Missions Resources - Bibliography
The United States of Europe
Authors: T.R. Reid
ISBN: 0143036084
Publisher: Penguin
Number of pages: 320
Type of cover: Soft Cover
Summary: December 5, 2005
by Paul Grant
No one really knows how many young men have died out in the fields of rural Belgium. After countless grisly wars, the number is far too high. Too many mothers and widows never saw their loved ones again, after one war or another drifted into Belgium.
The crossroads of Western Europe since the days of Julius Caesar, Belgium remains the center of life and death in a war-weary continent. Waterloo is here – where Wellington defeated Napoleon. Two World Wars were fought here, including the Battle of Charleroi and the Battle of the Bulge.
Early in T.R. Reid’s book on the European Union, he takes his story to a town in western Belgium called Ypres, the site of one of the greatest horrors of the last century: chemical warfare. Ypres today hosts more than 170 military cemeteries, where the memory of Europe’s tragic history quietly presents itself. In order to dig beneath the distractions of current events, to arrive at the moral foundation for Europe’s grand project, Reid digs beneath the surface, as it were, and considers the senseless waste of so many promising young lives.
Memory of the hell of war lies at the emotional heart of the European Union, more so than economics. In fact, if not for the memory of war, the fury fuelling the integration of a painfully fractured continent would dissipate faster than clouds of poison gas.
After WWII, six Western European countries gave up trying to fight the war to end all wars, and decided to permanently handicap their own war-making capacities. By integrating their coal and steel resources – the main means for war-making at the time – they hoped to make it impossible for any single nation (meaning Germany) to single-handedly go to war against the other five.
Today the European Economic Community has grown into the European Union, and now includes 25 members from Portugal to Finland, with more on the way. Belgium’s capital Brussels has been taken over by the European Union’s sprawling government district.
Brussels – which lies only a few miles away from Waterloo – is growing into a city unlike any other save Washington: an alternate reality of policy wonks, for whom all politics is an end, not the means. In poll after poll, average Europeans voice little to no interest in this class of “Eurocrats,” much to the consternation of the latter. European distaste for the ruling elites is an ongoing political story. Several months ago French and Dutch voters rejected the EU’s first constitution. Clearly the EU’s political legitimacy is in crisis among run-of-the-mill Europeans.
But Reid is not really reporting on politics. He’s got bigger fish to fry: the astonishing story of cultural change developing in Europe, in tandem with political and economic integration. Politics is the art of compromise, but the European Union grew out of the heart.
Unlike in the US (which Reid constantly contrasts with the European Union), young people (those born after WWII) have largely inherited memories from their elders. Memories of near-starvation die much more slowly than memories of wartime glory. While the EU may lack political legitimacy in the minds of so many young Europeans, the project of continental integration does not.
More important is the fluidity, with which "Generation E," as Reid calls European adults under forty, cross linguistic and cultural boundaries. Millions of people consider it normal to sit around a table with five friends, four of whom hail from different countries.
Reid goes to a Eurovision Song contest with a gaggle of such young people. Eurovision, now over fifty years old, is the prototype TV show for America’s "American Idol" contests. Every country in Europe (including those not in the Union) gets to enter a song, and the entire viewing public gets to vote on the winner. It’s a banal and tasteless event, to be sure, but over the decades since its founding Eurovision has become a Superbowl of sorts – an annual occasion to party. (In 1974 Eurovision gave us ABBA.)
Inasmuch as culture is held together by shared experiences and values, banal and everyday events are every bit as significant as profound political revolutions. In the daily transactions with the common Euro currency, people increasingly see other European countries as part of themselves. In the long run, which is the only run that counts, integration of the heart is much more significant than the political process that enabled it.
Who is European? How far does Europe extend to the East? Russia? Turkey? Uzbekistan? Israel? What about to the South? Can North Africa be included? Up through the middle of the last century, coastal Algeria was an integral part of France, with millions of ethnic French settlers. The European Union has no interest whatever in admitting North Africa into the common market, but cultural boundaries are much more difficult to draw than geographical ones. Last month’s French riots were all about that question. Some folk wish to keep Turkey out of Europe on vaguely defined cultural grounds, related to Christian heritage. Following that logic, the EU should be knocking at the door of Rwanda, Korea and Kenya, which countries are more “Christian” in terms of church attendance, than France itself.
Reid only touches on boundary problems, focusing instead on transatlantic bluster. In fact, the main point of his book seems to be fear-mongering within the United States about playing second fiddle on the global stage to Europe. Certainly the day will come when the US will no longer be the world’s lone superpower, but China and India will be more significant than Europe.
Whatever else is happening in Europe, the continent is certainly not becoming a new version of the USA. That was never really the purpose of the union, despite occasional anti-American bluster coming from Brussels. This book isn't about a new United States, either. Why then the title? Perhaps to scare solipsistic Americans into paying attention.
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