The Other United States

...is denounced by sanctimonious media appalled by our death penalty, sneering at our infantile patriotism, denouncing our combination of flawed omnipotence and ignorance, strength and stupidity...

...From Berlin to Madrid, and not least in Paris, the US...

...Today, the EU and the U.S...

...AMERICA may be the great gas-guzzling SUV among nations, but Europe is the world's largest importer of oil and gas...

...Europeans could not get their act together before 1914 or after, before 193 9 or after...

...Through the 18th and 19th centuries a trickle of other visionaries—like Montesquieu, Gibbon, Victor Hugo—pleaded for an end to borders and to the conflicts that tore the Continent apart...

...This bears out Reid's assertion that "a geopolitical earthquake is taking place in Europe that will profoundly affect the 21 st century world...

...On the euro's eve it showed the price of burgers varying across the Continent from $2 in Greece to $3.5 5 in Finland...

...But VAT does not cover the flow of cash needed from taxpayers' pockets...

...as one giant to another...

...Identities, as Timothy Garton Ash observes in his elegant Free World, are forged in both senses of the term: "beaten into shape while heated, and falsified...

...Nevertheless, the euro is now the strongest currency on earth...

...They try to mobilize moral sensibilities, as against the death penalty that Europeans, or the brightest and best among them, have rejected...

...An encompassing, often admirable welfare state requires Europeans to pay sky-high taxes that fund education, health care, day care, pensions, unemployment insurance, and parental leaves that can last a year or more at 80 per cent of salary...

...Visibly, prices converged—upward...

...The working year includes five weeks of vacation...

...But schools these days are about diversity and multiculturalism...

...A sour feeling toward America wells up like heartburn in European throats...

...The supranational notion of Europe as more than a geographical expression, and of a European identity with "natural" claims to personal allegiance, will take at least as long...

...Since 1985, when the Schengen Accords eliminated borders separating member nations, the EU has in addition bred what Reid calls a Generation E. The radicals of 1968, who cried "To hell with borders...

...In addition, they fund a Common Agricultural Policy that subsidizes farmers, herds, crops, and exports at rates far higher than those in the U.S...

...Although not many would agree with Johnson today, the chapter in question is understandably entitled "The Invention of Peace...

...The Iraq war, however, has lately displayed our SUV in the worst of unilateralist overdrives, and spawned more intense hostility to an arrogant Republic identified with Bushite hubris and obfuscation...

...two bureaucracies where once there was one, two rule-making bodies, two parliaments, and so redundantly on...

...the working week is 35 hours long...

...They invoke social justice and the need to confront "the sociopathological consequences of capitalist modernization...

...What would he make of a European symphony or cacophony 155timesas numerous...

...Log Cabin syrup, Skippy peanut butter, Coca-Cola and the rest have gone metric as well...

...have got their wish...

...to the monstrous, overbearing SUVs we drive...

...Yet a high euro also makes American exports more competitive, and contributes to Europe's longstanding inflation epidemic...

...All this is expensive, and it accounts for mind-boggling rates of value-added sales taxes (VAT) that range from lows of 16 per cent in Germany and Spain to highs of 25 per cent in Hungary, Sweden and Denmark...

...Two new books, The United States of Europe: The New Superpower and the End of American Supremacy by T. R. Reid (Penguin, 305 pp., $25.00) and Free World: America, Europe and the Surprising Future of the Westby Timothy Garton Ash (Random, 286 pp., $24.95), underscore the point...

...American law firms scramble to open Brussels offices, thousands of American lobbyists work EU corridors and force Congress to change the tax code...

...Europeans have been providing most of the foreign investment in the U.S., but American goods—T-shirts, sneakers, Levi's, fast food, soft drinks, Hollywood movies—have Coca-Colonized Europe...

...In 1950, the European Coal and Steel Community integrated the coal and steel industries of West Germany, France, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg in a new political and economic framework with headquarters in Brussels...

...Uniform sizes, standards and packaging mean that a product designed for one country will work and sell throughout a continent with half a billion consumers...

...It took great efforts and well over a century to inculcate a sense of national belonging...

...European institutions rely on VAT as a dedicated source of revenue that funds an EU budget of well over $ 100 billion...

...Meanwhile, overregulation and high social costs for employers discourage hiring...

...As merchants large and small translated their prices from lire, marks, francs, and the rest into euros, they rounded prices upward...

...Never mind...

...Both, in Garton Ash's words, are "gated communities of the rich surrounded by poorer communities and terrible slums...

...But there is little heat in the new foundry, and too much posturing...

...Johnson opined a long time ago, "there are few ways in which a man can be more innocently employed than in making money...

...are mixtures of power and vulnerability...

...The Union boasted its own anthem (the Ode to Joy from Beethoven's Ninth Symphony), its own feast day (May 9), its own parliament, governing council, central bank, court of justice (with an 80,000-page legal code that runs from crime and corporate taxes to lawn mower safety and peanut butter labels), and an alphabet soup of ancillary institutions...

...and provide the structures needed to ensure peace, safety and freedom...

...neither seems aware that hostile or derogatory views of vulgar transatlantic upstarts go back well beyond internal combustion engines...

...but moral sensibility is a shallow row to hoe...

...In 1957, the Treaty of Rome confirmed the Common Market of the six, who were subsequently joined by six more countries...

...Europe is an unseasoned institutional construct, not a sentimental stamp...

...Though that reflects American budget problems more than European budgetary prowess, the euro's performance, as Reid warns, could spell the end of the dollar's long reign as the world's preferred reserve currency...

...Reid's chapter tracing the EU's evolution is primarily about creating economic—but also political, institutional and constitutional—interdependence...

...That alien other is readily identified—and Free World's second chapter is titled "Europe as Not-Amenca...

...Relatively few exploit the novel entitlement, but most of the young have in common one lingua franca, English...

...Reid's clear and sometimes convincing reportage presents a potted history of how Europe was transformed...

...Both Reid and Garton Ash compare the U.S...

...In 2003 Americans worked 1,976 hours, Germans and French about 400 hours less...

...Garton Ash is skeptical about the EU's intention to make the European economy the most competitive in the world by 2010: "If it succeeds, I will eat my hat—and my shoes for dessert...

...Yet, as the two authors know, public spats often conceal interests and memories held in common...

...Eugen Weber is a frequent NL contributor whose books include The Western Tradition and A Modern History of Europe...

...Europeans invented Viagra...

...All members of this European Economic Community (EEC) agreed to remove barriers to trade among them, establish a single commercial policy toward nonmembers, pursue common agricultural, economic and transport policies, and free the movement of labor, capital and competition within the EEC's borders...

...The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO, 1949) linked West European nations with the United States and Canada in a defense alliance...

...dollar as the standard exchange unit for international transactions, the euro began as an uncertain runt...

...Not long ago America was Europe made new, spattered with settlements that proclaimed themselves rejuvenated versions of the old from New England and New Amsterdam to New Orleans...

...The Committee of European Security Regulators reviews the accounting standards of U.S., Canadian and Japanese companies to determine if their securities can trade in European markets...

...As he convincingly argues, it will require singular ingenuity for Europeans to continue to work shorter hours, take longer holidays, have a smaller proportion of the population employed, and still produce as much...

...Had we world enough and time, we might imagine how yetunwritten chapters of thoughtful, thought-provoking books like Reid's and Garton Ash's would read one day...

...Since the JTO imposes metric measures, my Jim Beam and Jack Daniel's, made in Kentucky and Tennessee respectively, are sold in liter bottles...

...The EU leads the world in imports, in exports, and in bureaucracy too...

...schoolchildren are hard to bend to sentimental attachments that reach beyond Eurovision pop and David Beckham...

...If European identity is slow to surface and European economic success is limited by EU policy, what glue is left to forge a truly united Europe...

...And its unexpected consequences too...

...Garton Ash contends that such emotional glue has traditionally been found, or manufactured, by identifying an alien "other" against whom "we" can close ranks and discover our reassuring togetherness...

...Again, been there, done that...

...Above all, they invoke "belief in the power of the state to correct the failures of the market," and in the power of the state tout court...

...But it turned out that democracy rhymes with bureaucracy, the government of the many by the unelected few...

...one shared mania for soccer...

...Generation E takes a borderless Europe for granted, and views the ability to study, work and live any place within it as a birthright...

...Both are assailed by barbarians at the gate...

...Some applaud this, some do not...

...Witness that key economic indicator, the Big Mac Index...

...More ominously, Europe, which spends little on defense, has plenty of money to throw at foreign aid...

...When at mid-19th century Jacob Burckhardt, the Swiss historian, warned against the coming of'terribles simplificateurs about to descend on Europe, he did not have in mind bureaucracy with its terribles compilateurs...

...But it doesn't stop there...

...As Dr...

...Why, then, do Europeans still fall short of their own goals...

...European students are better prepared in math, chemistry, physics, biology, and are more literate too...

...Secretary of State George C. Marshall in 1947, and financed by the European Recovery Program that Congress voted the following year, forced Europeans to work together in an Organization for European Economic Cooperation (1948...

...But it was in the wake of the deadliest of these butcheries that Winston Churchill, speaking in Zurich in 1946, called for "a kind of United States of Europe" that would re-create the European family (had there ever been one...

...Schools were once enlisted to teach a common culture, patriotism and civics...

...After a hesitant start, though, it rose from four-fifths of a dollar to sell (at this writing in November) for $ 1.30...

...It is affecting it already...

...In the 1990s, EU governments argued while Yugoslavia burned, 200,000 Europeans were murdered by other Europeans, and 3 million others were driven from their homes even before the further horrors of Kosovo...

...In 1848, James Russell Lowell bade fellow Americans to forget Europe: "Let her sneer, let her say our experiment fails,/ In her voice there's a tremble, e'en now while she rails ...' Americans and Europeans rail at each other still, as one of Garton Ash's insights testifies: "The emotional leitmotif of European anti-Americanism is resentment mingled with envy...

...As Reid puts it, the sheer pleasure Europeans take in denigrating America has become another bond unifying the Continent...

...They do not much resent each other either, and that is another venerable tradition well lost...

...Long ago, the nation and the nation-state were abstract notions to be shoved down the throats of those alleged to be their members...

...Perhaps, to quote Thomas L. Friedman, two United States are better than one...

...In the first place, because shifting fealty from the nation to the EU is a time-consuming affair...

...And an impressive record of inventiveness, innovation, enterprise, and profit from Airbus to Red Bull...

...Auguste Comte's 19th-century Positivist Catechism very sensibly pointed out that no state trying to handle a population of more than 3 million strong can expect to be truly free...

...For the moment, the powerful mood both authors identify as anti-Americanism looks like a key element of pan-Continental culture...

...Another of Brussels' covens, its Joint Trade Office (JTO), regulates trade, patents, banking, credit, consumer protection, mergers and acquisitions, competition, the safety of food and other products—from the length of bananas and the curvature of cucumbers to the size of condoms...

...Be careful what you ask for, you might get it...

...The self-help plan advanced by U.S...

...Jobs are more easily eliminated in the U.S., but they are also more easily created...

...Specifically designed to challenge the global hegemony of the U.S...

...one bubbly tide of excitement every May over the Eurovision pop song telecontest...

...Layoffs are illegal in many European countries, or involve punishingly high compensation...

...Europe leads the world in jetliner production...

...Result: Eurosclerosis and high unemployment rates...

...but geography lends itself better to that exercise than history...

...More people, more wealth, more trade than the United States...

...All generations benefit from a common menu that includes a Channel tunnel popularly known as the Chunnel, high-speed rail links, and cell phones as intrusive and even more numerous than here in the U. S. Most also share the euro, the Union currency whose seamless introduction on New Year's Day 2002 Reid chronicles with awe...

...The good will (or dependency) that this creates turns the EU into a "civilian great power," corralling more votes in the World Trade Organization, International Monetary Fund and other international venues than the skinflint United States...

...Our balance of payments deficit makes our economy look like an addict who needs a fix of foreign investment every day, but five of the 12 older EU countries are in violation of its deficit rules, and most of the countries newly admitted in 2004 are in worse straits...

...Europeans have been too busy making money, and spending it, to slaughter each other as vigorously as they used to...

...The state, or what passes for it, has now been multiplied by two—two capitals, one familiar, the other in Brussels...

...and in trade negotiations Eurocrats talk to the U.S...

...The scale of the Common Market makes the JTO a regulatory superpower, whose decrees affect global manufacture, trade, packaging, and labeling from bourbon to barbells and Barbie dolls...

...Europeans cloned Dolly the sheep...

...Or of other contemporary giants...

...That of American anti-Europeanism is irritation mixed with contempt...

...A trove of wordy sessions, windy summit meetings and fantastic employment opportunities for interpreters and translators...

...By this spring its membership had increased to 25 countries—representing nearly half a billion souls...

...For now, we might remember President John F Kennedy's call, 42 years ago, for a Declaration of Interdependence...

...and one Eurowide diet of fast food snacks, baguette sandwiches, frites (French fries), and beer...

...Two years later international differences had narrowed from 75 to 15 per cent, but the average price of a hamburger hovered around $3.30...

...Workers laid off despite the dissuasive tactics of the state tend to accept their fate and the payments that console them, rather than look for a job...

...Brussels has become a bigger bully than Washington...

...but been there, done that...

...Believers in the European creed try to dredge up parts of some historical heritage that will bear out politically correct commonalities...

...So aid becomes a slush fund for bribing recipients who can easily turn international contributions into private bank deposits...

...In 1992, the Treaty of Mastricht made the European Union (EU) official...

...Both are growing old too fast to survive without immigrants legal and illegal...

...more influence in almost every international body...

...For the moment, as Garton Ash observes, Europeans, or those of them who care, "are struggling to find an emotional glue to hold together this extraordinary project of voluntarily associating 25 diverse European countries in a single political community...

...Enlightened social policies cost money...