– Will the European Union
Achieve SUPERPOWER Status?

Wake up and smell the brioche
BY ROGER COHEN -New York Times

T.R. Reid boldly warns that while America sleeps, 'the United States of Europe' are preparing to become the new world superpower.

Sometimes, major events take place quietly, their import obscured by the hubbub of more arresting happenings. Only with time is the shift perceptible; it becomes clear the world has changed not because another terrorist has struck but because a nameless bureaucrat has accomplished a thankless task. Such is the case, it seems, with the emergence of what T.R. Reid somewhat provocatively calls "the United States of Europe."

Reid, a correspondent for the Washington Post, is by no means the first to use that term. In 1946, Winston Churchill urged Europeans to "build a kind of United States of Europe" to transform the Continent from "a breeding ground for pestilence and hate." Since then, through successive treaties and much haggling, Europe has inched toward the "ever closer union" prescribed by the founding fathers of integration. Reid's thesis is that the United States of Europe is no longer an objective; it is a reality.

This is a bold view. Reid's book, "The United States of Europe: The New Superpower and the End of American Supremacy," sometimes stretches to make the argument that the 25-nation European Union has marched into a central place on the world stage while America slept. The chronic failings of the union are glossed over. High unemployment, slow growth, often acute internal divisions (as over the war in Iraq) and the lack of the sort of military power needed to make diplomatic initiatives persuasive are issues on which Reid chooses not to dwell.

Rather, his focus is on Europe's achievements and the ways in which the union has emerged as a counterweight to an American power that is overwhelming in military terms but less persuasive in others. This approach is timely. For behind all the trans-Atlantic ugliness over Iraq lurk divisions that will no doubt prove enduring.

A united Europe has emerged as the embodiment of an approach to world affairs that stands in contrast to that of the United States. It is one based on pooled sovereignty, the primacy of international institutions and law, the exaltation of peace, an inviolable secularism, a shared currency (the euro), and a value system equating the death penalty with barbarism and free health care with civilization.

"Europe," Reid writes, "is at a point in its history where making aggressive war is considered passe, an outdated relic along the lines of burning at the stake or a medieval joust."

BEHOLD, THE SHIFT

That is an overstatement; European troops are deployed, and dying, in Afghanistan. But in this fluid book, written with verve, marked by the cool distillation of complex issues, Reid's central point is a critical one: the European Union, 15 years after the end of the Cold War, has achieved a heft insufficiently acknowledged on this side of the Atlantic. This unity was inspired by America's federal model and achieved under the protection of American troops but is now often characterized by opposition to America.

Soon, under its draft constitution, the European Union will have what amounts to a president and a foreign minister. Reid argues that these leaders will head a "borderless federal union that is not exactly a single country, but is much more than just another international organization or trading bloc," one "determined to challenge American claims to global supremacy."

In fact, several members of the European Union, especially new ones like Poland, remain attached to a strong American presence in Europe, because they see it as the ultimate guarantor of their security.

Views of the United States vary: British Atlanticism and French anti-Americanism coexist, with Germany hovering between them.

But it is indisputable that the ideal of European unity has assumed a kind of global resonance — one that inspires democratic reformers in Ukraine today — and done so in contradistinction to American power. The importance of Reid's book lies in its evocative framing of this shift.

His approach is journalistic, using portraits of European entrepreneurs and his family's personal experience during their years in London to compile a picture of a fast-changing continent. The vignettes are framed with enough history to give them context but not so much as to weigh down a book of polemical energy.

Among the best chapters is that devoted to the travails of General Electric's former chief executive, Jack Welch, whose plans in 2000 for a merger with Honeywell ran afoul of the European Union's Directorate-General for Competition. What's that? It is, as Welch discovers to his discomfort, where European antitrust law is enforced. Forget national governments; they have no more say in such matters. "We have to do business with Europe, so we have no choice but to respect their law," Welch says when his merger is squelched. "That really is just the way the world works now."

A RESPONSE AWAITS

In his chapter on the European social model, Reid explores one aspect of the "basic differences of worldview on the opposite sides of the Atlantic." He compares the Continent's safety net to "falling into a large, soft bed with a down comforter." There is, of course, a price for all the benefits: a lack of initiative. But Reid feels this can be overstated; look at how Nokia grabbed a bigger market share than Motorola or how Airbus took on Boeing. And his experience of Britain's National Health Service leads him to a stark view: "As an American, I would rather see my country move in the European direction on health care than vice versa."

It is hard, given spiraling American health costs, to argue with that conclusion. Reid's portrait of the euro's rise and America's vulnerability to its deficits is equally persuasive. But his general bullishness on European industry seems overblown, and the book suffers from a few odd slips, among them a reference to Zoran Djindjic as "prime minister of Serbia" that fails to note that he was assassinated in 2003. The book's notes — seven entries — leave much to be desired.

But these are quibbles. Reid has performed a valuable service. The tendency in the United States is still to laugh at European Union rules governing "the maximum permitted curvature of cucumbers" or invoke Henry Kissinger's line about Europe's missing phone number. These are tired habits.

It is now more important to ask how the United States should respond to the growing "soft power" and independence of the European Union. In recent years, under the Bush administration, the tendency has been to ignore it or try to divide it. Reid proposes another approach: "The United States of America has to show respect for the United States of Europe."