The European 'Bad' Dream
The European Dream by Jeremy Rifkin. Hardcover: 448 pages. (New York, NY: Tarcher, 2004.) Amazon Price: $17.13.
Review by Ryan Setliff
The European Dream: How Europe's Vision of the Future is Quietly Eclipsing the American Dream is written by a left-of-center American who has spent a considerable part of his life in Europe. The author Jeremy Rifkin has developed an enthusiastic admiration of a so called European Dream. Rifkin sees this emerging ideal animating the civil society and body politic of the new Europe. Succinctly stated, Rifkin presents the European Dream as a viable new paradigm transcending the ideals embodied within the American Dream. America is presented as a 'Jesusland' inebriated by folksy religion, cowboy capitalism and cowboy diplomacy. American after all was founded by "oppressed religious orders" like the Puritans. "Many Europeans no longer believe in God," boasts Rifkin. Europe is celebrated as a land of secularism, sophistication, humane economic considerations and the pursuit of consensus in diplomacy. America is said to be corrupted by national pride, the pursuit of the Almighty Dollar and an obsession with material acquisitiveness emanating from the "Protestant work ethic" no doubt. Americans are said to live to work, whereas Europeans work to live.
Europe is presented as having a saner, sober-minded, and more humane vision for life, economics, governance and international relations. In Europe, a cooperative spirit takes precedent over the competitive spirit. In America, we suffer from a "sink or swim mentality" and a "credit card culture" bemoans Rifkin. The American Dream is fading into oblivion he surmises.
Supposedly the European Dream "beckons us to a new age of inclusivity, diversity, quality-of-life, deep play, sustainability, universal human rights, the rights of nature, and peace on earth." This European Dream is heralded as an exemplar for the rest of the world to learn from or follow. As a backdrop to his thesis, Rifkin sketches a cursory history of the European Union from its embryonic beginnings as the European Coal and Steel Community after World War II to more recent times. Today, the political and economic union has solidified under a single European currency bloc. Also, the Europeans have taken steps to unify their military as well and develop a transnational rapid-reaction force. Presently, the European Union has 25 member states and population of over 456 million. As of 2004, it has an $11 trillion GDP that eclipses the United States. Though, the per capita income of member countries is typically two-thirds of the American income and less than one-third amongst the new eastern European member countries.
Rifkin errs significantly in his economic analysis and has a penchant for buoying essentially socialist policies with words like "innovative" and "dynamic" so as to make it palatable to his mostly American audience. Rifkin notes that Europeans "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." Leftist economists have created their own boorish indices of quality-of-life indicators that measures it in terms of aggregate state investment in social welfare services, health care, and unemployment benefits. So, somehow socialist Sweden comes out on top and exceeds the United States in "quality-of-life." Sweden is where the government gets half your take home pay and many urban dwellers live in monotonous state-sponsored housing. Having traveled all around Europe myself, I'm not sure how their quality-of-life surpasses America, the land of wide open spaces and more spacious dwellings. Perhaps the reason Europeans are so apt to demand more vacation and leisure time owes to the cramped hovels (with scant square footage) that most of them call homes. In 2005, the lackadaisical French have had their 35-hour work week pulled from under their feet by their government. This fact alone throws a real monkeywrench in Rifkin's boasting about having short work weeks while still sustaining high productivity. Originally, it was said that productivity would go up and unemployment would go down, but that never really went as planned; France simply can no longer bear this costly labour policy.
The author puts a spin on the precarious web of transnational bureaucracy and the regulatory state that is emerging. Trying to buoy the innovative nature of the European polity, he makes it out to be polycentric with multiple centers of public policy innovation. In reality, the emerging European superstate embodies a scattered web of local, regional, national, and international authority with no clear demarcation lines of jurisdiction but a trend towards aggrandizing power within the international body. Bureaucrats or aptly "Eurocrats" in Strausbourg can feasibly strike down and usurp national, regional and local authorities, though resistance by interposition is theoretically possible. Presently, there is virtually no limit set on the powers exercised by the transnational European authority, except the willingness (or lack thereof) of member nations to fund the Union. Rifkin boasts how the European Union authorities are increasingly bypassing the national authorities and working directly with local and regional governments. Rifkin casts this in a positive light and chalks it up to cutting the red tape. Though in reality, this is a stark reminder that urban Barcelonians, parochial Britons, and rural Bavarians will all find a government that is even less amenable to them and more aloof. It seems faceless faraway bureaucrats from Brussels and Strausbourg are setting far-reaching policies and laws affecting their lives even at the community level.
Rifkin devotes a good part of his book to elaborating upon the new proposed European Constitution and championing the ideals embodied therein. "Your Constitution is all sail and no anchor," uttered Lord Macaulay in criticising the U.S. Constitution. In my humble opinion, Macaulay's century-old criticism more aptly fits the new European Constitution which is still in the woodwork. What appears to be emerging is a paper palisade full of lofty egalitarian platitudes, as well as human rights and socialist precepts. The European constitution is teleocratic like the Soviet Constitution and the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, whereas the U.S. Constitution is nomocratic. The traditional current in governance in the West has been "nomocratic" or rule-based government; the other is "teleocratic" government, or government designed to achieve specific ideological ends (i.e abolishing poverty, achieving social justice, or building a new society). Europeans are apt to claim everything from job security, health care, and social security as rights. The teleocratic state typically takes an active role in a myriad of human activities: economics, education, health care, mass-media, family life, the arts, culture, sport — seemingly any object the state views as an end to the society it aspires to be.
At the climax of Rifkin's book, he lambastes the American Dream and subjects it to an asinine Freudian analysis elucidating the subconscious desires behind our "self-interest" obsession. "The American Dream," he posits, "is largely caught up in the death instinct... We have become a death culture." Supposedly in Rifkin's mind we Americans have lost touch with the "oceanic oneness [we] experienced as infants." We're allegedly like narcissistic children who seek to control our environment through our selfish ego.
If anything, this ridiculous never-grown-up psychoanalysis is more applicable to the European Dream. It's the Europeans who value security over liberty. It's Europeans who think risk is a dirty word and would rather have the holding hand of nanny state at their side. It's Europeans who would rather spend their life in a fetal position, figuratively speaking, with their socialistic womb-to-tomb welfare state nurturing them all the way. The hidden crux behind socialism has always been envy, however many egalitarian platitudes about compassion and dignity are lofted behind the vociferous ideology. The European Dream is inherently materialist in the philosophical sense and it is no secret that socialist ideas are well infused in the European psyche.
The paternalistic welfare state remains anathema to many Americans as the dependency that is intrinsic to it is considered detrimental to overall economic freedom while diminishing opportunity and prosperity. Americans generally would rather be risk-takers and have the opportunities that come with a laissez-faire economic environment. America has its problems I'll grant and the desire for immediate gratification and flagrant consumerism are among them. However, following the yellow-brick road to the European Dream may only end in disappointment.
Overall, Rifkin's book has a lot of research behind it, but it is full of verbose, non-sensical statements and illogical arguments. "Each and every person, in the Christian eschatology, is endowed with free will," notes Rifkin. Say what? What is eschatology Mr. Rifkin? Anyhow, his concluding chapters fluctuate between themes of universalism and new age rhetoric about "the third state of human consciousness." It's like Alvin Toffler ad nauseum. Sometimes, his analysis is simply non-sequitur as his conclusions do not follow his premises. As he winds up his concluding chapters, Rifkin trails off into a quixotic and esoteric new-age vision: he envisions a technocratic transnational managerial welfare state ushering in the "next stage of human consciousness." The subtle and sometimes overt Anti-Americanism laced throughout the book is a pleasant reminder that Anti-Americanism is indeed fueling the political aspirations of the European Union.
I suspect Rifkin's subtle hope is that a new American Dream would emerge and emulate the European Dream. It is perhaps wishful thinking that America would strive to imitate the ways of Europeans.
This book will probably resonate with a considerable part of the electorate that voted for John Kerry or Ralph Nader. The book might be worth examining to understand the cosmopolitan ideology animating the New Europe or at least a leftist American's preception of that ideology. Than again perhaps it is best left on the library shelf to collect dust... hindsight is always 20/20.
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