LONDON, 9 September 2004 — So who is the superpower? If it’s guns it is the United States of America. But if it’s gold it’s the European Union. If Europe had competed as one unit in the Olympics it would have overpowered the US by 82 gold medals to thirty-five. Perhaps we should add in opera houses too. Europe has 95 to America’s five.
This is a silly game of course. Nevertheless, as the American election looms closer, a distinct “them and us” mentality is developing among Europeans.
Still ringing in many of our ears is the sentiment we shared after the massive anti-war demonstrations on the eve of the Iraq war — in the words of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former French finance minister — “On Saturday, Feb. 15, 2003, a new nation was born on the street. This new nation is the European nation.”
All this cannot be either denied or minimized. Yet as the anti-Bush demonstrations in New York last week show there are two Americas, fairly evenly divided. Moreover within each camp there are many divisions. Not all, perhaps not even a majority, of Bush voters are warmongers. They may be frightened, they may be uninformed, they may feel the secure world with its old time morality that they have grown up in is disintegrating all around them, but only a moderately small if well organized minority reach for the gun as a matter of instinct.
The last thing that Europe needs to do at this most sensitive time in American politics is to talk itself into a militantly anti-American mood. A polarized Atlantic with embittered politicians, commentators and electorates on both sides will produce the very situation the Europeans fear most — a fortress America that abjures international cooperation
Europe works best not when it defines itself by measuring itself against others but when it seeks to cast a role for itself as the pioneer of cooperation between once hostile states. As the Oxford don, Timothy Garton Ash, puts it in his observant new book “Free World”: “To strive to create a European identity by making America into Europe’s Other, as Britain invented itself by making France its Other, is not European patriotism. It is European nationalism.”
No one else has achieved what the European countries have done — emerge from two devastating wars that they spread across the rest of the world and build a whole continent of peace. The compromises, the political trade-offs and the endless committee work may be mind-numbing and easy to satirize but, compared with the alterative, as Wordsworth would have said, “bliss was it that dawn to be alive”.
In 1942 they were only four countries in Europe that were electoral democracies — Britain, Switzerland, Ireland and Sweden. There was not, to my knowledge, any politician, professor or writer who imagined that just over 60 years later that Europe would have built a common union, uniting old enemies in the closest of embraces, with free elections, a vigorous press, a shared currency, and two European courts that adjudicate on the most complex disputes thrown up by industrial policy, interstate relations and human rights. And added to that a host of non-governmental organizations from Greenpeace and its environmental cause and Amnesty with its close monitoring of police excesses, which keep everybody on their toes. Europe has achieved what no one in 1945 could even imagine. Europe does not need to compare itself with America to stand tall, but only with its earlier self of not very long ago.
“War is one of the things”, writes Garton Ash, “that the whole European project has always defined itself against”.
And this is how Europe should proceed in the future. With an economic size that rivals America’s it has immense financial muscle. It has diplomatic sophistication of unparalleled expertise.
It has universities which if not at as good as Harvard can compete well with any other university in the US at producing applied brilliance. With this unprecedented armory, it should be able in crisis situations, whether it is the Israeli/Palestinian dispute (which after all was Europe’s making), the Sudanese civil wars or Iran’s march toward becoming a nuclear weapons’ state, to do far more than it is presently doing. Europe is in danger of becoming a professional critic of America for overreaching itself whilst it husbands its power and wealth, and reaches for very little.
Europe has to create as well as to criticize. It doesn’t need America’s guns. But it could do well to emulate its will. It needs to raise its sights beyond its obsession with America’s faults and get on with extending its zone of peace and prosperity far and wide. Maybe then it can dare to call itself a superpower.
