The European Dream (15 page)

Europe is not yet ready to abandon the old GDP scale. Yet, the very fact that a world superpower is seriously engaged in the process of rethinking what the criteria ought to be for measuring economic growth and for determining the basis of a good economy is nothing short of revolutionary. In the United States, at the federal level, except for a single speech on the U.S. Senate floor by Democratic senator Byron Dorgan back in 1995, there has been no discussion of rethinking the way the U.S. defines economic progress.
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Indeed, it’s probably fair to say that were any of the president’s council of economic advisers to even introduce the subject, he or she would be met with snickers of disbelief among fellow economists. Yet, in Europe, the powers that be appear willing, even eager, to challenge the old shibboleths and reconstitute some of the most basic assumptions of what economic progress should be about.

What does all of this have to do with the American and European dreams? 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 second, 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.

 

 

 

THE TUG BETWEEN EUROPE and America goes even deeper than questions of personal opportunity and quality of life. What really distinguishes the comings and goings in Europe and America today is that Europe is busy preparing for a new era while America is desperately trying to hold on to the old one. There is a sense of excitement across Europe, a feeling of new possibilities. To be sure, the feeling varies somewhat in intensity from country to country and region to region and even between young and old. There are also significant pockets of resistance to a transnational political space. Still, one gets the sense that Europeans know they are creating something new and bold and that the whole world is watching them. If I were to sum it up, I would say that Europe has become a giant freewheeling experimental laboratory for rethinking the human condition and reconfiguring human institutions in the global era.

Many observers—especially Americans—view the developments in Europe with whimsy or disdain or, worse still, indifference. The hard-line cynics are even less charitable, seeing the efforts afoot to create a “United States” of Europe as quixotic, and ultimately futile. European critics voiced similar reservations about our own experiment in forging a United States of America more than two hundred years ago. They proved wrong then, and I suspect we will be proved wrong this time around.

The emerging European Dream isn’t just a glib political catchphrase. There are profound changes occurring in Europe at the personal, institutional, and even metaphysical level. Even most Europeans, when pressed, aren’t exactly sure what they’ve gotten themselves into. Our American founders must have felt the same way. But if there are doubts and qualms, a sense of frustration and bewilderment, all that is to be expected of a people in the midst of rewriting the human story.

It is true that Europe is becoming a new land of opportunity for millions of people around the world in search of a better tomorrow. Europe’s emphasis on quality of life does indeed distinguish it from the older American model, with its singular attention to growth and the accumulation of personal wealth. But there is much more to the European Dream. In a world growing weary of grand utopian visions and more comfortable with individual story lines, the new European Dream has dared to create a new synthesis: one that combines a post-modern sensitivity to multiple perspectives and multiculturalism with a new universal vision. The new European Dream takes us into a global age.

In order to really understand the depth of the changes that are remaking Europe, it is essential to remember Europe’s past. The new European Dream is not so much a repudiation of the past as it is a building off of it. Dreams take us to where we would like to go, but to get there, we first need to know what we are leaving behind. Every journey has a starting point as well as a destination. In the case of the new European Dream, the starting point is not the new millennium or even the post-World War II era but, rather, the twilight period between the late medieval and early modern era, when many of the conventions we have come to know under the heading of “modernity” began to take hold. These conventions include the Enlightenment and the beginning of modern science, the flowering of the individual, the establishment of a private property regime, the formation of market capitalism, and the birth of the nation-state. The shift to a global era is forcing a rethinking of all of these well-worn conventions of the modern age. So, to understand the path that Europe’s new dream is forging, we first need to revisit its older byways to gain a reference point and, hopefully, some insights to help guide our journey.

What we are going to find, by retracing European history, are the roots of the American Dream that we discussed in chapter 1. 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, where it continued to animate the American experience right up to the present day. The American Revolution took place at the very time that a waning Protestant Reformation was making its final accommodation to the new forces of the Enlightenment. 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. Instead, successive generations of Americans chose to live out both the Protestant Reformation and Enlightenment traditions simultaneously and in their purest forms, becoming, at one and the same time, the most devoutly Protestant people on Earth and the most committed to scientific pursuits, a private property regime, market capitalism, and nation-state ideology. The American Dream, in the fullest incarnation, is an amalgam of both these earlier forces that shook Europe from its medieval moorings and propelled it into the modern age. In a very real sense, then, the American Dream is largely a European creation, uprooted and replanted on American soil and bred to fit America’s unique environment.

We Americans like to think of ourselves as forward-thinking, with our attention focused on the distant horizon. However, our worldview, strangely enough, 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.

In the next four chapters, we are going to retrace the philosophical and institutional changes that gave rise to the modern age, in order to better understand Europe’s own past and the American Dream that grew out of it. Knowing what Europe is leaving behind is essential to knowing where it’s heading as it prepares a new dream for a global era.

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HE GREAT TURNING POINTS in human history are often triggered by changing conceptions of space and time. Sometimes, the adoption of a single technology can be transformative in nature, changing the very way our minds filter the world. Consider, for example, the cell phone. Europeans were the first to enthusiastically embrace mobile-communications technology. I remember sitting with my wife in a fashionable upscale eatery in Milan many years ago, when we heard a phone ring from somewhere at a nearby table. The middle-aged man pulled a mobile phone from his jacket pocket and began an animated and lengthy conversation with someone on the other line. My wife turned to me with a quip, “Wait until American teenagers get ahold of this little toy.”

Americans subsequently took to cell phones. But the point is that the wireless revolution took off, in a big way, first in Europe. In 2000, the EU boasted 661 cellular mobile subscribers per 1,000 people, compared to only 308 subscribers per 1,000 people in the U.S., putting Europe far ahead of the rest of the world in early adoption of wireless telecommunications technology.
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After centuries of being surrounded by walls and living in a fortress mentality, suddenly Europeans found a way to break out, to liberate themselves. The cell phone brought with it a new kind of freedom: mobility, to be sure, but different from the kind that drew millions of Americans to buy Henry Ford’s cheap Model T car nearly one hundred years earlier.

For Americans, the automobile was a way to grab hold of the vast expanse of the American landscape—to expropriate and colonize it and make it more manageable and manipulable. The very name “auto-mobile” struck a chord. Americans, more than any other people, have come to view security in terms of “autonomy” and “mobility.” On the frontier, where human exchange is sparse and the elements threatening, being self-reliant and mobile is a way to ensure one’s security. Autonomy, mobility, and freedom have always come as a package in America. To be autonomous is to be independent and not beholden to others. Mobility, in turn, ensures endless new opportunities. The American cowboy and his horse enshrine the myth. Fiercely independent and always on the move, he was a free spirit that captured, so pointedly, the American frame of mind. With the passing of the great American frontier, and the cowboys who tamed it, Henry Ford sold a mechanical surrogate of the horse. The automobile allowed every American to exercise the same sense of freedom that cowboys must have felt atop their steeds, roaming the Western frontier.

In Europe, the sensibilities ran along a different vein. A frontier mentality of sorts existed, but in a more vicarious fashion. The various colonial adventures of the great European powers drew Europeans to the four corners of the Earth. Some came as settlers—to America, Australia, and South Africa—and adopted a frontier psyche. But many others came as colonial administrators, military personnel, and agents representing business and political interests back home. They were extensions of the Old World and never really shed their Europeanness.

For Europeans, the search for security was always more bound up in embeddedness in communities—whether indentured in medieval fiefs or fortressed away in craft guilds in walled towns. 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, and the lookout tower are the architectural symbols of the European sense of space. The idea of a lone, self-reliant individual freely roaming across an endless frontier even today makes little sense to Europeans.

The early success of mobile-phone technology in Europe speaks volumes. The cell phone keeps individuals connected to their communities. But it also allows individuals to break out from the constraints of geography, to be free of place but still connected to others in time. And this gets to one of the fundamental differences in how Europeans and Americans conceive of space and time. Americans covet exclusive space. Each person strives to be self-contained and autonomous. That’s why 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. For Americans, time is future-directed and viewed as a tool to explore new opportunities. For Europeans, time is more past- and present-oriented and used to reaffirm and nurture relationships.

A comprehensive anthropological study of how people use mobile phones in six countries bears out some of the differences in how Europeans and Americans relate to the new wireless technology. In Sweden, for example, “they view someone talking on their mobile as though the person with whom they’re speaking is physically in the room.”
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As a result, chatting on a mobile phone while eating lunch alone in a restaurant is perfectly acceptable behavior. Italians believe in constant connectivity and like to be reachable at all times. They have no reservations about using mobile phones in any public setting. Americans are a bit more circumspect in their use of mobile phones. New Yorkers, for example, tend to use their mobile phones more to accomplish tasks but also believe that having wireless conversations in public is often intrusive and a violation of others’ private space. While San Franciscans use mobile phones for work- and leisure-related activity and to communicate with friends, some worry about being constantly available all the time, and not having enough alone time.
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Some commentators have said that “Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus”—that on a very fundamental level, we think so differently that neither can truly understand the thinking of the other. There’s some truth to that argument. While the American consciousness has deep roots in the Old World, the very act of crossing the ocean to recast one’s fate and fortunes in new ways marked a psychological breach as deep and wide as the waters that separate the two continents.