The U.S. as Model

...But it will require a new transnational political initiative for which the present leadership, Left and Right, seems utterly unprepared...

...And over and above the technical factors I have previ ously mentioned, the basic secret is no secret...

...Perhaps the half-million copies the book has sold (so far) will dispose finally of the fairy tale of the rigidly doctrinaire wing of the Left in France: the lovely but impractical maiden, La Belle France, who loves to read and to talk about life with her old friend, Descartes, in her garden, "crushed by technology, "1 applied by the two wicked and identical giants on either side of the garden, Soy...

...The great frontiers for investment are the highly advanced, technologically complex industries, such as electronics, the strategic centers for the "second industrial revolution...

...If present trends continue, she will become a dependency...

...To ADVANCE THIS CRITICISM of The American Challenge is to be forced to describe how and why the American corporate structure is "performing poorly" where it could, if it would, perform superbly in building "a more intelligent and bountiful post-industrial society" here in the United States...

...Yet not a word on the fact that the former Secretary of Defense could not recognize until too late and at terrible human cost that the bombing of North Vietnam was bound to fail...

...It is simply not sufficient to show American business performing with such derringdo in Paris and Brussels without raising some fundamental questions about its role in New York and Chicago...

...Not a word on Big Steel, whose failure to incorporate new, European-invented technical processes is a national scandal, and whose usual answer to challenge is: raise prices...

...Les Belles Images (Paris: Gallimard, 1966...

...It is a selective invasion on the part of the giants...

...There is ample tribute to the organizational skill of the oil, automobile, and electronic companies abroad...

...JEAN-JACQUES SERVAN-SCHREIBER belongs to that small but influential group on the democratic Left in France which regards technological innovation as a key to a more progressive social order in Europe...

...I am aware of M. Servan-Schreiber's rebuttal...

...But there is not a word on the great debate in this country over the quality and value of our experiment in higher education...

...When it appeared in France in 1967 as Le Deli Americain, the critical and financial response was dramatic...

...The most recent data in BOOKS dicate that import sales of automobiles are now reaching an annual one million...

...The American Challenge ends on this prophetic note: The American expeditionary corps will leave Vietnam where there is nothing more to gain and everything to lose...

...They are drawn to the American rather than the Soviet model, although they remain aware of our racism and problems of poverty and urban blight...

...M. Servan-Schreiber is properly scornful of those who think an integrated European effort means a German police chief in Paris...

...Thus the European problem is not simply to try to raise factory production and reduce inter-European tariffs...

...Insofar as Servan-Schreiber concentrates on what must be done by Europeans to revitalize economic planning, reshape educational preparation for careers, and restructure investment and productivity within a truly European economic community (the Common Market is only a beachhead), he is sensible and sound...

...It is estimated that by 1970 the Americans will devote about 4.6 per cent of their national product to R & D as against a European 2.5 per cent...

...Agreed...

...By the same token, he has also overestimated the value of the modern corporation as the essential catalytic of change in the era of the postindustrial society and the organizational revolution...

...My illustrations are by no means atypical...

...And Europe can certainly benefit from a selective application of American-style, ideas, about resources, technology, organization, and the stimuli of upward mobility and education...

...Most thinking Europeans recognize that for all its defects the United States remains a democratic society, however fragile and imperfect...

...Equally, they wanted France to relinquish the "dream" of holding on to a colonial empire in the face of an irresistible counter-nationalism in Africa and Asia...

...For if the new industrial state, as Galbraith calls it, is at best performing poorly in meeting its social responsibilities here in the United States, then its export to Europe could be, at best, a mixed blessing...

...These men pride themselves on their pragmatism, their lack of dogma in developing flexible combinations of public and private initiative under the spacious tent of democratic planning...

...American investment in Europe now comes to about $14 billion in capital, in fixed assets...

...It may be argued that the explanation is simply lower labor costs abroad, which means lower prices...

...However, insofar as he argues that the American corporation and its managerial elite provide the best yardstick for assessing the European effort, he seems excessively restrictive...

...For example, American corporations now control 80 per cent of computer production in Europe, 95 per cent of the market in integrated circuits...

...as Robert Heilbroner has observed, The American Challenge is not about Macy's taking over Grandes Galeries...

...Not a word on the drug industry whose R & D ratio is in fact low, whose "discoveries" BOOKS are mostly and tardily borrowed (i.e...

...But an overenthusiastic response to what is indeed valuable in The American Challenge runs the risk of replacing Fairy Tale with Magic Key...

...In order to dramatize the American challenge he has, I think, underestimated European capacity for economic growth and social innovation...

...And without flexible governmental planning and extensive corporation research, postindustrial industrialism loses its dynamism...

...In the long run, however, Europe is left unprepared for the coming great age, Daniel Bell's "post-industrial society...

...above all, a failure to invest, if that is the word, in human resources so as to provide maximum social mobility and a new elite, a meritocracy of drive and talent...

...To avert this static future a European country could expel IBM or General Motors—but they would only go elsewhere, playing off one country against another...

...This will not require the elimination of cultural diversity in Europe...

...When it comes to inventions Europeans are usually first...

...Europeans should indeed "build a more intelligent and bountiful" system...

...Such an analysis is indeed being forged, I believe, by Michael Harrington, Robert Theobald, Bayard Rustin, and many others whose pragmatic radicalism is not so distant, after all, from the outlook of Pierre Mendes-France, Gaston Defferre, and...

...A country might nationalize an American corporation—but that would not work either, since the powerful support and financing from Washington, to say nothing of the great effort in research and development (R & D), cannot be conveniently had at the same time...

...Yet Detroit's insensitivity to consumer needs, its scornful reaction to "the little cars you wind up," until forced to produce its own, its preoccupation with vast and wasteful advertising budgets, its commitment to "planned obsolescence"— all this hardly suggests the model of dazzling innovation and responsible planning set before us in The American Challenge...

...The only comment on the Negro and the racial dilemma is an interesting one—our federal structure prevents decisive action when crisis breaks out in Mississippi...

...In the postwar era they considered themselves French and European...

...Moreover, if we take as a measure something Americans love to talk about pridefully, the quality of consumer goods, the Europeans —and the Japanese—seem to have little difficulty in competing...

...WITH STATISTICS and quiet eloquence M. ServanSchreiber outlines the situation...

...In the absence of all this in Europe, enter the Americans...

...The Americans have worked out "a close association between business, university, and the government [which] has never been perfected nor successful in any European country...

...But American industry will not leave Europe . . . Even if we were not faced with such a challenge by the Ameri cans, we ought to find in ourselves the power and the desire to build a more intelligent and bountiful post-industrial society...

...That Europe commands the intelligence and resources to produce such dramatic change, no one can doubt...

...A phenomenal half million copies were sold in France within a few months...

...or rather, enter the largest American corporations, already favorably BOOKS placed for growth and advanced research by virtue of generous support from the federal government and close cooperation with the scientific community...

...If it lags behind America in terms of absolute growth, it is without question continuing to improve its standard of living and productivity relative to its own past...

...More important, if Servan-Schreiber's central thesis—the ingenuity of American corporate management, together with our dedication to education, research, and mobility—is to hold up, then he must demonstrate the dynamic quality of our institutions here at home as well as abroad...

...The core of M. Servan-Schreiber's argument is that the European economic community is in deep trouble ("a state of collapse...

...an entire chapter consists of a McNamara speech verbatim...

...Europe benefits, of course, as the results of American technological innovation are applied, and in the short run she shares in the general progress...

...But in my judgment they will never do so if they succumb to the idea that the most effective route to social improvement lies in developing, in spirit and letter, an exact replica of the American technological-corporate order...

...The administrators, teachers, polytechniciens, and social scientists who comprise this coalition are bound together not by a rigid program or complex organization but by a point of view...

...And its striking conquest-bycomputer of the European economy could be less a matter of the American "secret" than simply a combination of European weakness and American corporate strength based not on "the spirit of dynamism" but on the fortuitous association of the technological giants with military contracts and the defense establishment...

...Here the American impact is remarkable...

...They know that our problem is not to overturn our remarkable technology—we could not even if we wanted to—but to harness the new industrial state to a radically different set of social priorities...

...Schreiber's quintessential representative of the "new men" of the postindustrial era is Robert McNamara...

...nearly all of American investment in Europe is self-generated from European resources...

...Not a word, however, on the failure of leading corporations and some major unions to promote equality of employment opportunity for Negroes, thereby wasting lives and money on the grand scale...

...Here it suffices by example to show how Servan-Schreiber has left the vital issue untouched...

...They are a kind of new class...

...How, then, should the American challenge be effectively contained so that the role of American corporate investment can be reduced while its beneficial results are retained in the European community...

...In the first place, Western Europe is not doing as badly as Servan-Schreiber implies...

...The first point, according to M. Servan-Schreiber, is to understand the secret of the American success...

...the disgraceful story of penicillin), and whose interests demand a powerful effort to combat effective federal regulation...

...Union and Yew S. America...

...But money is only the point of departure...

...A large claim, not altogether justified...

...And he states familiar reasons: archaic business practices, a static labor force, an unadventurous approach to investment and growth, unwillingness to revamp outmoded educational systems, resistance to creating a truly integrated common market...

...At home they wanted to shake their country loose from narrow nationalism, encrusted protectionism, bureaucratic stagnation...

...Arthur Schlesinger is moved to remark in his foreword that if Europeans can implement M. Servan-Schreiber's thesis—the necessity to adapt the organi zational skill of the modern American corporation to the sluggish European social order— his book "may do for European unity very much what Thomas Paine's Common Sense did for American independence...

...At the same time, with no illusions about the Soviet regime, they continue to evaluate both the achievement and deficiencies of Soviet centralized economic planning...

...And here, unfortunately, The American Challenge is virtually silent...

...The American Challenge presents effectively their point of view...

...The great virtue of The American Challenge, as directed to European readers, is to underline for them again that American technology and organization is not as such dangerous and oppressive, but potentially liberating if they will make their own fundamental changes in their own European social order...

...it is nothing less than "to transform the whole system: business, intellectual talent, education, research...

...the gap arises because the Americans have learned how to organize and manage inventions in a superior way...

...He is enormously impressed by the proportion of our young people in college compared to Europe and by our much higher percentage of sons of workers and farmers who reach college...

...Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber...

...They know that a common use of the word "planning" and a common investment in the wonders of aerospace technology does not make American and Soviet society identical...

...Now the American edition, in a spare, clear translation by Ronald Steel, is enjoying a similar reception...

...That should certainly give us pause...

...But the cushion for this strategic advantage comes, in the first instance, from the military-industrial complex here at home...

...1 The language is Simone de Beauvoir's: "In every country in the world, socialist or capitalist, man is crushed by technology, alienated from his work, enslaved and brutalized...

...It would be unfair to fault M. Servan-Schreiber for lack of detailed knowledge of our economic and social system were it not for the fact that he himself has chosen the American model for export to Europe as a solution of its crisis...

...in the nation, one in ten (in California, one in five) of every car sold is European or Japanese...