a new supercomputer for designing drugs, instead of buying one at an enormous cost, the company used software created by United Devices, an American company, to link its 2,700 desktop personal computers together, giving it the same computing power as a single supercomputer. The company has already found a number of new chemical compouns with the aid of its computational grid and is now planning to expand its grid capacity by linking all of its seventy thousand personal computers together, giving it incredible computing power... "The European Union is determined to lead the way in the grid technology revolution... gives it a leg up on American companies, where a "go it alone" strategy often results in competing standards, haphazard development of new technologies, and market redundencies" (46-48).
Live to Work or Work to Live?"...per capita income in the EU is just 72 percent of American per capita income... 75 percent of the difference is attributable to the fewer hours worked in the EU..."...in the European Union, workers have opted for more leisure rather than longer work hours and bigger paychecks. The French government instituted a thirty-five-hour workweek in 1999... "...it defies American logic that hard work and long hours on the job are indispensable to achieving significant gains in productivity and a better quality of life for working people... French productivity in 2002 was higher than in the US, and French workers were unjoying far more leisure time... "The French went to the thirty-five-hour workweek, in part, to create more jobs. If people worked fewer hours, went the reasoning, additional people could be employed, thus reducing the nation's unemployment roles... The new workers bring home paychecks, spend money in the marketplace, and pay taxes, all of which accrues to the overall well-being of the French economy. More than 285,000 jobs have been directly created by the thirty-five-hour workweek plan since its inception. "Skeptical at first, most French employers have been won over to the scheme. They're finding that fresh and motivated workers can produce just as much output in seven hours a day as less motivated and more tired workers can in eight hours. And, there has been an ancillary benefit: the thirty-five-hour-workweek law allows employers greater flexibility in assigning work schedules... "More leisure time has also boosted consumer spending at French cafés, movie houses, sproting events, and other entertainments... "In a number of other European countries, the average workweek is already thirty-nine hours or less, and most are edging toward the thirty-five-hour French workweek. Meanwhile, the average vacation time across Europe is six weeks, and in most countries, vacations are mandated by federal law. In the US, employers are not obligated by law to provide any vacation time. Two weeks' vacation, however, has become a standard in most industries... "The average American worker is now working ten weeks more a year than the average German worker... "Under the new "time credits" law, workers can take a maximum of one year off over their entire career or interrupt their work, or reduce it to a half-time job without severing their employment contract and without loss of social security rights... Workers can also request "thematic leaves" to take care of an ailing family member, to provide medical assistance to a relative, or to take care of a child... Each worker can also choose to reduce his or her working hours by 20 percent, which generally works out to be a four-day workweek. Workers over the age of fifty can reduce their work hours by one-fifth to one-half over an unlimited period of time... like France, the Belgian workforce enjoyed higher productivity in terms of output per hour than the American workforce in 2002... "The increase in work hours takes a heavy toll on American health, according to health professionals... One recent study... found that the more often American workers skip their vacation, the higher their health risks are" (48-52)...
Job Creation"...say the economists... the American economy has been an engine of job creation... "The American Miracle"..."A closer look suggests that many of the new jobs created had little to do with superior entrepreneurial talent or better managerial skills or the quicker adoption of new technologies, but with other factors that artificially boosted the employment figures for a brief moment only to disappear just as quickly once the stock-market bubble burst... "...real unemployment during that period was significantly higher, approaching the unemployment levels in the European Union. That is because more than two million discouraged workers simply gave up and dropped out of the workforce and therefore were no longer counted in the official statistics, and the prison population soared from 500,000 in 1980 to two million people today. Nearly 2 percent of the potential male adult workforce in the United States is now incarcerated. Moreover, many of the workers who did find employment in the boom period between 1995 and 2000 were temporary and part-time, without benefits, and for the most part underemployed... While the US Labor Department put the official enemployment figure at 6.2 percent in the summer of 2003, real unemployement, when discouraged workers who have given up are counted, is 9 percent of the workforce... "...runaway extension of consumer credit, which allowed Americans to go on a wild buying binge... the result was that America's family savings rate, which was about 8 percent in the early 1990s, sank to around 2 percent by the year 2001... "The US economy is experiencing its worst hiring slump in more than twenty years... "Were the European Union to abandon much of its social net in favor of a more libertarian market approach, its 455 million people might find themselves saddled with the kind of deep social ills that now plague the United States, from great inequality to increased poverty, lawlessness, and incarceration. That's a high price to pay when we consider the fact that the American model not only has failed to deliver real job growth but also has forced millions of Americans into long-term debt and bankruptcy" (52-55)...
The European Economic Miracle"A single EU passport now suffices for every European traveler..."Now Europe is knocking down the walls, the borders, the boundaries, the endless demarcations that have separated people from their neighbors and strangers for more than two millennia of history. One can rent a car and make a pilgrimage across the continent without ever stopping at a border crossing. How do we know we've left France and entered Spain? Everything suddenly feels more open, more expansive... "There is a new experiment taking place in Europe. The whole of Europe has become a testing ground for rethinking commerce and politics and for re-imagining how people might conduct their lives with one another... Twenty-five countries--big and small--across Europe have pooled their vast human and natural resources... "The people of Europe have a common European Parliament with many powers previously reserved to nation-states, a European Court of Justice that supersedes the laws of the respective countries, and a European Commission to regulate trade, commerce, and a hundred and one other things... The Union has established its own military arm... a common foreign policy... a Europe-wide foreign minister... "What we are witnessing is the birth of a new political entity and a new commercial force on the world scene... Four hundred and fifty-five million people... nearly 7 percent of the human race... "The European Union is now the largest internal single market as well as the largest trader of goods in the world... "The European Union's Gross Domestic Product... already exceeds the United States'... "Much of the European Union's potential depends on its ability to create a streamlined and seamless internal trading market and commercial arena. It is in the early stages of creating a continental-wide transportation network, an integrated electricity and energy network, a comon communication grid, a single financial-services market, and a unified regulatory framework for conducting business... "Europe-wide education programs are also being pursued. The European Union has initiated three high-profile educational programs: Socrates, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Youth program. Socrates covers general education from nursery school to adult education. The program establishes common educational projects, encourages student and teacher mobility between EU member countries, and is engaged in efforts to harmonize curricula. Its Erasmus project has provided grants to more than one million European students to study in another member country. The Comenius project has brought more than ten thousand schools together in cooperative education efforts across the EU. The Leondardo da Vinci program has helped more than two hundred thousand young people secure job training in another member country. The Youth program provides young people between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five with opportunities to do volunteer service either locally or in one of the other EU member countries" (62)... "...many of America's leading economists and political pundits, were convinced that the introduction of a single common currency across the EU would fail. The euro succeeded beyond even the most enthusiastic projection of its supporters and is now stronger than the dollar... and is becoming a rival in world financial circles' (64)... "... the EU also enjoys a greater share of global trade... if Europe's two key oil producers, Norway and the UK, wer to adopt the euro--which is likely--this might create a momentum to shift the oil pricing system to euros. If that were to happen, oil-importing nations aroung the world would no longer need dollar reserves to purchase oil, and the demand for dollars could decline significantly" (64)... "America's growing national debt is largely to blame for a 44 percent rise in the euro and a corresponding 31 percent fall in the dollar between July 2001 and December 2003. The International Monetary Fund is so concerned about US debt... that it issued a report warning that if steps weren't taken to reverse the trend, it could threaten the financial stability of the world economy. IMF economists say that US financial obligations to the rest of the world could be equal to 70 percent of its total economy in just a few years" (64)... "Few Americans realize the power of European transnational companies. Sixty-one of the 140 biggest companies on the Global Fortune 500 rankings are European, while only fifty are US companies, and twenty-nine are based in Asia" (66)... "Chances are, most Americans aren't familiar with Bertelsmann, the 167-year-old German media company... the largest book publisher in the world. Of course, Americans buy lots of books from the venerable American publisher Random House. What they don't know is that Random House is owned by Bertelsmann. Well, what about other well-known and long-established American book publishers Penguin, Putnam, and Viking? They are all owned by the British publishing giant Pearson. "American are proud of Boeing and like to think that no other country surpasses American know-how when it comes to making airplanes. Not so. Airbus, the European consortium, has outperformed Boeing for the past three years and now controls 76 percent of the global airplane market. "It's fair to say that Royal Ahold, the Dutch food retailer, has zero brand-name recognition in America, even though, with nearly $60bn in revenue in 2002, it's the world's second-largest food retailer. Over the past decade, the Dutch company has quietly bought up virtually every major grocery-store chain east of the Appalachians and now operates more than 1,400 stores still under their original names, like Bi-Lo, Stop & Go, Giant, and Bruno's. Ahold is currently the biggest food retailer on the East Coast of North America" (66-67)... "It's surprising how little regard European companies are given in discussions around globalization. At antiglobalization protests at World Trade Organization meetings, World Bank gatherings, and G8 Summits, the attention on the streets is generally on the evil machinations of US transnational companies. Even in world policy forums, the focus is almost exclusively on American companies. Yet in so many of the world's key industries, it's European transnational companies that dominate business and trade" (67-68)... "In a recent survey of the world's fifty best companies, conducted by Global Finance, all but one were European... singled out for praise for their innovative leadership and entrepreneurial acumen... "The US business community is forever touting the idea that small businesses are the backbone of the American economy. In truth, the European Union has a far greater number of small- and medium-sized businesses (SMEs) than the US. In fact, SMEs currently represent two-thirds of the total employment in the EU, compared to only 46 percent of the total employment in the United States" (69)... "America's recent economic growth has... come with.. a steep price tag in the form of record consumer and government debt... "...of the 7.2 million millionaires in the world today, the greatest percentage--32 percent--live in Europe, and their numbers are growing faster than those of any other region" (71)... "GDP gives a false sense of real economic well-being... The fault with the GDP is that it doesn't discriminate between economic activity that really improves the standard of living of people and economic activity that does not... "GDP counts every economic activity as good. So if crime rises because of unemployment and poverty, requiring an increase in police protection and enforcement, court costs, prisons costs, and a beefing up of private surveillance and protection, the economic activity it engenders finds its way into the GDP. If a toxic-waste dump needs to be cleaned up, an oil spill contained, or contaminated groundwater purified, again the economic activity adds to the total GDP. If the use of fossil fuels increases, it is added to the GDP, even though it means a depletion of existing stocks of nonrenewable energy. And if the health of millions of Americans deteriorates because of an increase in obesity, cigarette smoking, alcohol consumption, and drug use, the increased costs of health care are, likewise, added to the GDP... The purchase of more missiles, airplanes, tanks, and bombs are all added to the GDP... Here lies the rub. So much of our GDP--and an increasing percentage of it each year--is made up of economic activity that clearly does not improve our well-being... "The late senator Robert Kennedy... "it does not allow for the health of our families, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play... it measure everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile"... "Even the man who invented the GDP, Simon Kuznets... warned... that "the welfare of a nation" can "scarcely be inferred from a measure of national income"" (72-73)...
The Differences Between America and Europe"... the differences between America and Europe. The little things often caught my eye. For example, when I walk into men's rooms in Europe, the lights go on automatically and then shut off nine or ten minutes later whether I am done or not. Or whe I enter most hotel rooms, I have to insert my card key into a slot for the lights to turn on. When I leave, I retrieve my card key from the slot and the lights automatically turn off. Similarly, when I'm at an airport or approaching an escalator, a light signals my presence and the escalator begins to move. All of these little devices are designed to save energy."On the streets, I see very few homeless or mentally ill people. Although they certainly exist and their numbers are on the rise, they are not as visible a presence as they are on the streets of New York City, Washington, Chicago, and Los Angeles. People in Europe walk on the streets at night, even in the poor neighborhoods. Women often walk unaccompanied in the parks after dark. While police are around, they seem fewer and less tense than the ones I'm familiar with on city streets in America. "When I'm in Europe, I rarely come across multitudes of fat and obese people. Sometimes, I can walk an entire day without encountering a single overweight person. In America, in contrast, it seems everyone is grossly overweight and, even more shocking, unaware or unconcerned about their appearance. "In Europe, I see men and women lingering for hours over food and drink in the eateries and outdoor cafés. Although not unusual in itself, what's strange is that I see them at these establishments at all hours, not just at lunch or at the end of the day, as would be the case in America. The first thought that crosses my mind is, are these people all unemployed or just slow to get back to their desks and their assignments? "And no one seems to be rushing. No one. People still stroll in Europe. The older people often walk with their hands behind their backs, with one hand clasping the opposite wrist. I can't remember the last time I saw large numbers of people stroll on America's big-city streets. And while there is run-down housing and there are very poor neighborhoods all over Europe, they don't, for the most part, compare to the burned-out neighborhoods in the South Side of Chicago where I lived... "WHen I visit homes in Europe, people seem to have fewer things and be surrounded by less high-tech gadgetry. But what they do have is generally of very high quality... In Europe, it's less about how much one has and more about how to enjoy one's life. Most Europeans are quite clear in this regard" (74-75)...
Military, Terrorism"The twenty-five EU nations together devoted $155 billion in 2002 to defense-related spending. The US defense expenditures for this same year totaled $399 billion..."... many Europeans argue that the US military is far bigger than warranted in a post-Cold War world... global terrorism... Europeans argue that these problems are best handled with a combination of police actions, soft diplomacy, and more sophisticated and generous development aid" (76-77)...
Quality of Life"Universal public education is among our most cherished institutions and a signature for a country that has long believed in equality of opportunity..."No wonder American educators were taken aback by the results of the International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS) conducted in the mid-1990s and designed to compare the cognitive skills of adults in countries around the world. They survey found that American with less than nine years of education "score worse than virtually all of the other countries." "In 2000, the OECD reported on a detailed global survey taken to assess reading literacy in various countries. The Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) "focuses on measuring the extent to which individuals are able to construct, expand, and reflect on the meaning of what they have read in a wide range of texts... our children rank fifteenth in the world in reading literacy, below eight Western European nations. "Although the US spends about the same proportion of our GDP--3.6 percent--on education as the EU countries, children in twelve European nations rank higher in mathematics literacy, and in eight European countries, the children outscored American kids in scientific literacy. Equally surprising, the average teenager in the EU finishes 17.5 years of education, whicl American teenagers, on the average, finish only 16.5 years of education. And, in nine European coutries, more teenagers enter tertiary education (higher education) than in America" (78-79)... "...life expectancy throughout Western and Northern Europe is higher than in America... "The WHO also ranked the countries of the world in terms of overall health performance, and the US fell into thirty-seventh place. When it came to evaluating the fairness of countries' health care, the US ranked still lower, to fifty-fourth, or last place among the OECD nations. "Sadly, the US and South Africa are the only two developed countries in the world that do not provide health care for all of their citizens... "The irony is that the United States spends more per capita for health care than any other nation of the world... Most of the increased cost is attributable to the high administrative costs and margins associated with running a for-profit healthcare system... Waiting until the illness has advanced to a crisis increases the medical costs significantly" (79-80)... "Childhood poverty in the United States is among the highest in the developed world... ranks twenty-second, or second to last, among the developed nations. Only Mexico scores lower" (81)... "...the US incarceration rate is so high... [comprises] nearly one-quarter of the entire prison population in the world. While EU member states average 87 prisoners per 100,000 population, the US averages an incredible 685 prisoner per 100,000 population" (82)... "When people think of the older American Dream, what comes to mind is the idea that anyone can go from rags to riches. By contrast, the new European Dream is more about advancing the quality of life of a people. The first dream emphasizes individual opportunities, the sendon, the collective well-being of society. When it comes to the question of individual opportunities, however, the evidence suggests that Europe is fast catching up to the United States. As to quality of life, it's clear that Europe has moved ahead of America" (83)... "Although historians rarely allude to it, the reality is that the American Dream represents the thinking of a moment of time, frozen in European history and transported whole cloth to American shores in the eighteenth century... While much of Europe eventually combined elements of the Protestant Reformation theology and Enlightenment ideology into a new synthesis wrapped up in democratic socialism, America did not... "...our worldview... is locked into a specific period of time long since passed by in European history. In short, the American Dream is a very old dream and becoming increasingly irrelevant in the new era of globalization" (85)...
Security"Americans, more than any other people, have come to view security in terms of "autonomy" and "mobility"... To be autonomous is to be independent and not beholden to others. Mobility, in turn, ensures endless new opportunities..."For Europeans... one was secure to the extent one was nested in a community that, in turn, was safe from invasion or encroachment from the outside. The drawbridge, the moat... "American covet exclusive space... we put a premium on privacy. Europeans seek inclusive space--being part of extended communities, including family, kin, ethnic, and class affiliation. Privacy is less important than engagement" (90-91)...
Print Technology"A German, Johannes Gutenberg, invented the first print press with movable type in 1436, creating a revolution in communications that would become the indispensable command-and-control mechanism for organizing modern commerce and trade and for speeding up transactions and exchanges."Keeping track of vastly sped-up commercial transactions taking place over much longer distances required the kind of record-keeping that would have simply been impossible in an oral or script culture. Modern book-keeping, schedules, bills of lading, invoices, checks, and promissory notes, all so critical to the flow of modern commerce, were products of print technology. And print made possible the system of uniform pricing, without which modern notions of market exchange could not have evolved. "Print also changed spatial and temporal relationships in other profound ways. The late Walter J. Ong reminds us that because of oral cultures learning was passed on by word of mouth, storytelling and proverbs were ways to keep knowledge alive. Skills were passed down between parent and child and between master and apprentice by mouth. Very little practical knowledge was ever written down. Because communication was oral, it required close proximity between speakers and listeners. Oral cultures, by their very nature, are more intimate and communal. "Print cultures are very different. The author of an article or book rarely comes into close physical contact with the reader. Writing and reading are both carried out in relative privacy. Print breaks down the communal bond and reinforces the radical new idea of communications between people separated by great distances. "Printed books also brought the world into every home. It was now possible to learn about people in far-off lands. The human imagination was lifted from the parochialism of the immediate environment and allowed to roam the Earth" (94)... "Journeying over longer distances used to be so dangerous that the root of the word "travel" is "travail"" (95)...
Charging Interest"The Church prohibited usury... Matthew 6:24... Exodus 22:25... The Vatican... considered usury an improper gain and, therefore, theft..."Summing up the official position of the Vatican, Thomas Hobham argued that in charging interest, "the usurer sells nothing to the borrower that belongs to him. He sells only time which belongs to God. He can therefore not make a profit from selling someone else's property"" (104-105)...
Property"The concept of a society based on the sanctity of private property rights is a uniquely European idea. Its champions saw private property as the one and only mechanism that could ensure individual freedom. Later, its Marxist detractors would claim that private property, far from being the guarantor of personal freedom is, in fact, the single greatest obstacle to achieving it" (145)..."The naysayers, and there were many, argued that a society organized almost exclusively around a private property regime and a "mine vs. thine" attitude would be a ruination of civilization. They envisioned a world of unrelenting competition and struggle in which the more powerful would prevail and the rest become indentured or cast aside [Sounds familiar, right?]... "Karl Marx... calling it a scourge on civilization, and beseeched his fellow European countrymen to abolish the privatization of the means of production... "Working people... didn't experience much of the material gains promised by the Enlightenment... "The idea of a welfare state became acceptable in Europe around this time. It was a grand compromise, a way to appease the rising bourgeois class and the remaining aristocracy on the one hand, and Europe's working class and poor on the other hand. The idea of a private property regime would be upheld in return for a promise that some of the excesses of unbridled market capitalism would be redistributed... The welfare state would become a way to balance the books and prevent class divisions from turning into open warfare and revolution in the streets. For the most part, the great European compromise succeeded" (148-149)... "The quickening connection of the central nervous system of every human being to every other human being on Earth, via the World Wide Web and other new global communication technologies, is forcing us into a global space and a new simultaneous field of time. The result is that property exchange in national markets is going to increasingly give way in the twenty-first century to access relationships in vast global networks... "The capitalist marketplace and the nation-state are the defining institutional paradigm of the modern era, just as the Church and the feudal order were in the medieval era. And just as new spatial and temporal changes led to the demise of the medieval arrangement, now, once again, dramatic spatial and temporal changes are leading to the weakening of national markets and nation-states and the emergence of global commercial networks and transnational political spaces like the European Union. Rethinking a world beyond capitalist markets and nationa-states will likely be as contentious and bitterly fought as was the struggle that led to the fall of Christendom and feudal society" (159-160)...
Languages and Print"Much of the impetus for creating national languages had less to do with nation-state formation and more to do with the demographics facing the early print industry. Printers in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were anxious to expand the markets for the mass production of books. The problem was that while Latin was the official language of the Church and was used among European scholars and government officials in the palace courts, it represented too small a reading market for the new communications revolution. On the other hand, there were so many languages and dialects spoken across Europe that each one, by itself, would be too small a market to be commercially viable. The answer, in most countries, was to choose a single vernacular language, usually the most dominant in a region, and establish it as the language for reproduction--first in Bibles and later for works of literature and science."Even here, the languages that eventually became standard French, German, Spanish, Italian, and English are, in part, invented. They were usually the result of combining elements of all the various idioms spoken in a region and then standardizing the grammar. However, once a common language became accepted, it created its own mystique of permanence. People came to think of it as their ancestral tongue and the cultural tie that bound them together. "Getting everyone to speak and read the new vernacular necessitated the creation of a national educational system in each country...helped force a national consciousness... "Schools were designed to resemble factories, and students were made comfortable with the idea of spending an entire day in a large, centralized facility... Students were also taught the virtues of punctuality and efficiency, making and keeping schedules, and being industrious, disciplined, and competitive with one another... Turning out "productive citizens" became the primary responsibility of national education in every modern state" (168-169)...
The Nation-State"The modern state's mission is to create a totally rationalized environment that can optimize the free play of property exchange in a market economy...[Definition] "a state is a political institution that controls or possesses a geographic region for the purpose of exploitation and does so by manipulating the means of violence to maintain obedience to its rule" (170-171)...
Network Commerce"The birth of a new economic system is driving the changes in governance models, just as it did in the early modern era... This time around, it's the national market economy that is being challenged by a global network economy and the nation-state that is being partially subsumed by regional political spaces like the European Union. Network commerce is too quick, too dense, and too globally encompassing to be constrained by national borders. Nation-states are too geographically limited to oversee inter-regional and global commerce and harmonize the growing social and environmental risks that accompany a globalized world..."What's pushing all of these institutional changes is a communication revolution that is increasing the speed, pace, flow, density, and connectivity of commercial and social life... "The market-exchange economy and territory-bound nation-state were not designed to accommodate a communication revolution that can envelop the globe and connect everyone and everything on the planet simultaneously. The result is that we are witnessing the birth of a new economic system and new governing institutions that are as different from market capitalism and the modern territorial state as the latter were from the feudal economy and dynastic rule of an earlier era" (181-183)... "In pure networks, property still exists, but it stays with the producer and is accessed in time segments by the user. Subscriptions, memberships, rentals, time-shares, retainers, leases, and licensing agreements become the new medium of exchange... "[For example,] the music companies maintain a fast, efficient, smooth, and continuous relationship with the client over time, while Amazon.com is slogging along, having to negotiate each and every transaction as a discrete closed-end process. In a world where everyone is connected via cyberspace and information is being exchanged at the speed of light, time--not materials--becomes the most scarce and valuable resource. In pure networks, providers and users replace sellers and buyers, and access to the use of goods in extended time segments substitutes for the physical exchange of goods between sellers and buyers... "When transaction costs approach zero, margins virtually disappear, and market exchanges are no longer viable ways of conducting business. "Book publishing is a case in point. In a market, I sell my book to a publisher, who then sends it to a printer. From there, it is shipped to a wholesaler and then to a retailer, where the customer pays for the product. At each stage of the process, the seller is marking up the cost to the buyer to reflect his or her transaction costs. But now, an increasing number of publishers--especially of textbooks and research books, which require continuous updating--are bypassing all the intermediate steps in publishing a physical book and the transaction costs involved at each stage of the process. While Encyclopedia Britannica still charges $1,295 for its twenty-two-volume set of books, the company sells far fewer physical books. Instead, the compnay puts the books' contents on the World Wide Web, where information can be updated and accessed continuously. Users now pay a subscription fee to access the information over an extended period of time. Encyclopedia Britannica eliminates virtually all the remaining transaction costs of getting the information to its subscribers. The company has made the transition from selling a physical product to a buyer to providing the user access to a service over time" (184-185)... "The idea behind the networks is to pool resources and share risks while improving quality and reducing the time necessary to get goods and services to end users... "...networks have in common a way of doing business that differs fundamentally from the market-exchange model... The operational assumptions that guide networks turn much of orthodox market-based economic theory on its head and open up a new window for rethinking political goernance as well... "Markets, by their very nature, are adversarial forums... caveat emptor... "Networks operate on an entirely different principle. Each party enters into the relationship based on the supposition that by optimizing the benefits of the other parties and the grop as a whole, one's self-interest will be maximized in the process... "In a network, each party is dependent on resources controlled by another party... "The film industry was one of the first to shift into a network way of conducting business. The big studios disaggregated their operations in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Skilled craftsmem and creative personnel, who were previously employed in-house, set up their own independent companies. Now, when a film is done, the major movie studios partially finance the film and market it, while the executive producers bring together all of the individual subcontracting firms--the cinematographers, set designers, editors, etc.--in a short-lived network to make the movie. Often, the risks are distributed among the key entities, and they each share in the revenue stream once the film is released" (185-187)... "The keys to a successful network are reciprocity and trust... rather than tak[ing] advantage of the other parties... In the market arena, by contrast, sharing knowledge and making one's operation transparent would be seen as an error in judgment, allowing competitors to take advantage of one's weaknesses. In a network, however, vulnerability is considered a strength, not a weakness, a signal of trust and a willingness to work together to everyone's mutual benefit" (186-187)... "The close relationships between the players in a network often give them the lead over companies engaged in old-fashioned adversarial arm's-length market exchanges... being able to pool knowledge among a broad grop of players... can result in quicker problem-solving... "What's ultimately driving the shift to a network model is time scarcity... Certainly that has been the case in the semiconductor, computer, film, and fashion fields, where product life cycles are often measured in weeks and months rather than years. Networks are also better positioned to reduce costs in competitive markets like the auto industry. "Networks spawn greater creativity and innovation for the simple reason that they have a larger pool of the best minds to draw from... "Unlike market exchanges, which are expected to result in winners and losers, in network relationships, shared activity is expected to result in what is now called "win-win" situations. "The more conventional idea that competition for scarce resources is the essential nature of human behavior--the Hobbes/Darwin ethic--gives way to the radical notion that cooperation is more vital to one's survival and advancement" (190-192)...
Property vs. Belonging"...the late Toronto professor Crawford MacPherson... starts his analysis by reminding us that our current concept of property is largely an invention of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. We are so used to thinking of property as the right to exclude others from the use or benefit of something, says MacPherson, that we've lost sight of the fact that in previous times, property was also defined as the right not to be excluded from the use or enjoyment of something [commons]. MacPherson resurrects the older sense of property, the right of access to property held in common--the right to navigate water-ways, walk along commonly used country lanes, and enjoy access to the public square...The US is going the other direction with "common interest developments (CIDs). In these gated communities, not only are the homes privately owned, but even the streets, sidewalks, town squares, and parks are privately owned by the members who live there. Nonmembers often must seek permission at the gates to drive down the streets, walk on the sidewalks, stroll in the parks, or visit shops in the square. More than forty-seven million Americans... already live in these private communities, and the numbers are growing dramatically. CIDs may become the dominant living arrangement [in the US] by mid-century" (193-194)...
The EU"...the 1957 Treaty of Rome... established the European Community... the first political entity in history whose very reason for existence was "to build peace"" (201)..."Jean Monnet, the founding father of the Union... "The Maastricht Treaty of 1992 transformed the European Economic Community into the European Union... far more than a common economic market... a single EU-wide currency... the granting of common rights to all European citizens, furthering police cooperation among the states, and harmonizing immigration and asylum policies across the Union... "Now, 222 regions from Catalonia to Lombardy were to be officially represented in Brussels, giving them direct access to one another, the member states, and the EU governing machinery, without having to be represented exclusively by their nation-states... "It is... the first transnational government in history whose regulatory powers supercede the territorial powers of the members that make it up. This fact alone marks a new chapter in the nature of governance" (206-209)...
Human Rights"The rights outlined in the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union go far beyond the rights contained in our own Bill of Rights and subsequent constitutional amendments. They include the Right of Life: "no one should be condemned to the death penalty, or executed." Everyone has the right to have his or her physical and mental activity respected. In the fields of medicine and biology, the individual's right to free and informed consent is protected. Eugenics practices are prohibited, "in particular, those aiming at the 'selection' of a person." Selling human body parts is also prohibited, as is the reproductive cloning of human beings. Everyone has "the right to the protection of personal data concerning him or her." Similarly, "everyone has the right to access the data which has been collected concerning him or her, and the right to have it rectified." Everyone has "the right to marry and the right to found a family." Everyone has "the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his or her interests." "Everyone has the right to education and to have access to vocational and continuing education." While discrimination based on sex, race, color, and ethnic or religious background is prohibited, other discriminations, based on genetic features, language, and opinions, are also prohibited. The Union "shall respect cultural, religious, and linguistic diversity" as well. Children are granted the conventional rights "to such protection and care as is necessary for their well-being," but they are also guaranteed the right to "express their views freely." "Such views shall be taken into consideration on matters which concern them in accordance with their age and maturity." In addition, "every child shall have the right to maintain, on a regular basis, a personal relationship and direct contact with both his or her parents, unless that is contrary to his or her interests.""There are still other rights that do not exist in our U.S. Constitution. For example, the EU Constitution grants everyone "the right of access to a free placement service," as well as "the right to limitation of maximum working hours, to daily and weekly rest periods, and to an annual perios of paid leave." The constitution also guarantees the right to paid maternity leave and parental leave following the birth or adoption of a child. The Union "recognizes the right to social and housing assistance so as to ensure a decent existence for all those who lack sufficient resources." The constitutional guarantees also include "the right of access to preventive health care and the right to benefit from medical treatment." The EU even guarantees "a high level of environmental protection and the improvement in the quality of the environment... in accordance with the principle of sustainable development." "Many of the rights guaranteed by the new European Constitution remain controversial in the United States" (212-213)...
Governance"...the sudden fall of the Soviet Empire. The new technologies ran havoc over the rigid bureaucratic style... The inability of Communist governance, at every level, to respond to the liberating power of decentralized global information and communication technologies helped seal its doom. The old walls of repression and censorship were too thin to withstand the media invasion..."Taylor argued that management should assume complete authority over how work is carried out on the factory floor and front office. He reasoned that if laborers retained some control over how their work was to be executed, they would conspire to work as little as necessary to perform the tasks assigned to them... "Governments, like companies, relied on this kind of top-down bureaucratic model of governance for most of the twentieth century. In this schema, the ideas, feelings, and expertise of those delivering government services, as well as the affected citizenry, are largely ignored... the citizenry are treated as passive recipients... "The introduction of intelligent information and communication machines with feedback loops changed the nature of technology and created new metaphors for rethinking the art of governance... "...Alfred North Whitehead, the father of process philosophy... Because everything is in continuous flux, novelty is present at every instant. Whitehead believed that all living things are continuously anticipating novelty in their surrounding environment and making adjustments to those changes in order to secure their duration--what we now call "feedback"... "Norbert Wiener... cybernetics... transformed process philosophy into a new technological format... "Cybernetics reduces purposeful behavior to two components, information and feedback... Wiener defined information as
"the name for the content of what is exchanged with the outer world as we adjust to it... The process of receiving and of using information is the process of our adjusting to the contingencies of the outer environment, and of our living effectively within that environment" (Wiener, Norbert. The Human Use of Human Beings. NY: Avon Books, 1954. pp. 26-27). "According to cybernetics theory, the "steering mechanism" that regulates all behavior is feedback. Anyone who has ever adjusted a thermostat is familiar with how feedback works. The thermostat regulates the room temperature by monitoring the change in temperature in the room. If the room cools off and the temperature dips below the mark set on the dial, the thermostat kicks on the furnace, and the furnace remains on until the room temperature coincides once again with the temperature set on the dial. Then the thermostat kicks off the furnace, until the room temperature drops again, requiring additional heat. This is an example of negative feedback. All systems maintain themselves by the use of negative feedback. Its opposite, positive feedback, produces results of a very different kind. In positive feedback, a change in activity feeds on itself, reinforcing and intensifying the process, rather than re-adjusting and dampening it. For example, a sore throat cause a person to cough, and the coughing, in turn, exacerbates the sore throat... "Today's intelligent technologies all operate by cybernetic principles" (219-220)... Process politics... the radical suggestion that the best decisions are the ones reached democratically by everyone affected... In the process-oriented model, networks become the best mechanism for continuous engagement between the parties... "The 1968 student rebellion played a seminal role in loosening up the idea of governance. Students argued that the university was a community of shared interests and that they ought to enjoy some say in how it is to be governed. They sought to break out of the narrow container that kept all decision-making in the hands of a remote board of trustees and university bureaucracy... "Philosophers such as Michel Foucault argued... The state is no longer sovereign. It loses its power as the exclusive agent responsible for disciplining its citizenry... "The new communication technologies figure prominently in the deconstruction of state sovereignty... Governance is reconceived as the management and communication flows, and players position themselves at strategic nodes, embedded in mutliple interacting networks, where their every decision and action has consequences that flow across the network and beyond... "...the old nation-state governing unit is simply incapable, on its own, of managing the sheer volume and flow of human exchange and interactivity that is generated" (220-223)...
Network Governance"There was widespread agreement that the European Union had to catch up to the new technologies that were revolutionizing society..."In 1994... a report entitled Europe's Way to the Information Society: An Action Plan. The report spelled out a series of initiatives for making the European Union the first fully integrated information society in the world... "...the EU began to reinvent its style of governance... "Emphasis was placed on creating networks that transcend nation-state boundaries. The idea was to establish a European frame of reference... "It has even become popular in the European Union to talk about "polycentric" governance in contrast to conventional government. Traditional government is associated with territorial rule. Polycentric governance is decentralized... a function that can be performed by a wide variety of public and private, state and non-state, national and international institutions and practices... It is a new political game that is far more complex and sophisticated, in which no one player can dominate the field or determine the outcome, but where everyone has some power to affect the direction and flow of the process. "The polycentric governing style is characterized by continuous dialogue and negotiations between all the players in the many networks... The new genre of political leader is more like a mediator than a military commander. Coordination replaces commands... "For example, the introduction of the Subsidiarity Principle has become a mainstay of EU governance. The principle represented a compromise of sorts, between the confederalists and the federalists. The principle, which has been incorporated into the new constitution, states that, whenever possible, governing decisions ought to be made as far down and as close as possible to the communities and constituents most affected by the decisions... The upshot of subsidiarity is that the regions have now become a kind of third force, and they play off their relationships with both host countries and the EU to advance their goals... "There has been a balkanization of authority, with the entrance of new players and a multiplication of competing agendas... "The whole process ultimately works because the people of Europe want "problems without frontiers" to be addressed by the whole European community... handled at the Europe-wide level because the very nature and consequences of such activities transcend national boundaries and can only be effectively addressed by the whole community working in concert" (223-230)...
Civil Society"The materialists vieew the marketplace as the critical social institution and primary arbiter of human relations... "Rather, markets and governments are extensions of the culture. They are secondary, not primary, institutions. They exist by the grace of the cultures that create them..."...like all liberation movements, the first prerequisites for re-asserting its prominence is casting out much of the language that has come to define its very being. Advocates complain that the civil society is not "the third sector", as many academicians claim, but rather the first sector. Similarly, categorizing civil society groups as "not-for-profit organizations" or "nongovernmental organizations" makes them appear as less significant or even just shadows of commercial or governmental institutions. A new generation of activists prefer to think of their institutions as civil society organizations (CSOs). They also define their activity as service rather than volunteering, to connote its importance in developing and reproducing the culture" (235-237)... "Unlike market capitalism, which is based on Adam Smith's notion that the common good is advanced by each person pursuing his or her own individual self-interest, the civil society starts with the exact opposite premise--that by each person giving of him- or herself to others and optimizing the greater good of the larger community, one's own well-being will be advanced... "Civil society organizations have exploded across the world in the past twenty years... CSOs empower people to champion their own interests in a world where corporations and governments are less likely to do so... the success of civil society organizations is attributable to their ability to fill the vacuum left by market and government failures... "CSOs have pushed for greater representation in every country as well as at global institutions... The participation allowed, however, has rarely been more than perfunctory and advisory in nature. The EU has become the first government to formally acknowledge CSOs as full-fledged partners in public policy networks... There is a growing understanding that the very success of the EU... depends... on the effectiveness of civil society organizations in representing the interests of real constituencies whose concerns span the local, regional, national, and even EU boundaries. The CSOs bring true "participatory democracy" to the governing process" (230-239)... "What's becoming clear if that in a world increasingly dominated by global corporate interests, government at every level--municipal, regional, national, and transnational--will have to establish deep interlinking policy networks with civil society organizations if either are to amass enough political power to provide an effective counterbalance to the commercial arena" (240)...
Immigration"The world's poor are forced to migrate to wherever capital takes up residence. It's a matter of finding work. In Europe, companies are anxious to recruit cheaper immigrant workers in order to cut their labor costs and remain competitive in world markets. Immigrant groups will often take menial jobs that the native population refuses to do... Europeans worry that immigrant groups will grab the few available... jobs..."There is also the concern that immigrant cultures will strain an already overburdened welfare system... "Lastly, native cultural communities claim that poor immigrants pose a real threat to public safety. It is true that a disproportionate number of immigrants commit crimes and end up in prison... The main reason for the high crime rate is the high unemployment rate among foreigners living in the EU countries... "Europeans, by and large, feel inundated and overwhelmed by the immigrant crush... "The immigration backlash portends serious consequences for the long-term well-being of Europe itself. The sad truth is that without a massive increase in non-EU immigration in the next several decades, Europe iw likely to wither and die... "Europe's overall population is expected to fall by a startling 13 percent between 2000 and 2050... At the heart of the problem is... Europe has the lowest fertility rate of any region of the world... "An aging population is likely to result in Europe losing its competitive edge in the world economy... By 2006, more people will be retiring from the French workforce than will be entering it... "Fewer younger workers paying for the retirement of an increasing number of older workers... "The only way out, short of a miraculous rise in fertility... is to open the floodgates to millions of new immigrants... "I would suggest that the success or failure of the emergent European Dream hinges, to a great extent, on how the current generation of Europeans address the issues of fertility and immigration" (247-257)... "The Muslim influence is particularly challenging because Islam has traditionally viewed itself as a universal brotherhood of the faith. One's allegiance to Islam is supposed to supercede allegiances to any particular culture, place, or political institution" (261). [Muslim refuse to blend in. This is of particular concern because of their backward views on human rights.]...
Citizenship"Citizenship is becoming increasingly international as human activity becomes increasingly global. The old idea of tying citizenship to nationality appears almost quaint in a world of global commerce, transnational civil society movements, and shifting cultural diasporas..."...the Nuremberg war crimes trials after World War II, was the first multilateral government agreement to acknowledge rights and duties in a moral community that transcends sovereign states... "The EU citizen is the first in the world to be fully guaranteed universal human rights enforceable by law" (274-279)...
The Military"...the Bush White House loathe[s] the "Brussels" mentality... invariably the comment is made that Brussels whines about US strong-arm tactics and bullying behavior but appears quite comfortable letting us sacrifice our young men and women in uniform around the world to protect European security interests..."It has to do with very different sensibilities about how each superpower perceives its relationship to the world and the kind of vision of the future each holds" (283-284)... Capital Punishment"No issue more unites Europeans than the question of capital punishment. For them, opposition to the death penalty is as deeply felt as opposition to slavery was for the American abolitionists... Europeans express a raw emotional disgust of capital punishment that is not evident anywhere else in the world..."...candidate countries for EU membership must abolish capital punishment as a condition for entry into the Union. It tops the list of conditions... "The death penalty, for Europeans, is a constant reminder of the dark side of their past... "Protocol No. 6 bar[s] the death penalty unconditionally, even including crimes committed during times of war... "Europeans [as opposed to the US] deeply oppose the idea of retribution... Capital punishment... turns the justice system into a mere tool of illegitimate private vengeance. "At the heart of Christian doctrine is the belief in redemption--that even the worst sinner can be saved. The European Union embraces this most basic of Christian beliefs in its support of rehabilitation" (284-287)...
The Military"How do Europeans square their position on not taking the life of a criminal with waging war against an enemy?..."Europeans reject the kind of power politics that has dominated foreign policy for centuries and has led to so much death and destruction... "...are determined to never again allow national rivalries to descend into open warfare... a new vision of perpetual peace... "European leaders favor negotiation over ultimatums, reconciliation over recrimination, and cooperation over competition... "...in Europe, "the rule of law has replaced the crude interplay of power"... "...the European model of integration "is inspiring regional experiments from Asia to Latin America"... ""European integration shows that compromise and reconciliation is possible after generations of prejudice, war and suffering... "Europe's new approach [is] co-opting people rather than coercing them" (294-301)... "The EU member countries contribute ten times the number of peacekeeping troops as the US, belying the oft-heard American contention that Europe lets America should, alone, the task of being the world's policeman" (304)...
Irresponsible Science"Sir Martin Rees is one of the world's distinguished astronomers... in 2003... warned that a new genre of high-risk scientific experiments and pursuits threatened the very existence of life on Earth..."He pointed to the project begun at the Brookhaven Laboratory on Long Island in 2000. Physicists there are using a particle accelerator to attempt to create a "quark-gluon plasma," a hot soup of dense subatomic materials that replicate conditions believed to exist at the time the "big bang" gave birth to the cosmos more than 13.7 billin years ago. Some scientists worry that a high concentration of energy of the type being pursued at Brookhaven could conceivably lead to three doomsday outcomes. A black hole might form... [and] "suck in everything around it." It is also possible that quark particles could form a compressed object known as a "stranglet," which is "far smaller than a single atom" but could "infect" surrounding matter and "transform the entire planet Earth into an inert hyperdense sphere about one hundred metres across." Or even worse, the subatomic forces of space itself could be transformed by the experiment. If that were to happen, the effect might be to "rip the fabric of space itself." The result, warns Rees, could be that "the boundary of the new-style vacuum would spread like an expanding bubble," eventually devouring the entire universe... "Rees goes on to warn of a number of current experimental pursuits that pose the threat of disastrous consequences for life on Earth, including the construction of small nanobots that replicate like viruses and that could race out of control, devouring matter and turning the Earth's surface to a "gray goo." Rees worries about similar threats posed by genetic engineering and computer technology--especially as knowledge in the high-tech fields spreads, increasing the likelihood that someone will, by accident or intent, cause irrevocable harm" (315-317)... "Europe is beginning to diverge, in a fundamental way, from the American approach to science and technology... "The European Union is forging ahead on a wide regulatory front... "...controls on chemicals to mitigate toxic impacts on the environment and himan and animal health... "The REACH system--which stands for Registration, Evaluation, and Authorization of Chemicals--requires the companies to conduct safety and environmental tests to prove that the products they are producing are safe... "The European Union's regulatory approach, in stark contrast [to the US], is designed to prevent harm before it occurs... "What's changed... risks of all kinds are now global in scale, open-ended in duration, incalculable in their consequences... "..."the precautionary principle"... has become the centerpiece of EU regulatory policy"(315-327)...
The Precautionary Principle"...a proposed experiment, or technology applicatin, or product introduction is subject to review and even suspension in "cases where scientific evidence is insufficient, inconclusive or uncertain and preliminary scientific evaluation indicates that there are reasonable grounds for concern that the potentially dangerous effects on the environment, human, animal, or plant health, may be inconsistent with the high level of protection chosen by the EU"... allowing regulatory authorities to err on the side of safety" (327)...
Farming"The contrast between American and European approaches to the future of farming highlights the differences... genetically modified food crops... the ultimate expression of the Baconian approach to science, with its emphasis on waging war against nature...In Europe "Organic agriculture... an array of agricultural practices to integrate farm production back into its local environment" (344)...
Rights of Animals"The new European agenda extends the idea of universal rights... to our fellow creatures..."...the Amsterdam Treaty... "to ensure improved protection and respect for the welfare of animals as sentient beings"... Never before had any government recognized other creatures as sentient beings, with feelings and consciousness. Then, in March 2002, the German Bundestag shocked the world community by becoming the first parliament in the world to guarantee animal rights in its constitution" (346)... "The best current example of the dictum that what's harmful to the other animals is harmfuol to us is the overuse of antibiotics... raising the very real danger of spreading global pandemics... "The European Union has become the first government to issue a directive to state "that efforts must be undertaken to replace animal experiments with alternative methods." (351)...
Spreading the European Dream"...no nation will be able to go it alone twenty-five years from now. European states are the first to understand and act upon the emerging realities of a globally interdependent world..."Canadian sensibilities are far more closely aligned with Europe than with the US... Canada might eventually join the European Union... "...the US [is] an oddity in a globalized world where other nations are pooling or giving up much of their sovereignty and becoming part of transnational regional political organizations" (358-359)... "The most likely candidate region to follow on the heels of the European Union is the East Asian community, with or without China's participation... 1967... the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN)... East Asian Vision Group (EAVG)... Asians are "better suited than Europeans to create network governance, a transnational space, and a global consciousness... "The constant attention to relationships also makes Asians more sensitive to the feelings of others... Asian parents spend far more time with their kids focusing on feelings and social relations, to help children "anticipate the reactions of other people with whom they will have to coordinate their behavior"" (362-363)... "Given their preoccupation with relationships, Asians are understandably less interested in discovering the truth than in knowing "the way." It's knowing how to relate to "the other," not how to acquire "the other," that's ultimately important... "...in Chinese... there is no word for 'individualism.' The closest one can come is the word for 'selfishness'" (364). "People surround themselves with substitutes to try to regain the sense of oceanic oneness they experienced as infants. Freud believed that the Christ story served as a surrogate for the loss of the original feeling of oneness by offering God's unconditional love and the hope of eternal salvation. In the modern era, nationalist ideology became the favored substitute. Patriotic fervor gives many people a sense of being part of a larger, loving, immortal whole. Ideology often serves the same purpose. Many capitalists and socialists have found refuge in an ell-embracing ideological bubble" (371)... "...solid majorities in every European country say they "believe it is more important for government to ensure that no one is in need, than it is for individuals to be free to pursue goals without government interference... "...95 percent of Europeans put helping others at the top of their list of priorities... putting financial success dead last of the eight values ranked in the survey" (382-383)...
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