Does the E.U. NEED to Hate America?

Does the E.U. need to hate America? According to T.R. Reid, in The United States of Europe: The New Superpower and the End of American Supremacy,” it appears that the answer is “yes”.

Although insightful, his is that “the planet has a second superpower now”, is unconvincing.

… Reid fails to convince. Nevertheless, his book offers a valuable portrait of a continental political class obsessed with “counterweighting” the United States of America. Indeed, the book prompts the question of whether the EU actually needs a degree of anti-Americanism to generate a shared identity for a fractious pastiche of nations tied together by nothing more than soccer and the technocratic tendrils of the Brussels bureaucracy.

His argument is based on economics: the “miraculous’ euro, the global power of European regulators, and increasing investment in the U.S.

But,and isn’t there always “a but”? Although “the euro has succeeded, double-digit unemployment, a declining birthrate, soaring taxes, and a union-dominated welfare state suggest a grimmer economic future,” because of “a growth rate roughly half the world average” that “fail to meet its goal of outperforming the U.S. economy by 2010.”

And what is the effect of European regulators?

…Europe’s regulators legislate the length of leeks and the curves of cucumbers, mandate minimum tax rates, and prop up a pathetically inefficient agricultural sector… Rather than making a superpower, the EU’s ham-fisted regulators keep the world’s largest unified market from reaching its full potential… Regulatory power goes “hand in hand with Europe’s centralized, semi-planned economy in which parts for airplaines are made all over Europe, flown in a special transport to another place where they are assembled.

Europe’s “soft power” comes from owning many familiar “American” product lines: Mowtown records, owned by the French, Amoco by the British, and Vaseline by the Dutch. Somehow this “soft power” is supposed to undermine U.S. power, but the truth is Europe invests in America “because America offers a far friendlier business climate than the chokingly regulated EU.”

Why do they bother? Reid makes one point well:

EU officials are as obsessed with “counterweighting” the Americans as they are proud of their genuine economic achievements. He quotes EU Commission president Romano Prodi’s exultation that “the historical significance of the euro is to construct a bipolar economy in the world.” In other words, at the hour of Europe’s greatest success, its top official celebrated not only the new currency, but also a new way to stick it to the Americans. The euro, Reid argues, “is just one facet of the broader effort to create a “bipolar” world in every respect — to see the European Union as a global superpower of American dimensions.”

Not only do they “stick it to Americans” by counterweighing, they block, as in blocking the U.S. purchase of German-made diesel submarines for Taiwan, lifting a post-Tiananmen arms embargo on China. They have also launched a joint project with the Chinese military to develop an alternative to the U.S.-run GPS system, and pursued a schizoid policy on terror by sending forces to Afghanistan and clamping down on its own restive Muslim population while bankrolling the Palestinian Authority and undermining American efforts in Iraq.

It appears that the Europeans are certainly not working with America in the War on Terror!

The EU remains “far from united.” There is no religion or feeling of nationality. The only uniting force is that which denigrates America:

“The sheer pleasure that Europeans take in denigrating America has become another bond unifying the continent,” he writes. Might anti-Americanism be useful for European integration?

Anti-Americanism is the natural choice, the unifying principle “to hold the enterprise together.” In anti-Americanism there is something for everyone to hate: McDonald’s, the “barbaric” death penalty, or le cowboy Bush. The elites of Europe “have conjured up a hydropower for the adolescent Union to define itself against.”

Although exaggerated, Reid’s warning of the EU’s “urge to counterweight” the United States is an important one. Europeans have “set out to unify in opposition to the only country that has the world leadership it demands, and with the possible addition of the seasoned and battle-hardened army that will come with Turkey’s admittance into the EU, they might be more than Reid’s anti-power to America’s super-power.