Online at: http://politicalaffairs.net/article/articleview/998/

Book Review – The United States of Europe, By T.R. Reid

By Gerald Horne

Archives - Dates and Topics

2005 – print

May click here for related stories: imperialism/globalization

4-22-05, 10:50 am

“Americans have largely ignored this European revolution,” says the author, T.R. Reid, speaking of the growth of the European Union (EU). They, he says, “have been asleep.” “Americans,” he argues, “seem to be in a state of denial about what Europe has achieved.” Obviously, this well-known Washington Post journalist does not regularly read Political Affairs for if he did, he would have been reading article after article and review after review chronicling the evolution of this latest stiff challenger to the hegemony of US imperialism and he would not have been capable of writing such words.

Still, better late than never and Reid’s warning to his readers about what the rise of the EU portends is quite timely nonetheless. He acknowledges freely that many in Europe – particularly Paris – see the EU as a ‘counterweight’” or “‘countervailing power’” to US imperialism. Even Bush’s “poodle,” Prime Minister Tony Blair, is quoted as saying, “‘we are building a new world superpower’” since “‘a single-power world is inherently unstable.’”

To his credit, the author does point out that there was more hysteria directed toward Japan in the 1980s when it appeared to be challenging US hegemony and investing heavily in this economy. Perhaps, he writes, "Americans are more comfortable with foreign ownership today than they were fifteen years ago because the current investment surge is coming from blue-eyed Judeo-Christian Europeans and not just from East Asia. (That’s certainly the standard view in China and Japan, where it is simply taken for granted that Americans are too racist to be comfortable when an Asian buys the company they work for.)"

It is curious that “Americans” in the author’s view – and the view of others apparently – seems to mean “Euro-Americans.”

Whatever the case, the planet’s leading dynamo – China – seems to be getting along better with the EU than the US nowadays with enormous consequences for the global correlation of forces. It is Brussels that is moving aggressively to lift the arms embargo against Beijing, which is causing apoplexy in Washington. And it is China that “has agreed – in the face of tough American lobbying – to invest a quarter of a billion euros in the Galileo project,” a direct challenger to the US’s NASA [National Aeronautics and Space Administration]. “Israel and India, two close US allies in most theaters, have also asked to become partners in the European system.” Given that US imperialism envisions space as the next frontier for military warfare, this is no minor matter.

After living in Europe for a number of years, the author reports a number of disturbing attitudes that are held across the Atlantic about the US. “Americans” are thought of as being “insular people, ignorant of and indifferent to the rest of the planet” with an awesome combination of “‘omnipotence’” and “‘ignorance.’”

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Such opinions cannot be dismissed easily since the EU is developing a strength that cannot be ignored. “By the end of the first decade of the 21st century, the euro will be the coin of the realm for about half a billion people, from the Atlantic coast of Ireland to the Russian border….” As the dollar falls in value, US entities may find that their future borrowing has to take place not in dollars that are printed on presses on this side of the Atlantic but in Western Europe. This would be of stunning importance for the fate of US imperialism.

General Electric (GE) discovered to its dismay what can occur when the EU is ignored. This corporate behemoth sought to merge with Honeywell and Washington ignored the obvious antitrust implications in passing favorably on this maneuver and things seemed to be proceeding nicely – until Brussels intervened and amidst howling on Washington and Wall Street firmly blocked this merger.

This reflects the point, says the author, that the EU “has become the de facto global policeman for a vast panoply of agricultural, industrial and financial products. In the 21st century, the rules that run the global economy are largely Brussels’ rules.”

This has come as something of a shock to the self-proclaimed “sole remaining superpower,” the so-called “indispensable nation.” Yet, if present trends continue, we can expect to witness a strengthening EU that takes in Turkey and Ukraine into a “super-state” that already surpasses the US in population, size of the economy and other leading indicators. This will require a mighty adjustment by US imperialism and thanks to the author, those who seek to subdue this monster have further ammunition for their worthy cause.

The United States of Europe: The New Superpower and the End of American Supremacy.
By T.R. Reid
New York: Penguin Press, 2004.

--Gerald Horne is a contributing editor of Political Affairs.