Book Review: The United States of Europe by T.R. Reid

The United States of Europe: The New Superpower and the End of American Supremacy
By T.R. Reid
The Penguin Press, 305 pages, $25.95

Slam dunks aren't what they used to be. Conquest in Iraq is nothing like the "slam dunk" George Tenet predicted as CIA Director. Unification of Europe is proving to be unlike the slam dunk author T.R. Reid describes in his book, The United States of Europe. The resounding "No" votes to a pan-European constitution from France and The Netherlands deflect the political trajectory Reid expected.

Perhaps it is the subtitle of Reid's book, The New Superpower and the End of American Supremacy, that delivers the most value. Reid's vision of the future casts the U.S. as a fading matinée idol to Europe's fresh star on the rise. While the U.S.A. unquestionably drove the 20th century, the reins of the 21st century are in the hands of the newly crystallized European Union, asserts Reid.

Initially, Reid may seem an unlikely messenger of European issues as he is more closely associated with Japan, having been The Washington Post bureau chief in Tokyo during the first half of the 1990s. He has written three books in Japanese. But he proves to be a worthy pundit with a worldly trained eye and a globally tuned ear.

Reid is fully aware that he must deliver his humbling prophesy to an audience that is hard-wired for jingoism. At the merest suggestion of vulnerability, the U.S.A. cheerleading gets louder. America prevailed in two world wars. America lead the world in industrial production. America devised The Marshall Plan to heal the ravages of war. America stopped the spread of communism. America policed the world with military might. Boo-Ya! But that was then, Reid says, and this is now. We must appreciate that what has emerged in the unified Europe (constitution or no constitution) is a cohesive region representing about 500 million people and a collective gross domestic product in the range of $10 trillion. It wields more people, more wealth and more trade than the U.S.A.

It was no less a statesman than Winston Churchill who coined the term "United States of Europe" to illustrate the framework he foresaw. (He also minted the phrase "Iron Curtain" to depict the post-World War II Soviet clampdown.) Churchill envisioned a federated Europe with member countries enjoying a form of statehood status. The current European Union is modeled quite similarly, with a central executive commission, a central legislative body, a central judicial branch and a central bank governing 26 countries. The chief architects of the European Movement--Jean Monnet and Robert Schuman--are men hardly known in insulated America, but there are monuments built to them in Europe.

The European Union has been successful on multiple levels from the moment on January 1, 2002, when banks and ATMs throughout the continent distributed only the new common currency, the euro. This freshly designed pan-European money hit the ground running and continues to pace the American dollar. Reid explains that one of the underpinnings of monetary stability in the EU is called the Stability and Growth Pact. In order to qualify for Euro membership, a country's budget deficit cannot exceed 3% of its gross domestic product. With such a mandate, each country pulls its own weight and the EU ensures its even economic keel. Concerns of rocking the boat by admitting economically uncertain countries such as Turkey have thrown the plan off course.

The evidence of the EU's economic might is empirical and its direct effect on the U.S. is compelling. Reid explains how the European aircraft manufacturing company Airbus Industries has flown circles around Boeing by having a better understanding of the needs of tomorrow's airlines and adapting with a superior business plan. With the closing of Boeing facilities and the attendant loss of jobs and revenue, the lesson hits home. Reid points out that the EU and the European Space Agency have trumped American technology by developing a vastly improved global positioning system and they are signing up future customers around the world. The ESA promises to be a dominant force in space exploration as their success in reaching the farthest point in the solar system demonstrates.

In a chapter translated as "Europe, The Winner," Reid cleverly invents a typically American couple and tracks them taking a typically American vacation using what we think to be typically American products and services. He then deftly reveals how every single product and service is owned by a European corporation or holding company.

Reid wants his readers to know that the united Europe is not just an economic success story, it is a social success as well. "The unified Europe has a higher life expectancy, lower infant mortality, lower rates of heart disease and cancer, and health insurance that covers every person--all for about half as much per capita as the United States spends," he writes. Take poverty rates, for example. Using a definition of "poverty" to be a family income at least 50% below the mean personal income in the nation as a whole, about 20% of adults in America live in poverty at any given time. By the same measurement, in France the figure is 7.5% and in Italy the figure is 6.5%.

Europeans pay a whopping sales tax, sometimes called Value Added Tax, to pay for health care, unemployment subsidy, housing benefits and other such services in the interest of the commonweal. Whereas in America, the term "welfare state" is used derisively by politicians "seeking to attack those who want to give away huge sums of public money," Reid explains, in Europe people are proud of the social safety blanket known as the welfare state. Perhaps the most unifying mindset of the European is the shared sense of the government's social responsibility to everyone and the basic responsibility of everyone to pay for the social model. This is not a shared American value, where the individual is valued over the collective and government has come to be perceived as the problem and not a solution.

The modern European principle against the death penalty constitutes a seemingly unbridgeable chasm between Euro-American cultures. Reid quotes a European educator saying, "Your country stands with China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo in number of executions." Reid points out that George W. Bush's advocacy of the death penalty and his signature on 153 death warrants while governor of Texas is one of the factors that made him a despised figure in Europe long before the war in Iraq. Europeans knew him as "the world's leading executioner" when he entered the White House. A British newspaper wrote, "And disturbingly, he has mass support from Americans, driven by their out-of-control gun culture and blood lust for retribution." When Attorney General John Ashcroft toured Europe hoping to convince justice ministers to extradite alleged terrorist prisoners to the United States for trial and possible death sentences, he failed miserably. "To the Europeans, the amazing thing was that a senior U.S. government official didn't recognize the force of Europe's Charter on Fundamental Rights," says Reid. The otherwise reserved BBC asked, "What planet does the American attorney general live on?"

With the European Union's economic muscle, its social mandate and its ability to regulate all trade within its expanding borders, America can no longer afford to ignore or demean its influence. It is a difficult and unpleasant job to teach Americans that the center of the universe may no longer be Washington D.C., and may instead be the seat of Euro operations in Belgium, but Reid's important book is worthy of the task.