More Mood Than Fact

...In the nato alliance only the British are utterly dependable...

...Large American corporations operating in Western Europe have simply overwhelmed their smaller, contentious rivals in the individual Common Market countries and Great Britain...

...A Frenchman is a realist and this is the way the world is...

...The American Challenge is not particularly good economics and The American Empire is intelligent journalism rather than scholarly history...

...In any event, it is far more the consequence of European shortcomings than of the American will to domination...

...The mood is a large political fact...

...Reviewed by ROBERT LEKACHMAN The first of these volumes focuses upon the European presence of large American corporations, and the second upon America's political and military role in the world...

...Here are the two tracts' partially overlapping arguments...

...For one thing, compared to the tyrannies that Europe has undergone in the past, American hegemony is relatively mild...

...Evidently this is the Slavic-American century...

...After all, neither the American nor the Russian barbarians can very often do what they like, which is no doubt just as well...

...He has resigned himself to the American imperium and even to the American-Soviet condominium over the world, which he defines in his concluding pages...

...Possibly a few more instances of superpower bungling and a year or two more of American balance of payment deficits will stimulate some new self-confidence among the Europeans...

...In the land of the free, business management is a respected science, research and development are a corporate obsession...

...Worse still, the Americans are professionals in a field where the Europeans are bungling amateurs...

...Moreover, even in highly industrialized societies a relatively small percentage of Gross National Product consists of the highly standardized, mass-produced items in whose output the American large corporation admittedly leads the universe...

...Cultivated Greek intellectuals presumably despised the crude, but efficient Romans who subjugated them...

...Americans who still think that French policy is all the product of a senile general afflicted with a swollen ego should have second thoughts as they see just how large and ambiguous the American world role looms in the minds of these two keen-witted Frenchmen who are not senile or heads of state...

...On our side, the cia, one of the demons in de Riencourt's tale, often proposes but it frequently—as in Cuba, Syria, and Egypt—fails to dispose...

...It is equally arguable just how much our space program has aided civilian product development...

...What nerve have these two Frenchmen twanged...

...The weak and unstable nations of much of Africa and Asia are far too busy quarreling with each other and among themselves to be accounted any superpower's reliable client...

...Recent political experience seems to confirm Walter Lippmann's case for fragmentation of the power blocs...

...Steel and Hormel than Armour...

...The omnipotence of the Pentagon, a co-demon, accords ill with the experience of Vietnam...

...The moral, rather, is: Harken to the American gospel and do thou likewise...

...In the United States research and development may be having their heyday, but a large percentage of important innovations comes from small firms or free-lance inventors...

...What are they saying that arouses the emotions of their readers...

...When power relationships shift, so also do the parts played by the actors who posture on the international stage...

...In Servan-Schreiber's judgment, the only way that Europe can preserve what remains of its autonomy and liberate itself from the status of an indulged American satellite is to put aside ancient rivalries, genuinely integrate as a single economy, learn American managerial and technological methods, and make the most of a potential not much inferior to the American...

...Paradoxically or not, Europe's best hope of liberation is successful imitation of its benevolent master...

...One hopes that for the sake of both Americans and Europeans this mood is transitory...

...It is a mood in which a sense of powerlessness, resentment at American and Russian power and crudity, uneasy acceptance of the world as it is, and a desire to emulate the strong, cohabit in unstable proximity...

...World Communism is split in three, at the least...

...Please, please, let this not be the Slavic-American century...

...American business is neither so efficient, nor European business so backward, as Servan-Schreiber depicts them...

...In the end, then, what is educational to Americans is the French and possibly the Western European mood these two books express and no doubt reinforce...

...In The American Empire, de Riencourt presents an identical estimate of American economic influence in Europe, but within a wider geographical and political perspective...

...Common Market or no Common Market, a French or German corporation is not free to operate at will beyond its own frontier, but IBM, General Electric, General Motors, and similar goliaths base themselves in Brussels, Rotterdam, Zurich, Milan, or London and operate imperially all over Western Europe...

...It is a blessing that Henry Luce did not survive to endure the hyphenization of his favorite concept...

...As I implied at the outset, I find much of this argument unpersua-sive...

...Although American hegemony is much less than a blessing, de Riencourt prefers it to the series of power vacuums he perceives as the only alternative...

...On the face of it, Europeans, who are more individualistically inclined than Americans, should generate still larger numbers of bright ideas...

...As this sketch may suggest, Servan-Schreiber is not anti-American...

...Armco does better than U.S...

...Russian confusion and panic in the handling of Czech liberalism, Russian perplexity about the Rumanians and the Yugoslavs, and total Russian failure to cope with the unruly Chinese, do not testify to serene dominion within Redland...

...Finally, to make so much of the "superiorities" of the American design for a supersonic transport is to ignore the strong possibility that the project in any venue will be perceived as a massive mistake...

...Nevertheless, in Europe—especially in France—The American Challenge has enjoyed enormous notoriety, and the English translation has enjoyed a good run on the American bestseller list into the bargain...

...Europeans, to their cost, pay little heed to them...

...As for de Riencourt's complementary case for Soviet-American hegemony, any reader of the New York Times can't help wondering about what the author forgets...

...De Riencourt's taste for the new Roman imperialism is no more pronounced than his admiration for American hypocrisy or for American policy in the Middle East, Europe, and the Caribbean...

...Quite possibly The American Empire, animated by a strong point of view and a lively set of prejudices, will enjoy comparable success...

...The largest American companies are not necessarily either the most efficient or the most profitable...

...Indeed, he is somewhat at a loss to explain the suspiciously American efficiency of the Swedes, who are smaller in number than the inhabitants of Greater New York, not to mention the peculiar success of the Japanese...

...Servan-Schreiber's sermon to all good Europeans selects as its text the "fact" of overwhelming American business efficiency...

...In addition, while nasa and the Pentagon heavily subsidize the science-based computer, space, and electronics industries, European governments waste their energies in intramural quarrels and their resources upon the support of outmoded humanistic education...

...The success of Volkswagen rather suggests that the German economy and, therefore, the French and the British economies are quite large enough to reap the benefits of economies of scale...

...He is convinced that American power and the American past have prepared the United States for its imperial role in the 20th century...