Why Europe Will Run the 21st Century
By Mark Leonard
March 7, 2005 BIZBOOKS0307
Fourth Estate, $17
Conventional wisdom has it that Europe is a washed-up, aging, economically stagnant continent, destined inexorably to lose ground not only to a dynamic United States but to China and even India as well.
Subscribers to this thinking tend also to disparage the European Union as a main source of the problem: too much red tape, inept economic management, excessive taxes, lowest-common-denominator foreign-policy making. Yet there is another view, epitomized not only in this book by a British Europhile, Mark Leonard, but in other recent books by two American commentators, "The United States of Europe" by T.R. Reid, and "The European Dream" by Jeremy Rifkin.
Leonard argues that an ever-expanding E.U. has a rosy future, and that its model of a "network" that is more than a gaggle of nation-states but less than a federal superstate is in many ways more alluring than America's.
As so often happens, the truth lies somewhere between these pessimistic and optimistic views. Leonard is right, for example, to point to the stunning success of the E.U. in democratizing and liberalizing its near neighbors, by the simple expedient of holding out the carrot of membership. Contrast the progress made over the past three decades by southern and central Europe, and now by much of eastern Europe and Turkey, with the continuing troubles of most U.S. neighbors in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Nor is the economic performance of the E.U. anything like as bad as the gloomsters claim. It is the world's biggest market, biggest exporter and biggest foreign investor. It is home to many of the world's largest and most successful companies. Some of its member countries, such as Finland, Sweden and Ireland, rank at the top of the league of the world's most competitive economies.
Indeed, over the past decade the increase in output per hour worked has been larger in the E.U. than in the United States. The gap in overall economic growth reflects America's faster population growth and longer working hours, not a more productive workforce. If Europeans are choosing more leisure time, more public spending and smaller families than Americans, what is wrong with that?
The Economist
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