Reply With QuoteI think it is. We are too busy rooting out gays, removing nipples from TVs and teaching creationism to continue bankrupting our country with ill advised military Yeehaaaawww adventures. Or something to that effect.
I'm not sure what to make of this interview with Emmanuel Todd. It's available at http://vancouver.indymedia.org/news/2003/09/65702.php. He states that a growing disaffection with the US in Europe will lead to their consolidation as a counterweight, and will include Russia as a nuclear deterrent. Apparently, this would be a much stronger economic entity than the US.
He's French, so perhaps biased, but a couple of things strike me. First, the interview was in April of 2003, but he already predicted the difficulty we would have in keeping control of Iraq. Ok, so maybe a dozen of us on this board could have called it, too. But he also wrote a book in 1976 called "The Final Fall: the Decomposition of the USSR." That was a pretty good call. And now? Well, his new book is called "After the Empire: Essays on the Decomposition of the American System." And today I also read that New York City is now considered a less likely contender for hosting the Summer Olympics than Moscow! Not only that, but there many countries talk of switching from a dollar economy to one based on the euro.
So, is the American era about to close? What do y'all think?
I think it is. We are too busy rooting out gays, removing nipples from TVs and teaching creationism to continue bankrupting our country with ill advised military Yeehaaaawww adventures. Or something to that effect.
Sounds like 70s talk to me. We were much more badly burned by Vietnam than anything going on these days - our national prestige and confidence had essentially evaporated. Then we had three weak Presidents in a row - Nixon was crippled by Watergate, Ford really didn't have a mandate, and Carter had no significant ability to impact domestic or foreign affairs.
Internationally, I find it difficult to credit the EU as a potential superpower. It's an economic unit but politically it is still very much split apart, as witnessed by the fact that every country made a separate decision to help/not help the US in Afghanistan and Iraq. The fact that France and Germany needed to threaten the East Europeans with non-EU membership and ostracization two or three years ago, in the hopes of convincing them to not aid us, suggests that the EU is a very long way from being a coherent body. Until the EU itself is in charge of foreign policy - that is, until the EU nations completely give up their sovereignty - it's not going to be able to do more than flail incoherently on the international stage, which is effectively what it did in response to the Afghanistan war, with half of its countries going one way and the other half going the other way.
The author is willing to cite an EU-Russia partnership as a significant strategic consideration, but I don't buy it. Russia is going downwards in every conceivable sense of the word - Putin is re-establishing the mechanisms of dictatorship, business is dominated by organized crime with the government the largest "family" of all, the Russian population is in slow decline, and they cannot even permanently manage the Chechnya situation. It is at this point questionable whether their nuclear missiles even work, since they are all approaching better than twenty years old. If the value of Russia to Europe is in nuclear arms, then Europe doesn't need Russia, since both France and the UK are nuclear powers already.
Economically, the EU and the US are on a par with each other, with GDPs growing at similar averaged rates over the last five years, so I don't know what the author means when he says that "the European industrial mass...is now substantially higher than the American industrial mass". I certainly hope he isn't talking about factories, because it doesn't do the EU any good for its economic might to be tied up in manufacturing rather than, say, knowledge industries. I also find it amusing that the author claims that "A technologically dynamic industry does not worry about registering patents because it knows it is moving so quickly, no one will catch up with it". This statement doesn't seem at all justified, and is so radically counterintuitive that it really needs justification before such a third-order measure of productivity can be used as a demonstration of why the author thinks that the US is falling behind.
Basically, I think it's a bad theory.
Russia's a third world country on the brink of anarchy, so they're a pretty shit security force.
New York City would be an awful place to host the Summer Olympics. There is no room for the games in NYC. I wouldn't read too much into a selection of anywhere over NYC.
EU nations won't give up their foreign policy sovereignty; never going to happen. Doesn't mean the EU members can't wield their power together in some cases, where they agree.Originally Posted by Silverlight
The EU is not going to be a superpower like the US, but that doesn't mean it still can't be a counterweight. Eventually, differences between the EU and the US might become big enough for the EU countries (even Britain) to be forced to take the same positions.
If I'm not mistaken, most of the world supported the war in Afghanistan, and a lot of EU countries have troops there still. What countries of the EU opposed the war?
Germany and France threatened nothing of the sort, and certainly wouldn't have been able to follow through on such threats even if they had made them. What you are likely referring to are Chirac's heated comments last year about the new EU states that supported the Iraq war, where he warned them that this might impact their chances of integration into the EU. That statement is a truism, not a threat, based on the way in which new members are accepted by the EU.
Thanks for the clarification.
I don't see that statement as a trusim. France can do a hell of a lot to smooth or hinder any country's entry into the EU, and the fact that a threat is based on enforcement of rules doesn't make it less of a threat when the entity in question could easily induce breaking of the rules for political reasons.
I agree, but all that's really saying is that American hegemony is America's to lose, and America's to gain back when the period of crisis passes. Any circumstance in which the US withdrew from the world stage would reduce or destroy the coherence of the EU, because the EU is essentially defined as "that big European entity intended to free us from American relevance" and has been since the inception. The extent to which the EU is capable of coordinating the foreign policy of its member states is the extent to which its member states have the same interests, a state which is virtually impossible to maintain over any period of time.
This all assumes that the EU maintains itself, as well. Personally, I think the EU has taken enough sovereignty where at some point member nations are going to rebel. Europe is not a monolithic culture and the mechanism by which the US dealt with fractured cultural interests - federalism - is not at all natural to an established bureaucracy. It is arguable that many if not most of the US's culture-war-type debates would be trivially solved by the application of federalism. Resolving those problems would do a great deal to insure another twenty to fifty years of American superpower status.
France can't break the rules, and its ability to prevent any member joining, especially at the stage the process was at that point, was negligible. Therefore it couldn't be a threat. The current new member states were voted in at the European Parliament. France has a share of that vote, and Chirac and his party have a share of that vote. Even if Chirac managed to persuade all the MEPs in his party to vote against member states that supported the war in Iraq, he could only muster less than 10% of the vote. Unless many of the other nations were annoyed enough to do something about it, then it wouldn't make any difference, as all the member states had invested so much in the enlargement process this was highly unlikely.Thanks for the clarification.
I don't see that statement as a trusim. France can do a hell of a lot to smooth or hinder any country's entry into the EU, and the fact that a threat is based on enforcement of rules doesn't make it less of a threat when the entity in question could easily induce breaking of the rules for political reasons.
It is true that if enough members were annoyed with the new states, that they could be voted out of enlargement. It isn't true that France could prevent them from joining. Therefore it isn't a threat, but a truism.
If Chirac had said "support the war on Iraq and I will instruct my party's MEPs to vote against your accession", now that would have been a threat, but a pretty weak one.
France can veto any new members, as they might well with Turkey.
I think that's a drastic oversimplification. Different member states have differing opinions on what the EU is intended to be. I don't think being a counterweight to the US has been much of a priority before the end of the Cold War, and it is only with the Bush administration that it has become a concern for most people. Last time Norway applied for membership (in 1994), it was a very peripheral topic of the national debate. Now, a not insignificant amount of people have become pro-EU because of a desire to be aligned with Europe rather than the US, but it's still far from the only argument for joining the EU.
It can also happen if the member nations see that they will gain more by coordinating on certain matters, even if they are not in complete agreement. Also, the member nations of the EU will have more and more interests in common as the rest of the world becomes more powerful economically and the US grows further apart.
Again, the EU is never going to become the United States of Europe. A 'rebellion' by some member states against the EU will quite likely not result in the breakup of the union, but a changing of it.
It'll be interesting to see if you'll actually do it.
This is true to an extent. However, the enlargement of the EU had already been established in the Amsterdam Treaty of 1997; the time for veto had already passed. By the time of Chirac's statement the only tests left for the candidate states to pass were the vote in the EU Parliament and the referendum's in their own countries. France can still threaten to veto Turkey and other potential members who are a long way away from joining, but they couldn't threaten the likes of Latvia, whom Chirac's comments were directed at.France can veto any new members, as they might well with Turkey.
China will PWN everyone in 100 years.
Europe is absolutely incapable of being a counterweight to anything, due entirely to its demographics. You can't be a power when you're literally dying off.
Something of an exaggeration. While I don't know the latest numbers (can you provide them?), a few years ago that was only true for Italy. I don't believe it's the case for >50% of Europe.
As far as I was aware all developed countries, including the US, are "dying off" and it is only immigration that is keeping the average age down. If America were to shut its gates to immigration then it would "die" faster than Europe.
No, US maintains a replacement birth rate (about 2.3 or so kids per household). Throttle immigration and population would remain steady. Immigration adds to that, to make it positive. Plus, also consider that the hispanic birth rates are extremely high. Projections are that we'll have 500 million Americans by the latter part of this century.
Europe, though, is confounding the experts. It's birthrate has just collapsed.
It isn't confounding anyone. Google on "demographic transition" -- it is a widespread phenomenon.
The U.S. is almost at the replacement rate without immigration, although that hides the fact that the births are disproportionately in the poorer sectors of society.
...which would be recent Mexican immigrants for the most part, no?
Hispanic birthrates and immigration rates are relatively high, but all other racial classifications are expected to increase in population, according to the US Census and every other source I could find. The US is definitely better than replacement with every group, which is not the case with Europe.
This is a relatively recent phenomenon, and hardly a trend that is guaranteed to continue over time.
Well, a new article in Salon and a couple of upcoming books seem to be giving this meme more traction:
http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2...pe/index1.html
Going back 18 months, one of the strategic considerations driving the Bush administration's 2003 invasion of Iraq was surely the opportunity it presented to drive a wedge between pro- and anti-American politicians in Europe. By peeling away Britain's Tony Blair, Spain's José Maria Aznar and Italy's Silvio Berlusconi from the antiwar EU consensus, the Bushies may have hoped to disrupt the idea of a Europe that spoke with one voice on foreign policy and military action (an expressed EU goal) for a generation to come.
<edit>
But then surprising things started to happen. When it came time to twist arms on the U.N. Security Council over the vote to authorize military action, the Americans were outfoxed. Most of the poorer nations on the council received substantial foreign aid from Europe -- the EU gives almost three times as much aid to developing countries as the U.S. does -- and proved more amenable to lobbying from the French and Germans than from the British and Americans. Bush and Blair needed nine votes and could never get more than four; at least in that limited arena, Reid writes, "Europe's political clout proved stronger than American military might."After adding 10 new Eastern and Central European nations last May, the European Union now has a much larger population than the United States, and a slightly bigger economy. As Jeremy Rifkin argues in his dense and contentious new research-driven tome "The European Dream," the United States remains ahead in per-capita GDP, but the difference is not as significant as it looks.
Much of American "productivity," Rifkin suggests, is accounted for by economic activity that might be better described as wasteful: military spending; the endlessly expanding police and prison bureaucracies; the spiraling cost of healthcare; suburban sprawl; the fast-food industry and its inevitable corollary, the weight-loss craze. Meaningful comparisons of living standards, he says, consistently favor the Europeans. In France, for instance, the work week is 35 hours and most employees take 10 to 12 weeks off every year, factors that clearly depress GDP. Yet it takes a John Locke heart of stone to say that France is worse off as a nation for all that time people spend in the countryside downing du vin rouge et du Camembert with friends and family.Perhaps more surprisingly, European business has not been strangled by the EU welfare state; in fact, quite the opposite is true. Europe has surpassed the United States in several high-tech and financial sectors, including wireless technology, grid computing and the insurance industry. The EU has a higher proportion of small businesses than the U.S., and their success rate is higher. American capitalists have begun to pay attention to all this. In Reid's book, Ford Motor Co. chairman Bill Ford explains that the company's Volvo subsidiary is more profitable than its U.S. manufacturing operation, even though wages and benefits are significantly higher in Sweden. Government-subsidized healthcare, child care, pensions and other social supports, Ford says, more than make up for the difference.Despite its deepening inequality, the United States remains to a large extent a more dynamic and less class-bound society, and it still offers individuals that opportunity for constant reinvention that lies at the heart of our national dream. Rifkin in particular believes that the new cold war with Europe will be good for America in the long run and may help rejuvenate the American left (even if the next four years are likely to get pretty ugly). Americans may need to be taught, by example, that unfettered corporate capitalism, regressive taxation and a bare-minimum social safety net are not the only way to guarantee prosperity -- and perhaps that our definition of what constitutes prosperity could stand some scrutiny.
Posting Permissions