Friday, March 05, 2004
A Decent Regard
By Robert Kagan
Tuesday, March 2, 2004; Page A21
The chief criticism of President Bush's foreign policy in this campaign is obviously not going to be that he invaded Iraq. The big antiwar candidate, Howard Dean, is finished. The two remaining candidates for the Democratic nomination both voted for the war. The failure to find stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq -- and the stunning ineptitude of the administration in defending itself against unfair charges of prewar deception -- has not undermined basic public support for the war.
If there is a substantive critique of Bush foreign policy beyond mere Bush-hatred, it is the administration's failure to win broad international support for the war and for other major policies. This critique has merit, though not as it is usually framed by the critics. The problem is not that the administration skirted the U.N. Security Council last year -- actually it was France and Russia that walked away from Resolution 1441. Moreover, Europeans themselves went to war in Kosovo in 1999 without authorization from the United Nations. Nor is the problem that the Bush administration went to war "unilaterally" -- unless one defines "unilateralism" as a failure to win the support of Paris and Berlin. In any case, no serious Democrat argues the United States should renounce the right to "go it alone" when all else fails. Last week John Kerry said no president should "ever" let our allies "tie our hands and prevent us from doing what must be done." To European ears, that won't sound very different from the Bush-style "unilateralism" Kerry criticizes.
The problem the United States faces today is harder to quantify but arguably more profound. It is a problem of legitimacy. Contrary to the claims of partisan critics, moreover, it is a problem that neither began with nor will end with the Bush administration. It is, rather, the product of the end of the Cold War, the emergence of a unipolar order and the nervousness the new circumstances can create even among America's friends.
Well before the Bush administration proved so maladroit at reassuring even America's closest allies, other post-Cold War administrations had faced mounting anxiety about growing U.S. dominance. In the 1990s, while Bill Clinton and Madeleine Albright were proudly dubbing the United States the "indispensable nation," French foreign ministers, along with their Russian and Chinese counterparts, were declaring the American-led unipolar world to be unjust and dangerous. In the Clinton years, Samuel P. Huntington was warning about the "arrogance" and "unilateralism" of American policies. European complaints about the "arrogance" and "bullying" of the Clinton administration before, during and after the Kosovo war in 1999 evinced a growing concern about the inherent problems of the new structure, and especially the accelerating loss of European control over American actions.
The problem is, to the liberal democratic mind there is something inherently illegitimate about a unipolar world, regardless of whether the superpower is led by George W. Bush or John F. Kerry. As the British scholar-statesman Robert Cooper argues in his new book, "The Breaking of Nations," "Our domestic systems are designed to place restraint on power. . . . We value pluralism and the rule of law domestically and it is difficult for democratic societies -- including the USA -- to escape from the idea that they are desirable internationally as well."
Will the United States use its power to serve only its own narrow interests, at the expense of others? That is what worries even friends and admirers of the United States these days. "The difficulty with the American monopoly of force in the world community," Cooper argues, "is that it is American and will be exercised, necessarily, in the interests of the United States. This will not be seen as legitimate."
In a recent speech to the American Enterprise Institute, Charles Krauthammer asked why Americans should care about the legitimacy bestowed by other nations. It is a good question. During the 2000 presidential campaign, Condoleezza Rice derided the belief, which she attributed to the Clinton administration, "that the support of many states -- or even better, of institutions like the United Nations -- is essential to the legitimate exercise of power."
But it turns out we're not as thick-skinned as we think. Even the Bush administration felt compelled to seek European approval last year, and at the place where Europeans insist approval be granted, the U.N. Security Council. Perhaps the Bush administration did not need France and Germany to pursue war in Iraq, but it believed it needed the support at least of Britain. Why? Not because British troops were essential to the success of the invasion. It was the patina of international legitimacy that Tony Blair's support provided -- a legitimacy that the American people wanted and needed, as Bush officials well understood. Nor can there be any question that the Bush administration has suffered from its failure to gain the broader approval of Europe, and thus a broader international legitimacy, for the invasion of Iraq -- and suffered at home as well as abroad.
There are sound reasons why the United States needs European approval, reasons unrelated to international law, the strength of the Security Council and the as-yet nonexistent "fabric of the international order" that some speak of. The main reason has to do with America's liberal, democratic ideology. Europe matters because Europe and the United States remain the heart of the liberal, democratic world. Americans rightly have a hard time ignoring the fears, concerns, interests and demands of fellow democracies, especially in Europe. American foreign policy will always be drawn by American liberalism to seek greater harmony with Europe, if Europeans are willing and able to make such harmony possible.
The alternative course would be difficult for the United States to sustain, for it is questionable whether this country could operate effectively over time without the moral support and approval of the democratic world. This is not for the reasons usually cited. Most American advocates of "multilateralism" focus on the need for the material cooperation of allies -- in Kerry's words, to "take the target off the back of our troops" and put it on someone else's back. That essentially self-interested sentiment is not likely to inspire others to help. Nor is it even the most important reason why we need allies. In the end, it is America's need for international legitimacy that will prove more decisive in shaping America's course. Whether the United States can "go it alone" in a material sense is an open question. Militarily, it can and does go virtually alone, even when the Europeans are fully on board, as in Kosovo and in the Persian Gulf War. But whether the American people will continually be willing and able to support both military actions and the burdens of postwar occupations in the face of constant charges of illegitimacy by their closest democratic allies -- that is more doubtful.
Americans' reputation for insularity and indifference is undeserved. They have always cared what the rest of the world thinks of them, or at least what the liberal world thinks. In their Declaration of Independence, Americans recognized the importance of paying a "decent respect to the opinions of mankind." Ever since, Americans have been forced to care what the liberal world thinks by their universalist national ideology.
Because Americans do care, the steady denial of international legitimacy by fellow democracies may gradually erode domestic support for the kind of active foreign policy that the present dangerous times demand. If there is a crisis over Iran in the coming year, and the United States and Europe remain at odds, will it be harder for any American president, Democratic or Republican, to take the action he deems necessary?
As much as some might wish to dismiss the problem, Americans cannot ignore the unipolar predicament. The Bush administration has been slow to recognize that there even is a problem. This is partly because Bush and his advisers came to office guided by the narrow realism that was dominant in Republican foreign policy circles during the Clinton years. In the 2000 campaign and in the early months of the Bush presidency, there was much talk about focusing intently, and exclusively, on the American "national interest." Trying to fashion a foreign policy that would be as different from the Clinton approach as possible, the Bush administration proclaimed it would take a fresh look at all treaties, obligations and alliances and reevaluate them in terms of America's "national interest."
Pursuing the "national interest" always sounds right. But in fact the idea that the United States can take such a narrow view of its "national interest" has always been mistaken. For one thing, Americans had "humanitarian interests" two centuries before that term was invented, as well as moral, political and ideological interests for which Americans have historically been willing to fight. Beyond that, the enunciation of this "realist" view by the dominant power in a unipolar era is a serious foreign policy error. A nation with global hegemony cannot proclaim to the world that it will be guided only by its own definition of its "national interest." That is precisely what even America's closest friends fear: that the United States will wield its vast power only for itself.
Both the unipolar predicament and the American character require a much more expansive definition of American interests. The United States can neither appear to be acting only in its self-interest nor act as if its own national interest were all that mattered. The United States must act in ways that benefit humanity, as it has frequently tried to do in the past. It must certainly seek to benefit that part of humanity that shares America's liberal principles. Even at times of dire emergency, and perhaps especially at those times, the world's sole superpower needs to demonstrate that it wields its power on behalf of its principles and all who share them, including its democratic allies in Europe.
The United States, in short, must pursue legitimacy in the manner truest to its nature, by promoting the principles of liberal democracy, not only as a means to greater security but as an end in itself. The U.N. Security Council is not the only place to obtain legitimacy, as Europeans themselves know. Americans can win legitimacy by promoting democracy and liberal reform in places such as Iraq, Afghanistan and Haiti -- and by not shirking their responsibilities, especially in places where they have wielded their great power. Success in such endeavors will provide the United States a measure of legitimacy, even in Europe. For Europeans cannot forever ignore their own vision of a more humane, more liberal and more democratic world, even if they are these days more preoccupied with their vision of a strengthened international legal order and more concerned about an American Leviathan unbound.
By Robert Kagan
Tuesday, March 2, 2004; Page A21
The chief criticism of President Bush's foreign policy in this campaign is obviously not going to be that he invaded Iraq. The big antiwar candidate, Howard Dean, is finished. The two remaining candidates for the Democratic nomination both voted for the war. The failure to find stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq -- and the stunning ineptitude of the administration in defending itself against unfair charges of prewar deception -- has not undermined basic public support for the war.
If there is a substantive critique of Bush foreign policy beyond mere Bush-hatred, it is the administration's failure to win broad international support for the war and for other major policies. This critique has merit, though not as it is usually framed by the critics. The problem is not that the administration skirted the U.N. Security Council last year -- actually it was France and Russia that walked away from Resolution 1441. Moreover, Europeans themselves went to war in Kosovo in 1999 without authorization from the United Nations. Nor is the problem that the Bush administration went to war "unilaterally" -- unless one defines "unilateralism" as a failure to win the support of Paris and Berlin. In any case, no serious Democrat argues the United States should renounce the right to "go it alone" when all else fails. Last week John Kerry said no president should "ever" let our allies "tie our hands and prevent us from doing what must be done." To European ears, that won't sound very different from the Bush-style "unilateralism" Kerry criticizes.
The problem the United States faces today is harder to quantify but arguably more profound. It is a problem of legitimacy. Contrary to the claims of partisan critics, moreover, it is a problem that neither began with nor will end with the Bush administration. It is, rather, the product of the end of the Cold War, the emergence of a unipolar order and the nervousness the new circumstances can create even among America's friends.
Well before the Bush administration proved so maladroit at reassuring even America's closest allies, other post-Cold War administrations had faced mounting anxiety about growing U.S. dominance. In the 1990s, while Bill Clinton and Madeleine Albright were proudly dubbing the United States the "indispensable nation," French foreign ministers, along with their Russian and Chinese counterparts, were declaring the American-led unipolar world to be unjust and dangerous. In the Clinton years, Samuel P. Huntington was warning about the "arrogance" and "unilateralism" of American policies. European complaints about the "arrogance" and "bullying" of the Clinton administration before, during and after the Kosovo war in 1999 evinced a growing concern about the inherent problems of the new structure, and especially the accelerating loss of European control over American actions.
The problem is, to the liberal democratic mind there is something inherently illegitimate about a unipolar world, regardless of whether the superpower is led by George W. Bush or John F. Kerry. As the British scholar-statesman Robert Cooper argues in his new book, "The Breaking of Nations," "Our domestic systems are designed to place restraint on power. . . . We value pluralism and the rule of law domestically and it is difficult for democratic societies -- including the USA -- to escape from the idea that they are desirable internationally as well."
Will the United States use its power to serve only its own narrow interests, at the expense of others? That is what worries even friends and admirers of the United States these days. "The difficulty with the American monopoly of force in the world community," Cooper argues, "is that it is American and will be exercised, necessarily, in the interests of the United States. This will not be seen as legitimate."
In a recent speech to the American Enterprise Institute, Charles Krauthammer asked why Americans should care about the legitimacy bestowed by other nations. It is a good question. During the 2000 presidential campaign, Condoleezza Rice derided the belief, which she attributed to the Clinton administration, "that the support of many states -- or even better, of institutions like the United Nations -- is essential to the legitimate exercise of power."
But it turns out we're not as thick-skinned as we think. Even the Bush administration felt compelled to seek European approval last year, and at the place where Europeans insist approval be granted, the U.N. Security Council. Perhaps the Bush administration did not need France and Germany to pursue war in Iraq, but it believed it needed the support at least of Britain. Why? Not because British troops were essential to the success of the invasion. It was the patina of international legitimacy that Tony Blair's support provided -- a legitimacy that the American people wanted and needed, as Bush officials well understood. Nor can there be any question that the Bush administration has suffered from its failure to gain the broader approval of Europe, and thus a broader international legitimacy, for the invasion of Iraq -- and suffered at home as well as abroad.
There are sound reasons why the United States needs European approval, reasons unrelated to international law, the strength of the Security Council and the as-yet nonexistent "fabric of the international order" that some speak of. The main reason has to do with America's liberal, democratic ideology. Europe matters because Europe and the United States remain the heart of the liberal, democratic world. Americans rightly have a hard time ignoring the fears, concerns, interests and demands of fellow democracies, especially in Europe. American foreign policy will always be drawn by American liberalism to seek greater harmony with Europe, if Europeans are willing and able to make such harmony possible.
The alternative course would be difficult for the United States to sustain, for it is questionable whether this country could operate effectively over time without the moral support and approval of the democratic world. This is not for the reasons usually cited. Most American advocates of "multilateralism" focus on the need for the material cooperation of allies -- in Kerry's words, to "take the target off the back of our troops" and put it on someone else's back. That essentially self-interested sentiment is not likely to inspire others to help. Nor is it even the most important reason why we need allies. In the end, it is America's need for international legitimacy that will prove more decisive in shaping America's course. Whether the United States can "go it alone" in a material sense is an open question. Militarily, it can and does go virtually alone, even when the Europeans are fully on board, as in Kosovo and in the Persian Gulf War. But whether the American people will continually be willing and able to support both military actions and the burdens of postwar occupations in the face of constant charges of illegitimacy by their closest democratic allies -- that is more doubtful.
Americans' reputation for insularity and indifference is undeserved. They have always cared what the rest of the world thinks of them, or at least what the liberal world thinks. In their Declaration of Independence, Americans recognized the importance of paying a "decent respect to the opinions of mankind." Ever since, Americans have been forced to care what the liberal world thinks by their universalist national ideology.
Because Americans do care, the steady denial of international legitimacy by fellow democracies may gradually erode domestic support for the kind of active foreign policy that the present dangerous times demand. If there is a crisis over Iran in the coming year, and the United States and Europe remain at odds, will it be harder for any American president, Democratic or Republican, to take the action he deems necessary?
As much as some might wish to dismiss the problem, Americans cannot ignore the unipolar predicament. The Bush administration has been slow to recognize that there even is a problem. This is partly because Bush and his advisers came to office guided by the narrow realism that was dominant in Republican foreign policy circles during the Clinton years. In the 2000 campaign and in the early months of the Bush presidency, there was much talk about focusing intently, and exclusively, on the American "national interest." Trying to fashion a foreign policy that would be as different from the Clinton approach as possible, the Bush administration proclaimed it would take a fresh look at all treaties, obligations and alliances and reevaluate them in terms of America's "national interest."
Pursuing the "national interest" always sounds right. But in fact the idea that the United States can take such a narrow view of its "national interest" has always been mistaken. For one thing, Americans had "humanitarian interests" two centuries before that term was invented, as well as moral, political and ideological interests for which Americans have historically been willing to fight. Beyond that, the enunciation of this "realist" view by the dominant power in a unipolar era is a serious foreign policy error. A nation with global hegemony cannot proclaim to the world that it will be guided only by its own definition of its "national interest." That is precisely what even America's closest friends fear: that the United States will wield its vast power only for itself.
Both the unipolar predicament and the American character require a much more expansive definition of American interests. The United States can neither appear to be acting only in its self-interest nor act as if its own national interest were all that mattered. The United States must act in ways that benefit humanity, as it has frequently tried to do in the past. It must certainly seek to benefit that part of humanity that shares America's liberal principles. Even at times of dire emergency, and perhaps especially at those times, the world's sole superpower needs to demonstrate that it wields its power on behalf of its principles and all who share them, including its democratic allies in Europe.
The United States, in short, must pursue legitimacy in the manner truest to its nature, by promoting the principles of liberal democracy, not only as a means to greater security but as an end in itself. The U.N. Security Council is not the only place to obtain legitimacy, as Europeans themselves know. Americans can win legitimacy by promoting democracy and liberal reform in places such as Iraq, Afghanistan and Haiti -- and by not shirking their responsibilities, especially in places where they have wielded their great power. Success in such endeavors will provide the United States a measure of legitimacy, even in Europe. For Europeans cannot forever ignore their own vision of a more humane, more liberal and more democratic world, even if they are these days more preoccupied with their vision of a strengthened international legal order and more concerned about an American Leviathan unbound.
The End of Europe? By Niall Ferguson
Posted: Thursday, March 4, 2004
Well, thank you very much indeed, Chris, and thank you also to Lynde and Harry Bradley, whose generosity makes this series of lectures possible. And thank you also for turning off your cell phones.
I want to speak this evening about what may seem a rather dramatic subject--the end of Europe, by which I don't mean its disappearance from the map, but a fundamental transformation in the political and economic institutions of the European Union.
In order to illustrate my argument, I want to take you back very far in time. In fact, I want to take you back to the year 732. In Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, in Chapter 52, Part 2, he describes what might have happened if the Muslim that had invaded across the Straits of Gibraltar and invaded Spain and then France in the year 711 had won what became known in the West as the Battle of Poitiers. So let me quote Gibbon, that much greater Oxford historian.
"A victorious line of march had been prolonged above 1,000 miles from the Rock of Gibraltar to the banks of the Loire. The repetition of an equal space would have carried the Saracens to the confines of Poland and the highlands of Scotland. The Rhine is not more impassable than the Nile or the Euphrates, and the Arabian fleet might have sailed without a naval combat into the mouth of the Thames. Perhaps"--and here is the quintessential Gibbon--"perhaps the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford and our pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Mohammad."
Some of you who know my work on empire may have anticipated that this evening I would talk about empire. Indeed, American empire is the subject of my forthcoming book. But I thought we'd done empire last year in this very room. And so what I want to talk about what instead is a different notion. It's a little neologism of my own. It's "impire," with an "i". It's about what happens when a political entity, instead of expanding outwards towards its periphery exporting power, implodes, when the energies come from outside into that entity.
And I want to try and suggest to you that the face of Europe today and in the coming decades was unwittingly, or perhaps presciently, foreseen by Gibbon in that characteristically ironical passage. I want to try to suggest to you that the end of Europe is not merely an economic phenomenon but will in fact prove to be a cultural phenomenon. Europe will turn out to be not an empire in the sense that I think the United States is today--that is to say, an expansive geopolitical entity--not a rival or a competitor or even a counterweight to the United States, but almost its antithesis, something that is drawing political energies into it, that is perhaps even being colonized by exogenous forces.
So that's my argument.
I think it's fair to say that Americans, if I dare to generalize, regard the European Union as a relatively serious entity. I think they see it as economically comparable, at least in scale, with the United States, with, after all, a combined gross domestic product that, by some measures at least, is very nearly equal to that of the United States. Indeed, given exchange rate movements at the moment, I suspect that when they work out the combined GDP of the EU for 2004 and compare it with that of the United States, it may come out slightly higher, even in current dollar terms. Americans see a strong European currency, belying the predictions of "Cassandras" that the euro would fail. They see, if they look closely, evidence that, at least by some measures, West European productivity is not far behind that of the United States. They see, perhaps above all, an equal in trade negotiations.
Nor is it only as an economic counterweight that Americans take Europe seriously. In simple demographic terms, the European Union is a larger entity than the United States and will be larger still with the accession of May the 1st of this year of 10 new countries. With its population of 450 million people, the Europe of 25 will be one and a half times larger than the United States.
Americans also detect in Europe a cultural challenge, perhaps even a cultural rival. It's not just that, like my sparring partner from last year, Robert Kagan, they detect in Europeans a kind of Venusian aversion to the exercise of military power as compared with the Martian--or marshall--American preference for the use of force, they also see profoundly different attitudes towards, for example, the welfare state. And they detect--and I think with some reason--a certain hostility to the United States that has perhaps become more averse in the last few years than it was before.
Americans also see a political process, a constitutional process going on in Europe, which, at least for a time last year, seemed to suggest the emergence of a genuine federal United States of Europe. And although that constitution has been put on the back burner, the draft treaty for a European constitution--to give it its proper name--is not, ladies and gentlemen, by any means a dead letter. Those who look closely at the way the European Union works will recognize that, at least in legal terms, it already is a federal system in the American sense, that the European Court is in ever sense the equal of the Supreme Court in the United States. It is the highest legal instance in Europe.
And then, if one looks at the small print of the draft constitution, one sees ways in which the central federal institutions, or quasi-federal institutions of the EU are gaining in power. Were that draft treaty to be implemented, then the rules of qualified majority voting, which allow countries to have rules imposed upon them by a majority, these rules would be extended to cover many more areas of European policy.
And in diplomatic terms, too. Who could mistake the reality that at least some European powers, perhaps traditional great powers of Western Europe, can exercise at least a kind of disruptive influence on American power? The world is not really unipolar so long as the European Union enjoys the unique distinction of having two members on the United Nations Security Council who are permanent members.
There are other respects in which I think Americans should take Europe seriously in the international sphere, and they're often underestimated. Europeans contribute a great deal more, and have contributed a great deal more, in terms of official aid to developing countries in recent years. They've contributed substantially more to peacekeeping missions organized by the United Nations. My future colleague Joe Nye at Harvard talks about soft power, and detects a certain decline in the soft power of the United States. He might equally well, it seems to me, argue that the soft power of the European Union has been growing steadily and that as the world--if the Pew Global Attitude Survey is anything to go by--becomes hostile to the United States, so, subtly and implicitly, it becomes more friendly to the European Union.
So whether you read Robert Kagan or the very different work that's been produced by scholars like Sam Huntington, John Mearsheimer, Charles Kutchen, it's clear that serious American thinkers take the European Union very seriously indeed. But what I want to do this evening is to suggest to you that they should not take it so seriously, that in fact the European Union, in all of these respects that I have just listed, is actually flattered by such comparisons.
On the contrary, when we look closely at the way in which the European Union is evolving and try to set its evolution in some kind of historical perspective, I believe it becomes apparent that, far from approaching a kind of parity with the United States, whether in economic and cultural and political or in international terms, in reality the European Union is an entity on the brink of decline and even of dissolution.
Now, for the avoidance of doubt, I'm not saying that the European Union will disappear as an institution in our lifetimes. Institutions, in Europe particularly, tend not to disappear. They just decline in their power. Like, for example, today's Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development--once the prototype of a far larger post-Marshall Aid Europe, today a harmless agency for gathering data and producing economic reports. And ladies and gentlemen, Europe is littered with such agencies, which once embodied grandiose plans--think, for example, of the Bank for International Settlements, the International Labor Organization. There's scarcely a European capital without the relic of some past plan for great greater European integration.
My suggestion is not that the European Union will vanish, but simply that its institutions are in danger of atrophying and that it, too, may one day be no more than a humble data-gathering agency with expensive but impotent offices in the City of Brussels and elsewhere.
Let me try to illustrate to you why I think this is. There are really three parts to my argument, one of which is quite obvious and I will deal with as swiftly as possible. And that is, essentially, to point out why so many of these apparent signs of rapid integration, of approaching parity with the United States are false signs.
The second and more interesting part of the argument is to do with a fundamental historical insight into the way that the European Union or, to be precise, the process of European integration, has always functioned from its very inception until the present. I want to draw on the work of recent scholars, not all of which will be known to you, to suggest that there is a key to understanding the process of European integration, and that key can be summed up in a single phrase: German gravy.
Finally, having bored you near to unconsciousness with economics, I will soar away from such dry matter and offer a third cultural argument to the effect that Europe may not only experience a kind of institutional decline, but that its very culture is in itself authentically, and in the true sense of the word, decadent. So my conclusion will be as much cultural as economic.
First, the economics. In every year of the last decade but one--that was 2001--the economy of the United States has grown in real terms faster than that of the European Union. In every year of the last eight years but one, productivity has grown faster in the United States than in Europe. If you look at the average of unemployment--and these are the standardized measures of unemployment that the OECD uses--you can see that on average over the last decade unemployment in the European Union has been nearly double what it has been in the United States.
Why is this? I think there are two ways of explaining European economic under-performance in the past decade. One of them is that the labor market and indeed markets generally are more rigid, are less flexible than those of the United States. Another of them is simply that the monetary policy of the European Central Bank has been somewhat inept, or at least somewhat unbalanced, in the way that it has treated the different members of the euro zone. The key points about economic under-performance in Europe is that it is principally, or at least predominantly, a German story.
It is richly ironic that only 20 years ago scholars were warning that Germany was going to supersede the United States itself as one of the great economic powers, along, of course, with Japan in the world. In truth, those of us who were living in Germany in the 1980s could see an impending economic crisis in that country, a crisis that German reunification temporarily postponed in an orgy of deficit finance and government contracts.
Now we see the reality. There is a profound problem in the German economy that would be there whether the Bundesbank was still in charge of monetary policy in that country or not. The problem is worsened by the fact that, under the ECB, interest rates in Germany are probably around 100 basis points higher than they should be. And given that the German economy is roughly a third of the economy of the euro zone, an unhealthy Germany is an unhealthy European economy.
I want to add a little footnote to this story. If you look closely at man-hour statistics, the productivity of, say, a Frenchman in a single hour compared with his American counterpart, there is in fact nothing to choose between them. As a worker, a Frenchman is just as efficient as an American. It's less true, but comparable, in the case of a German worker. One of the biggest differences, in fact, in economic terms between Western Europe--and its true in some measure of Eastern Europe, but principally between Western Europe and the United States, has been a divergence in working hours. In the past decade or so, Americans have steadily worked more hours per year. In fact, according to figures from the OECD, the average American in employment works nearly 2,000 hours a year--and hours a year are a good measure to see just how much work people are doing. The average German, ladies and gentlemen, works fully 22 percent less of the year. And the figures are actually larger if you consider, for example, the Dutch. Between 1979 and the present, the length of the working year grew in the United States. Or, if you want to put it in more conventional terms, the vacation shrank.
Precisely the opposite happened in Europe. In Europe, working hours diminished, vacations grew Labor participation also diminished. Fewer and fewer of the population actually entered the labor market altogether. And that in many ways explains that differential in GDP growth rates as well as anything I could suggest to you. And it's a little hint of what I'm going to say in a minute, that this, I think, is more than just an economic phenomenon. In some ways it is a symptom of that cultural malaise in Europe that I want to see as a critical part of the end of Europe.
To put it very crudely and to hint at what I'm going to say later, it is the work ethic itself. Whether you call it a Protestant work ethic or simply a work ethic, it is that which seems to be most obviously in decline. And it is, I think, noteworthy that the decline in working hours is most pronounced in what were once distinctly Protestant countries of northwestern Europe. Once.
I would, if time permitted, talk some more about the economic and political implications of European enlargement. I would, if time permitted, like to suggest to you that the acquisition of 10 new states, most of them in Central and Central Eastern Europe, does not necessarily portend great advantages either for those new member states or for the older member states of Western Europe. Let me merely point out that one respect in which Central European economies have coped with their relatively lower productivity compared with Western Europe since the ending of communist rule in those countries nearly 15 years ago has been by working longer hours. In fact, the Czechs are among the very few people in the world today who work more hours per year than the Americans.
My question, and it is a rhetorical one, though it may invite further comment--not least from my good friend Radek Sikorski, a greater expert in these matters than I can ever claim to be--but my question is, really, whether East Europeans who have discovered the benefits of economic liberty since the fall of the Berlin Wall may not find that liberty circumscribed by the mass of regulations and rules that emanate daily from Brussels.
I could also talk about the extent to which, despite the appearance of a greater European cultural identity, in reality, a certain fragmentation of European culture is still very evident in the many euro-barometer polls that have been conducted over the past years. It's clear that a sense of Europeanness, far from growing at the expense of national identity, has, if anything, suffered something of a decline in recent years.
I could, if time permitted, dwell on why it is that the draft constitution for a European treaty has been grounded, or beached, perhaps even sunk by recent political events in Europe. Some of you will be familiar with these stories; others will be indifferent to them. I would rather proceed at speed to the second part of my argument.
In other words, the conventional points that suggest an approaching European parity with the United States, be they economic, cultural, or political, are points which are at best arguable and, in my view, largely false.
But now let me broaden my argument. Let me introduce a certain historical perspective. I'm not, as anybody who has read the book Virtual History will know, an economic determinist or any kind of determinist. I do not, in fact, regard economics as in some sense the driving force of human history. But there are exceptions to that rule. There are certain processes which are primarily economic in their character. And I think it's true to say that European integration is one of those processes.
There's been some very good work on the history of European integration done recently. It hasn't been, I think, widely enough understood or received. Perhaps the most interesting work has been produced by the venerable British historian Alan Millwood, but it's also been complemented by the young Harvard historian Andrew Muravchik. Between them, working independently, they've arrived at a new interpretation--and I think it deserves to be called a new interpretation--of why European integration happened at all after the Second World War.
Instead of the conventional view that a few saintly figures, like Jean Monnet, realized a vision of European integration to prevent the recurrence of war in Europe and generally make everybody happier and better off, they argue that what happened, beginning with the negotiations that produced the European coal and steel community, the nation states of Western Europe, beginning with the six that produced the ECSC--the coal and steel community--made very limited concessions of sovereignty in the pursuit of the national economic interest; and, to be quite specific, in pursuit of the interests of well represented economic groups within their societies, principally heavy industry and small agriculture.
If one understands the process of European integration in these terms--essentially an economically driven set of deals between still largely sovereign nation states--one thing becomes abundantly clear. And that is, ladies and gentlemen, from the very outset this process relied on what I rather crudely called a moment ago "German gravy." It was the Germans who, from the very word go, were prepared to subsidize the other parties in the process of European integration.
To give you just one example: The fundamental bottom line of the coal and steel community was that German taxpayers would prop up the inefficient coal mines of Belgium at the cost of hundreds of thousands of marks. In the same way, it was German taxpayers who paid the development aid to the French colonial empire, aid that was an integral part of the Treaty of Rome. It's often forgotten that where the British saw a choice between empire and Europe, and dithered and hesitated about that choice, the French did what I always do whenever I see a choice. They said, We'll have both, please.
Not only did the French seek to retain their African empire and what was left of their Asian empire within the structures of the emerging European community, but, with a brilliant stroke of diplomacy, they insisted that the other members, the other five members that signed the Treaty of Rome should subsidize their own colonies. And so it was that, in an extraordinary deal that was done in 1956-57, Conrad Adenauer agreed to payments to French colonies that came very largely from German taxpayers. A common agricultural policy, which became the single largest item in the budget of the European community, was from its very inception underwritten by net contributions from German taxpayers. That was how it worked.
If you add up all the--to use the technical term--unrequited transfers that Germany has paid through the European budget since its inception, one of the most striking facts that I can offer you is that the total exceeds the amount that Germany was asked to pay in reparations after the First World War. It is more than 132 billion marks, the sum that the Germans in the 1920s insisted would bankrupt them if they paid it. Well, they paid it. They paid it not as reparations, but as net contributions to the European budget.
And that, I think, explains one of the more striking findings of recent European survey data. Euro-barometer surveys show that there's a real discrepancy between what people think about the European Union relative, as it were, to the general good and what they think about the European Union relative to their own national good. And it's an almost perfect correlation. Countries that are net gainers, net recipients from the European budget think that the European Union is quite good, but they think it's even better for their own country. Countries which are net donors to the European budget--and that principally means Germany, but also in some measure Britain--think that the European Union is okay for their country but is obviously very good generally.
And this, it seems to me, takes us to the very heart of the political economy of European integration Let me tell you some simple percentages about the way the European Union works, to illuminate the fundamental imbalance between representation and taxation which is at the heart of the story of European integration.
Today, Germany accounts for around a quarter, a little under a quarter, of the combined gross domestic product of the entire European Union. It accounts for just over a fifth, 22 percent, of its population. It accounts for 16 percent of the seats in the European Parliament; around about 11 percent of votes on the Council of Ministers, though that process of voting is, of course, under a process of reform. In fact, if the draft treaty isn't enacted after enlargement, Germany's share of votes in the Council of Ministers will fall to 8 percent. But if you look at net contributions to the European budget in the years 1995 to 2001, Germany contributed 67 percent.
So you get between 8 and 11 percent of the decisive votes in the Council of Ministers, that is, the key decision making body of the European Union, but you--by which I mean "you" as Germany--contribute two-thirds towards the combined budget.
Now, that's all very well, ladies and gentlemen, if Germany is the fastest growing economy in Europe. But as I've already pointed out to you, it is today the slowest growing economy in Europe. It is, in fact, the sick man of Europe. And although the German economy is very large, it is far from clear why, when it has not grown at all in the past six quarters, why the German economy should continue to subsidize the economies of the smaller, poorer countries of Southern and now also Central Europe.
My estimation, ladies and gentlemen, is that the train is still running, but there ain't no gravy anymore. And as that reality gradually dawns, the process of European integration, which I believe has depended from its very inception on German gravy, is bound to come to a halt. Who, after all--who is going to pay for those, and I quote, "maximum enlargement-related commitments," to the 10 new member states which have been capped at 40 billion euros? The general assumption appears still to be that the German taxpayer will pay that money. I see no reason whatsoever why that should be the case.
But ladies and gentlemen, I didn't come here this evening to make a purely economic argument. What I've said I think is in fact a sufficient argument to explain the end of the process of European integration as we have known it up until this point. But I have one last argument to make that is not, in the end, an economic argument at all.
The fundamental problem that Europe faces, more serious than anything I've mentioned so far, is senescence. It's a problem that we all face as individuals to varying degrees, but from society to society the problem of senescence, of growing old, varies hugely. In the year 2050, which is less remote than it may at first sound, current projections by the United Nations suggest that the median age of the European Union countries, the EU 15, will rise from 38 to 49--a Europe of 49-year-olds. It will rise in the United States, too. I wish I had time to tell you about the problems that you are going to face, because then it would stop you feeling the complacency that you may have begun to feel this evening.
The situation in the United States is not great at all in this respect, but it is--and I believe this is the most one can say--better than the situation of the European Union. The German population will in fact decline--absolutely, not in relative terms--absolutely, from 82 to 67 million. Falling populations will be a characteristic feature of the hitherto dominant societies of Western Europe. An increase in retirement ages will not help. It is not the answer. It would not suffice to alter the problems that will beset the social security systems of Western Europe. The implicit liabilities of the German social security system at the moment are currently around about 270 percent of German GDP. There are problems with the social security and Medicare systems in this country--very serious problems indeed; I've written about that. But the problems in Europe are much worse, and they will bite politically much sooner.
There is only one way out for this continent, and that is immigration. There is an obvious source of youthful workers who aspire to nothing more than a better standard of living all around Europe. All around Europe there are countries whose birth rate is more than twice the European average, significantly more than double it. The trouble is that nearly all these countries are predominantly Muslim countries. Not only that, but there is, right next door to the European Union, in fact between the European Union and Iraq, a country which now has a very plausible claim to European Union membership. And that country is Turkey.
Turkey's per capita income is in fact, by some measures, higher than that of Hungary, Latvia, and Lithuania, all of which are about to enter the European Union--certainly higher than those Balkan economies that hope to be in the next, or next but one, wave. The arguments against Turkish membership--and the Turks have been pressing for some form of membership since the 1980s--are getting weaker and weaker. And you know the only one that is left? And it's one most often heard among German conservatives, but occasionally it slips out of a French mouth, too--that argument is a cultural argument. The argument is that fundamentally Europe is a Christian entity. Its cultural roots are different from those of Ottoman Turkey. That Europe is in a sense a latter day secular version of Christendom.
Ladies and gentlemen, I only wish that were true. The reality is--and it is perhaps the most striking cultural phenomenon of our times--that Western and Eastern Europe are no longer in any meaningful sense Christian societies. They are quite clearly post-Christian--indeed, in many respects, post-religious--societies. In the Netherlands, Britain, Germany, Sweden, and Denmark, less than 1 in 10 of the population attends church even once a month. A clear majority do not attend church at all. There are now more Muslims in Britain, indeed in England, than Anglican communicants. More Muslims attend mosque weekly than Anglicans attend church.
In the recent Gallup Millennium Survey of Religious Attitudes conducted just a couple of years ago, more than half of all Scandinavians said that God did not matter to them at all. This, it seems to me, makes the claim to a fundamental Christian inheritance not only implausible but downright bogus in Europe. The reality is that Europeans inhabit a post-Christian society that is economically, demographically, but, in my view, above all culturally a decadent society.
They cannot, though they will try, resist forever the migration that must inevitably occur from south and from east. They will try. Indeed, they try even now to resist the migration that really ought legally to be permissible from the new member states to the old member states after May the 1st. Even that has become contentious. Increasingly, European politics is dominated by a kind of dance of death as politicians and voters try desperately and vainly to prop up the moribund welfare states of the post-Second World War era, but above all to prop up what little remains of their traditional cultures.
I understand Samuel Huntington is worried that Mexican culture is taking a firm root in this country and shows no sign of being dissolved into the traditional American melting pot. I read an alarmist article by him in Foreign Policy this week. Well, I have good news for him. Long before the mariachis play in Harvard Yard, long before that, there will be minarets, as Gibbon foretold, in Oxford. Indeed, ladies and gentlemen, there already is one. The Center for Islamic Studies is currently building in my old university a new center for Islamic studies. And I quote, "Along the lines of a traditional Oxford college around a central cloistered quadrangle, the building will feature a prayer hall with traditional dome and minaret tower." It will open next year. I wonder what Gibbon would have said.
Thank you very much.
Posted: Thursday, March 4, 2004
Well, thank you very much indeed, Chris, and thank you also to Lynde and Harry Bradley, whose generosity makes this series of lectures possible. And thank you also for turning off your cell phones.
I want to speak this evening about what may seem a rather dramatic subject--the end of Europe, by which I don't mean its disappearance from the map, but a fundamental transformation in the political and economic institutions of the European Union.
In order to illustrate my argument, I want to take you back very far in time. In fact, I want to take you back to the year 732. In Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, in Chapter 52, Part 2, he describes what might have happened if the Muslim that had invaded across the Straits of Gibraltar and invaded Spain and then France in the year 711 had won what became known in the West as the Battle of Poitiers. So let me quote Gibbon, that much greater Oxford historian.
"A victorious line of march had been prolonged above 1,000 miles from the Rock of Gibraltar to the banks of the Loire. The repetition of an equal space would have carried the Saracens to the confines of Poland and the highlands of Scotland. The Rhine is not more impassable than the Nile or the Euphrates, and the Arabian fleet might have sailed without a naval combat into the mouth of the Thames. Perhaps"--and here is the quintessential Gibbon--"perhaps the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford and our pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Mohammad."
Some of you who know my work on empire may have anticipated that this evening I would talk about empire. Indeed, American empire is the subject of my forthcoming book. But I thought we'd done empire last year in this very room. And so what I want to talk about what instead is a different notion. It's a little neologism of my own. It's "impire," with an "i". It's about what happens when a political entity, instead of expanding outwards towards its periphery exporting power, implodes, when the energies come from outside into that entity.
And I want to try and suggest to you that the face of Europe today and in the coming decades was unwittingly, or perhaps presciently, foreseen by Gibbon in that characteristically ironical passage. I want to try to suggest to you that the end of Europe is not merely an economic phenomenon but will in fact prove to be a cultural phenomenon. Europe will turn out to be not an empire in the sense that I think the United States is today--that is to say, an expansive geopolitical entity--not a rival or a competitor or even a counterweight to the United States, but almost its antithesis, something that is drawing political energies into it, that is perhaps even being colonized by exogenous forces.
So that's my argument.
I think it's fair to say that Americans, if I dare to generalize, regard the European Union as a relatively serious entity. I think they see it as economically comparable, at least in scale, with the United States, with, after all, a combined gross domestic product that, by some measures at least, is very nearly equal to that of the United States. Indeed, given exchange rate movements at the moment, I suspect that when they work out the combined GDP of the EU for 2004 and compare it with that of the United States, it may come out slightly higher, even in current dollar terms. Americans see a strong European currency, belying the predictions of "Cassandras" that the euro would fail. They see, if they look closely, evidence that, at least by some measures, West European productivity is not far behind that of the United States. They see, perhaps above all, an equal in trade negotiations.
Nor is it only as an economic counterweight that Americans take Europe seriously. In simple demographic terms, the European Union is a larger entity than the United States and will be larger still with the accession of May the 1st of this year of 10 new countries. With its population of 450 million people, the Europe of 25 will be one and a half times larger than the United States.
Americans also detect in Europe a cultural challenge, perhaps even a cultural rival. It's not just that, like my sparring partner from last year, Robert Kagan, they detect in Europeans a kind of Venusian aversion to the exercise of military power as compared with the Martian--or marshall--American preference for the use of force, they also see profoundly different attitudes towards, for example, the welfare state. And they detect--and I think with some reason--a certain hostility to the United States that has perhaps become more averse in the last few years than it was before.
Americans also see a political process, a constitutional process going on in Europe, which, at least for a time last year, seemed to suggest the emergence of a genuine federal United States of Europe. And although that constitution has been put on the back burner, the draft treaty for a European constitution--to give it its proper name--is not, ladies and gentlemen, by any means a dead letter. Those who look closely at the way the European Union works will recognize that, at least in legal terms, it already is a federal system in the American sense, that the European Court is in ever sense the equal of the Supreme Court in the United States. It is the highest legal instance in Europe.
And then, if one looks at the small print of the draft constitution, one sees ways in which the central federal institutions, or quasi-federal institutions of the EU are gaining in power. Were that draft treaty to be implemented, then the rules of qualified majority voting, which allow countries to have rules imposed upon them by a majority, these rules would be extended to cover many more areas of European policy.
And in diplomatic terms, too. Who could mistake the reality that at least some European powers, perhaps traditional great powers of Western Europe, can exercise at least a kind of disruptive influence on American power? The world is not really unipolar so long as the European Union enjoys the unique distinction of having two members on the United Nations Security Council who are permanent members.
There are other respects in which I think Americans should take Europe seriously in the international sphere, and they're often underestimated. Europeans contribute a great deal more, and have contributed a great deal more, in terms of official aid to developing countries in recent years. They've contributed substantially more to peacekeeping missions organized by the United Nations. My future colleague Joe Nye at Harvard talks about soft power, and detects a certain decline in the soft power of the United States. He might equally well, it seems to me, argue that the soft power of the European Union has been growing steadily and that as the world--if the Pew Global Attitude Survey is anything to go by--becomes hostile to the United States, so, subtly and implicitly, it becomes more friendly to the European Union.
So whether you read Robert Kagan or the very different work that's been produced by scholars like Sam Huntington, John Mearsheimer, Charles Kutchen, it's clear that serious American thinkers take the European Union very seriously indeed. But what I want to do this evening is to suggest to you that they should not take it so seriously, that in fact the European Union, in all of these respects that I have just listed, is actually flattered by such comparisons.
On the contrary, when we look closely at the way in which the European Union is evolving and try to set its evolution in some kind of historical perspective, I believe it becomes apparent that, far from approaching a kind of parity with the United States, whether in economic and cultural and political or in international terms, in reality the European Union is an entity on the brink of decline and even of dissolution.
Now, for the avoidance of doubt, I'm not saying that the European Union will disappear as an institution in our lifetimes. Institutions, in Europe particularly, tend not to disappear. They just decline in their power. Like, for example, today's Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development--once the prototype of a far larger post-Marshall Aid Europe, today a harmless agency for gathering data and producing economic reports. And ladies and gentlemen, Europe is littered with such agencies, which once embodied grandiose plans--think, for example, of the Bank for International Settlements, the International Labor Organization. There's scarcely a European capital without the relic of some past plan for great greater European integration.
My suggestion is not that the European Union will vanish, but simply that its institutions are in danger of atrophying and that it, too, may one day be no more than a humble data-gathering agency with expensive but impotent offices in the City of Brussels and elsewhere.
Let me try to illustrate to you why I think this is. There are really three parts to my argument, one of which is quite obvious and I will deal with as swiftly as possible. And that is, essentially, to point out why so many of these apparent signs of rapid integration, of approaching parity with the United States are false signs.
The second and more interesting part of the argument is to do with a fundamental historical insight into the way that the European Union or, to be precise, the process of European integration, has always functioned from its very inception until the present. I want to draw on the work of recent scholars, not all of which will be known to you, to suggest that there is a key to understanding the process of European integration, and that key can be summed up in a single phrase: German gravy.
Finally, having bored you near to unconsciousness with economics, I will soar away from such dry matter and offer a third cultural argument to the effect that Europe may not only experience a kind of institutional decline, but that its very culture is in itself authentically, and in the true sense of the word, decadent. So my conclusion will be as much cultural as economic.
First, the economics. In every year of the last decade but one--that was 2001--the economy of the United States has grown in real terms faster than that of the European Union. In every year of the last eight years but one, productivity has grown faster in the United States than in Europe. If you look at the average of unemployment--and these are the standardized measures of unemployment that the OECD uses--you can see that on average over the last decade unemployment in the European Union has been nearly double what it has been in the United States.
Why is this? I think there are two ways of explaining European economic under-performance in the past decade. One of them is that the labor market and indeed markets generally are more rigid, are less flexible than those of the United States. Another of them is simply that the monetary policy of the European Central Bank has been somewhat inept, or at least somewhat unbalanced, in the way that it has treated the different members of the euro zone. The key points about economic under-performance in Europe is that it is principally, or at least predominantly, a German story.
It is richly ironic that only 20 years ago scholars were warning that Germany was going to supersede the United States itself as one of the great economic powers, along, of course, with Japan in the world. In truth, those of us who were living in Germany in the 1980s could see an impending economic crisis in that country, a crisis that German reunification temporarily postponed in an orgy of deficit finance and government contracts.
Now we see the reality. There is a profound problem in the German economy that would be there whether the Bundesbank was still in charge of monetary policy in that country or not. The problem is worsened by the fact that, under the ECB, interest rates in Germany are probably around 100 basis points higher than they should be. And given that the German economy is roughly a third of the economy of the euro zone, an unhealthy Germany is an unhealthy European economy.
I want to add a little footnote to this story. If you look closely at man-hour statistics, the productivity of, say, a Frenchman in a single hour compared with his American counterpart, there is in fact nothing to choose between them. As a worker, a Frenchman is just as efficient as an American. It's less true, but comparable, in the case of a German worker. One of the biggest differences, in fact, in economic terms between Western Europe--and its true in some measure of Eastern Europe, but principally between Western Europe and the United States, has been a divergence in working hours. In the past decade or so, Americans have steadily worked more hours per year. In fact, according to figures from the OECD, the average American in employment works nearly 2,000 hours a year--and hours a year are a good measure to see just how much work people are doing. The average German, ladies and gentlemen, works fully 22 percent less of the year. And the figures are actually larger if you consider, for example, the Dutch. Between 1979 and the present, the length of the working year grew in the United States. Or, if you want to put it in more conventional terms, the vacation shrank.
Precisely the opposite happened in Europe. In Europe, working hours diminished, vacations grew Labor participation also diminished. Fewer and fewer of the population actually entered the labor market altogether. And that in many ways explains that differential in GDP growth rates as well as anything I could suggest to you. And it's a little hint of what I'm going to say in a minute, that this, I think, is more than just an economic phenomenon. In some ways it is a symptom of that cultural malaise in Europe that I want to see as a critical part of the end of Europe.
To put it very crudely and to hint at what I'm going to say later, it is the work ethic itself. Whether you call it a Protestant work ethic or simply a work ethic, it is that which seems to be most obviously in decline. And it is, I think, noteworthy that the decline in working hours is most pronounced in what were once distinctly Protestant countries of northwestern Europe. Once.
I would, if time permitted, talk some more about the economic and political implications of European enlargement. I would, if time permitted, like to suggest to you that the acquisition of 10 new states, most of them in Central and Central Eastern Europe, does not necessarily portend great advantages either for those new member states or for the older member states of Western Europe. Let me merely point out that one respect in which Central European economies have coped with their relatively lower productivity compared with Western Europe since the ending of communist rule in those countries nearly 15 years ago has been by working longer hours. In fact, the Czechs are among the very few people in the world today who work more hours per year than the Americans.
My question, and it is a rhetorical one, though it may invite further comment--not least from my good friend Radek Sikorski, a greater expert in these matters than I can ever claim to be--but my question is, really, whether East Europeans who have discovered the benefits of economic liberty since the fall of the Berlin Wall may not find that liberty circumscribed by the mass of regulations and rules that emanate daily from Brussels.
I could also talk about the extent to which, despite the appearance of a greater European cultural identity, in reality, a certain fragmentation of European culture is still very evident in the many euro-barometer polls that have been conducted over the past years. It's clear that a sense of Europeanness, far from growing at the expense of national identity, has, if anything, suffered something of a decline in recent years.
I could, if time permitted, dwell on why it is that the draft constitution for a European treaty has been grounded, or beached, perhaps even sunk by recent political events in Europe. Some of you will be familiar with these stories; others will be indifferent to them. I would rather proceed at speed to the second part of my argument.
In other words, the conventional points that suggest an approaching European parity with the United States, be they economic, cultural, or political, are points which are at best arguable and, in my view, largely false.
But now let me broaden my argument. Let me introduce a certain historical perspective. I'm not, as anybody who has read the book Virtual History will know, an economic determinist or any kind of determinist. I do not, in fact, regard economics as in some sense the driving force of human history. But there are exceptions to that rule. There are certain processes which are primarily economic in their character. And I think it's true to say that European integration is one of those processes.
There's been some very good work on the history of European integration done recently. It hasn't been, I think, widely enough understood or received. Perhaps the most interesting work has been produced by the venerable British historian Alan Millwood, but it's also been complemented by the young Harvard historian Andrew Muravchik. Between them, working independently, they've arrived at a new interpretation--and I think it deserves to be called a new interpretation--of why European integration happened at all after the Second World War.
Instead of the conventional view that a few saintly figures, like Jean Monnet, realized a vision of European integration to prevent the recurrence of war in Europe and generally make everybody happier and better off, they argue that what happened, beginning with the negotiations that produced the European coal and steel community, the nation states of Western Europe, beginning with the six that produced the ECSC--the coal and steel community--made very limited concessions of sovereignty in the pursuit of the national economic interest; and, to be quite specific, in pursuit of the interests of well represented economic groups within their societies, principally heavy industry and small agriculture.
If one understands the process of European integration in these terms--essentially an economically driven set of deals between still largely sovereign nation states--one thing becomes abundantly clear. And that is, ladies and gentlemen, from the very outset this process relied on what I rather crudely called a moment ago "German gravy." It was the Germans who, from the very word go, were prepared to subsidize the other parties in the process of European integration.
To give you just one example: The fundamental bottom line of the coal and steel community was that German taxpayers would prop up the inefficient coal mines of Belgium at the cost of hundreds of thousands of marks. In the same way, it was German taxpayers who paid the development aid to the French colonial empire, aid that was an integral part of the Treaty of Rome. It's often forgotten that where the British saw a choice between empire and Europe, and dithered and hesitated about that choice, the French did what I always do whenever I see a choice. They said, We'll have both, please.
Not only did the French seek to retain their African empire and what was left of their Asian empire within the structures of the emerging European community, but, with a brilliant stroke of diplomacy, they insisted that the other members, the other five members that signed the Treaty of Rome should subsidize their own colonies. And so it was that, in an extraordinary deal that was done in 1956-57, Conrad Adenauer agreed to payments to French colonies that came very largely from German taxpayers. A common agricultural policy, which became the single largest item in the budget of the European community, was from its very inception underwritten by net contributions from German taxpayers. That was how it worked.
If you add up all the--to use the technical term--unrequited transfers that Germany has paid through the European budget since its inception, one of the most striking facts that I can offer you is that the total exceeds the amount that Germany was asked to pay in reparations after the First World War. It is more than 132 billion marks, the sum that the Germans in the 1920s insisted would bankrupt them if they paid it. Well, they paid it. They paid it not as reparations, but as net contributions to the European budget.
And that, I think, explains one of the more striking findings of recent European survey data. Euro-barometer surveys show that there's a real discrepancy between what people think about the European Union relative, as it were, to the general good and what they think about the European Union relative to their own national good. And it's an almost perfect correlation. Countries that are net gainers, net recipients from the European budget think that the European Union is quite good, but they think it's even better for their own country. Countries which are net donors to the European budget--and that principally means Germany, but also in some measure Britain--think that the European Union is okay for their country but is obviously very good generally.
And this, it seems to me, takes us to the very heart of the political economy of European integration Let me tell you some simple percentages about the way the European Union works, to illuminate the fundamental imbalance between representation and taxation which is at the heart of the story of European integration.
Today, Germany accounts for around a quarter, a little under a quarter, of the combined gross domestic product of the entire European Union. It accounts for just over a fifth, 22 percent, of its population. It accounts for 16 percent of the seats in the European Parliament; around about 11 percent of votes on the Council of Ministers, though that process of voting is, of course, under a process of reform. In fact, if the draft treaty isn't enacted after enlargement, Germany's share of votes in the Council of Ministers will fall to 8 percent. But if you look at net contributions to the European budget in the years 1995 to 2001, Germany contributed 67 percent.
So you get between 8 and 11 percent of the decisive votes in the Council of Ministers, that is, the key decision making body of the European Union, but you--by which I mean "you" as Germany--contribute two-thirds towards the combined budget.
Now, that's all very well, ladies and gentlemen, if Germany is the fastest growing economy in Europe. But as I've already pointed out to you, it is today the slowest growing economy in Europe. It is, in fact, the sick man of Europe. And although the German economy is very large, it is far from clear why, when it has not grown at all in the past six quarters, why the German economy should continue to subsidize the economies of the smaller, poorer countries of Southern and now also Central Europe.
My estimation, ladies and gentlemen, is that the train is still running, but there ain't no gravy anymore. And as that reality gradually dawns, the process of European integration, which I believe has depended from its very inception on German gravy, is bound to come to a halt. Who, after all--who is going to pay for those, and I quote, "maximum enlargement-related commitments," to the 10 new member states which have been capped at 40 billion euros? The general assumption appears still to be that the German taxpayer will pay that money. I see no reason whatsoever why that should be the case.
But ladies and gentlemen, I didn't come here this evening to make a purely economic argument. What I've said I think is in fact a sufficient argument to explain the end of the process of European integration as we have known it up until this point. But I have one last argument to make that is not, in the end, an economic argument at all.
The fundamental problem that Europe faces, more serious than anything I've mentioned so far, is senescence. It's a problem that we all face as individuals to varying degrees, but from society to society the problem of senescence, of growing old, varies hugely. In the year 2050, which is less remote than it may at first sound, current projections by the United Nations suggest that the median age of the European Union countries, the EU 15, will rise from 38 to 49--a Europe of 49-year-olds. It will rise in the United States, too. I wish I had time to tell you about the problems that you are going to face, because then it would stop you feeling the complacency that you may have begun to feel this evening.
The situation in the United States is not great at all in this respect, but it is--and I believe this is the most one can say--better than the situation of the European Union. The German population will in fact decline--absolutely, not in relative terms--absolutely, from 82 to 67 million. Falling populations will be a characteristic feature of the hitherto dominant societies of Western Europe. An increase in retirement ages will not help. It is not the answer. It would not suffice to alter the problems that will beset the social security systems of Western Europe. The implicit liabilities of the German social security system at the moment are currently around about 270 percent of German GDP. There are problems with the social security and Medicare systems in this country--very serious problems indeed; I've written about that. But the problems in Europe are much worse, and they will bite politically much sooner.
There is only one way out for this continent, and that is immigration. There is an obvious source of youthful workers who aspire to nothing more than a better standard of living all around Europe. All around Europe there are countries whose birth rate is more than twice the European average, significantly more than double it. The trouble is that nearly all these countries are predominantly Muslim countries. Not only that, but there is, right next door to the European Union, in fact between the European Union and Iraq, a country which now has a very plausible claim to European Union membership. And that country is Turkey.
Turkey's per capita income is in fact, by some measures, higher than that of Hungary, Latvia, and Lithuania, all of which are about to enter the European Union--certainly higher than those Balkan economies that hope to be in the next, or next but one, wave. The arguments against Turkish membership--and the Turks have been pressing for some form of membership since the 1980s--are getting weaker and weaker. And you know the only one that is left? And it's one most often heard among German conservatives, but occasionally it slips out of a French mouth, too--that argument is a cultural argument. The argument is that fundamentally Europe is a Christian entity. Its cultural roots are different from those of Ottoman Turkey. That Europe is in a sense a latter day secular version of Christendom.
Ladies and gentlemen, I only wish that were true. The reality is--and it is perhaps the most striking cultural phenomenon of our times--that Western and Eastern Europe are no longer in any meaningful sense Christian societies. They are quite clearly post-Christian--indeed, in many respects, post-religious--societies. In the Netherlands, Britain, Germany, Sweden, and Denmark, less than 1 in 10 of the population attends church even once a month. A clear majority do not attend church at all. There are now more Muslims in Britain, indeed in England, than Anglican communicants. More Muslims attend mosque weekly than Anglicans attend church.
In the recent Gallup Millennium Survey of Religious Attitudes conducted just a couple of years ago, more than half of all Scandinavians said that God did not matter to them at all. This, it seems to me, makes the claim to a fundamental Christian inheritance not only implausible but downright bogus in Europe. The reality is that Europeans inhabit a post-Christian society that is economically, demographically, but, in my view, above all culturally a decadent society.
They cannot, though they will try, resist forever the migration that must inevitably occur from south and from east. They will try. Indeed, they try even now to resist the migration that really ought legally to be permissible from the new member states to the old member states after May the 1st. Even that has become contentious. Increasingly, European politics is dominated by a kind of dance of death as politicians and voters try desperately and vainly to prop up the moribund welfare states of the post-Second World War era, but above all to prop up what little remains of their traditional cultures.
I understand Samuel Huntington is worried that Mexican culture is taking a firm root in this country and shows no sign of being dissolved into the traditional American melting pot. I read an alarmist article by him in Foreign Policy this week. Well, I have good news for him. Long before the mariachis play in Harvard Yard, long before that, there will be minarets, as Gibbon foretold, in Oxford. Indeed, ladies and gentlemen, there already is one. The Center for Islamic Studies is currently building in my old university a new center for Islamic studies. And I quote, "Along the lines of a traditional Oxford college around a central cloistered quadrangle, the building will feature a prayer hall with traditional dome and minaret tower." It will open next year. I wonder what Gibbon would have said.
Thank you very much.
The End of Europe?
By Niall Ferguson
Posted: Thursday, March 4, 2004
Well, thank you very much indeed, Chris, and thank you also to Lynde and Harry Bradley, whose generosity makes this series of lectures possible. And thank you also for turning off your cell phones.
I want to speak this evening about what may seem a rather dramatic subject--the end of Europe, by which I don't mean its disappearance from the map, but a fundamental transformation in the political and economic institutions of the European Union.
In order to illustrate my argument, I want to take you back very far in time. In fact, I want to take you back to the year 732. In Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, in Chapter 52, Part 2, he describes what might have happened if the Muslim that had invaded across the Straits of Gibraltar and invaded Spain and then France in the year 711 had won what became known in the West as the Battle of Poitiers. So let me quote Gibbon, that much greater Oxford historian.
"A victorious line of march had been prolonged above 1,000 miles from the Rock of Gibraltar to the banks of the Loire. The repetition of an equal space would have carried the Saracens to the confines of Poland and the highlands of Scotland. The Rhine is not more impassable than the Nile or the Euphrates, and the Arabian fleet might have sailed without a naval combat into the mouth of the Thames. Perhaps"--and here is the quintessential Gibbon--"perhaps the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford and our pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Mohammad."
Some of you who know my work on empire may have anticipated that this evening I would talk about empire. Indeed, American empire is the subject of my forthcoming book. But I thought we'd done empire last year in this very room. And so what I want to talk about what instead is a different notion. It's a little neologism of my own. It's "impire," with an "i". It's about what happens when a political entity, instead of expanding outwards towards its periphery exporting power, implodes, when the energies come from outside into that entity.
And I want to try and suggest to you that the face of Europe today and in the coming decades was unwittingly, or perhaps presciently, foreseen by Gibbon in that characteristically ironical passage. I want to try to suggest to you that the end of Europe is not merely an economic phenomenon but will in fact prove to be a cultural phenomenon. Europe will turn out to be not an empire in the sense that I think the United States is today--that is to say, an expansive geopolitical entity--not a rival or a competitor or even a counterweight to the United States, but almost its antithesis, something that is drawing political energies into it, that is perhaps even being colonized by exogenous forces.
So that's my argument.
I think it's fair to say that Americans, if I dare to generalize, regard the European Union as a relatively serious entity. I think they see it as economically comparable, at least in scale, with the United States, with, after all, a combined gross domestic product that, by some measures at least, is very nearly equal to that of the United States. Indeed, given exchange rate movements at the moment, I suspect that when they work out the combined GDP of the EU for 2004 and compare it with that of the United States, it may come out slightly higher, even in current dollar terms. Americans see a strong European currency, belying the predictions of "Cassandras" that the euro would fail. They see, if they look closely, evidence that, at least by some measures, West European productivity is not far behind that of the United States. They see, perhaps above all, an equal in trade negotiations.
Nor is it only as an economic counterweight that Americans take Europe seriously. In simple demographic terms, the European Union is a larger entity than the United States and will be larger still with the accession of May the 1st of this year of 10 new countries. With its population of 450 million people, the Europe of 25 will be one and a half times larger than the United States.
Americans also detect in Europe a cultural challenge, perhaps even a cultural rival. It's not just that, like my sparring partner from last year, Robert Kagan, they detect in Europeans a kind of Venusian aversion to the exercise of military power as compared with the Martian--or marshall--American preference for the use of force, they also see profoundly different attitudes towards, for example, the welfare state. And they detect--and I think with some reason--a certain hostility to the United States that has perhaps become more averse in the last few years than it was before.
Americans also see a political process, a constitutional process going on in Europe, which, at least for a time last year, seemed to suggest the emergence of a genuine federal United States of Europe. And although that constitution has been put on the back burner, the draft treaty for a European constitution--to give it its proper name--is not, ladies and gentlemen, by any means a dead letter. Those who look closely at the way the European Union works will recognize that, at least in legal terms, it already is a federal system in the American sense, that the European Court is in ever sense the equal of the Supreme Court in the United States. It is the highest legal instance in Europe.
And then, if one looks at the small print of the draft constitution, one sees ways in which the central federal institutions, or quasi-federal institutions of the EU are gaining in power. Were that draft treaty to be implemented, then the rules of qualified majority voting, which allow countries to have rules imposed upon them by a majority, these rules would be extended to cover many more areas of European policy.
And in diplomatic terms, too. Who could mistake the reality that at least some European powers, perhaps traditional great powers of Western Europe, can exercise at least a kind of disruptive influence on American power? The world is not really unipolar so long as the European Union enjoys the unique distinction of having two members on the United Nations Security Council who are permanent members.
There are other respects in which I think Americans should take Europe seriously in the international sphere, and they're often underestimated. Europeans contribute a great deal more, and have contributed a great deal more, in terms of official aid to developing countries in recent years. They've contributed substantially more to peacekeeping missions organized by the United Nations. My future colleague Joe Nye at Harvard talks about soft power, and detects a certain decline in the soft power of the United States. He might equally well, it seems to me, argue that the soft power of the European Union has been growing steadily and that as the world--if the Pew Global Attitude Survey is anything to go by--becomes hostile to the United States, so, subtly and implicitly, it becomes more friendly to the European Union.
So whether you read Robert Kagan or the very different work that's been produced by scholars like Sam Huntington, John Mearsheimer, Charles Kutchen, it's clear that serious American thinkers take the European Union very seriously indeed. But what I want to do this evening is to suggest to you that they should not take it so seriously, that in fact the European Union, in all of these respects that I have just listed, is actually flattered by such comparisons.
On the contrary, when we look closely at the way in which the European Union is evolving and try to set its evolution in some kind of historical perspective, I believe it becomes apparent that, far from approaching a kind of parity with the United States, whether in economic and cultural and political or in international terms, in reality the European Union is an entity on the brink of decline and even of dissolution.
Now, for the avoidance of doubt, I'm not saying that the European Union will disappear as an institution in our lifetimes. Institutions, in Europe particularly, tend not to disappear. They just decline in their power. Like, for example, today's Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development--once the prototype of a far larger post-Marshall Aid Europe, today a harmless agency for gathering data and producing economic reports. And ladies and gentlemen, Europe is littered with such agencies, which once embodied grandiose plans--think, for example, of the Bank for International Settlements, the International Labor Organization. There's scarcely a European capital without the relic of some past plan for great greater European integration.
My suggestion is not that the European Union will vanish, but simply that its institutions are in danger of atrophying and that it, too, may one day be no more than a humble data-gathering agency with expensive but impotent offices in the City of Brussels and elsewhere.
Let me try to illustrate to you why I think this is. There are really three parts to my argument, one of which is quite obvious and I will deal with as swiftly as possible. And that is, essentially, to point out why so many of these apparent signs of rapid integration, of approaching parity with the United States are false signs.
The second and more interesting part of the argument is to do with a fundamental historical insight into the way that the European Union or, to be precise, the process of European integration, has always functioned from its very inception until the present. I want to draw on the work of recent scholars, not all of which will be known to you, to suggest that there is a key to understanding the process of European integration, and that key can be summed up in a single phrase: German gravy.
Finally, having bored you near to unconsciousness with economics, I will soar away from such dry matter and offer a third cultural argument to the effect that Europe may not only experience a kind of institutional decline, but that its very culture is in itself authentically, and in the true sense of the word, decadent. So my conclusion will be as much cultural as economic.
First, the economics. In every year of the last decade but one--that was 2001--the economy of the United States has grown in real terms faster than that of the European Union. In every year of the last eight years but one, productivity has grown faster in the United States than in Europe. If you look at the average of unemployment--and these are the standardized measures of unemployment that the OECD uses--you can see that on average over the last decade unemployment in the European Union has been nearly double what it has been in the United States.
Why is this? I think there are two ways of explaining European economic under-performance in the past decade. One of them is that the labor market and indeed markets generally are more rigid, are less flexible than those of the United States. Another of them is simply that the monetary policy of the European Central Bank has been somewhat inept, or at least somewhat unbalanced, in the way that it has treated the different members of the euro zone. The key points about economic under-performance in Europe is that it is principally, or at least predominantly, a German story.
It is richly ironic that only 20 years ago scholars were warning that Germany was going to supersede the United States itself as one of the great economic powers, along, of course, with Japan in the world. In truth, those of us who were living in Germany in the 1980s could see an impending economic crisis in that country, a crisis that German reunification temporarily postponed in an orgy of deficit finance and government contracts.
Now we see the reality. There is a profound problem in the German economy that would be there whether the Bundesbank was still in charge of monetary policy in that country or not. The problem is worsened by the fact that, under the ECB, interest rates in Germany are probably around 100 basis points higher than they should be. And given that the German economy is roughly a third of the economy of the euro zone, an unhealthy Germany is an unhealthy European economy.
I want to add a little footnote to this story. If you look closely at man-hour statistics, the productivity of, say, a Frenchman in a single hour compared with his American counterpart, there is in fact nothing to choose between them. As a worker, a Frenchman is just as efficient as an American. It's less true, but comparable, in the case of a German worker. One of the biggest differences, in fact, in economic terms between Western Europe--and its true in some measure of Eastern Europe, but principally between Western Europe and the United States, has been a divergence in working hours. In the past decade or so, Americans have steadily worked more hours per year. In fact, according to figures from the OECD, the average American in employment works nearly 2,000 hours a year--and hours a year are a good measure to see just how much work people are doing. The average German, ladies and gentlemen, works fully 22 percent less of the year. And the figures are actually larger if you consider, for example, the Dutch. Between 1979 and the present, the length of the working year grew in the United States. Or, if you want to put it in more conventional terms, the vacation shrank.
Precisely the opposite happened in Europe. In Europe, working hours diminished, vacations grew Labor participation also diminished. Fewer and fewer of the population actually entered the labor market altogether. And that in many ways explains that differential in GDP growth rates as well as anything I could suggest to you. And it's a little hint of what I'm going to say in a minute, that this, I think, is more than just an economic phenomenon. In some ways it is a symptom of that cultural malaise in Europe that I want to see as a critical part of the end of Europe.
To put it very crudely and to hint at what I'm going to say later, it is the work ethic itself. Whether you call it a Protestant work ethic or simply a work ethic, it is that which seems to be most obviously in decline. And it is, I think, noteworthy that the decline in working hours is most pronounced in what were once distinctly Protestant countries of northwestern Europe. Once.
I would, if time permitted, talk some more about the economic and political implications of European enlargement. I would, if time permitted, like to suggest to you that the acquisition of 10 new states, most of them in Central and Central Eastern Europe, does not necessarily portend great advantages either for those new member states or for the older member states of Western Europe. Let me merely point out that one respect in which Central European economies have coped with their relatively lower productivity compared with Western Europe since the ending of communist rule in those countries nearly 15 years ago has been by working longer hours. In fact, the Czechs are among the very few people in the world today who work more hours per year than the Americans.
My question, and it is a rhetorical one, though it may invite further comment--not least from my good friend Radek Sikorski, a greater expert in these matters than I can ever claim to be--but my question is, really, whether East Europeans who have discovered the benefits of economic liberty since the fall of the Berlin Wall may not find that liberty circumscribed by the mass of regulations and rules that emanate daily from Brussels.
I could also talk about the extent to which, despite the appearance of a greater European cultural identity, in reality, a certain fragmentation of European culture is still very evident in the many euro-barometer polls that have been conducted over the past years. It's clear that a sense of Europeanness, far from growing at the expense of national identity, has, if anything, suffered something of a decline in recent years.
I could, if time permitted, dwell on why it is that the draft constitution for a European treaty has been grounded, or beached, perhaps even sunk by recent political events in Europe. Some of you will be familiar with these stories; others will be indifferent to them. I would rather proceed at speed to the second part of my argument.
In other words, the conventional points that suggest an approaching European parity with the United States, be they economic, cultural, or political, are points which are at best arguable and, in my view, largely false.
But now let me broaden my argument. Let me introduce a certain historical perspective. I'm not, as anybody who has read the book Virtual History will know, an economic determinist or any kind of determinist. I do not, in fact, regard economics as in some sense the driving force of human history. But there are exceptions to that rule. There are certain processes which are primarily economic in their character. And I think it's true to say that European integration is one of those processes.
There's been some very good work on the history of European integration done recently. It hasn't been, I think, widely enough understood or received. Perhaps the most interesting work has been produced by the venerable British historian Alan Millwood, but it's also been complemented by the young Harvard historian Andrew Muravchik. Between them, working independently, they've arrived at a new interpretation--and I think it deserves to be called a new interpretation--of why European integration happened at all after the Second World War.
Instead of the conventional view that a few saintly figures, like Jean Monnet, realized a vision of European integration to prevent the recurrence of war in Europe and generally make everybody happier and better off, they argue that what happened, beginning with the negotiations that produced the European coal and steel community, the nation states of Western Europe, beginning with the six that produced the ECSC--the coal and steel community--made very limited concessions of sovereignty in the pursuit of the national economic interest; and, to be quite specific, in pursuit of the interests of well represented economic groups within their societies, principally heavy industry and small agriculture.
If one understands the process of European integration in these terms--essentially an economically driven set of deals between still largely sovereign nation states--one thing becomes abundantly clear. And that is, ladies and gentlemen, from the very outset this process relied on what I rather crudely called a moment ago "German gravy." It was the Germans who, from the very word go, were prepared to subsidize the other parties in the process of European integration.
To give you just one example: The fundamental bottom line of the coal and steel community was that German taxpayers would prop up the inefficient coal mines of Belgium at the cost of hundreds of thousands of marks. In the same way, it was German taxpayers who paid the development aid to the French colonial empire, aid that was an integral part of the Treaty of Rome. It's often forgotten that where the British saw a choice between empire and Europe, and dithered and hesitated about that choice, the French did what I always do whenever I see a choice. They said, We'll have both, please.
Not only did the French seek to retain their African empire and what was left of their Asian empire within the structures of the emerging European community, but, with a brilliant stroke of diplomacy, they insisted that the other members, the other five members that signed the Treaty of Rome should subsidize their own colonies. And so it was that, in an extraordinary deal that was done in 1956-57, Conrad Adenauer agreed to payments to French colonies that came very largely from German taxpayers. A common agricultural policy, which became the single largest item in the budget of the European community, was from its very inception underwritten by net contributions from German taxpayers. That was how it worked.
If you add up all the--to use the technical term--unrequited transfers that Germany has paid through the European budget since its inception, one of the most striking facts that I can offer you is that the total exceeds the amount that Germany was asked to pay in reparations after the First World War. It is more than 132 billion marks, the sum that the Germans in the 1920s insisted would bankrupt them if they paid it. Well, they paid it. They paid it not as reparations, but as net contributions to the European budget.
And that, I think, explains one of the more striking findings of recent European survey data. Euro-barometer surveys show that there's a real discrepancy between what people think about the European Union relative, as it were, to the general good and what they think about the European Union relative to their own national good. And it's an almost perfect correlation. Countries that are net gainers, net recipients from the European budget think that the European Union is quite good, but they think it's even better for their own country. Countries which are net donors to the European budget--and that principally means Germany, but also in some measure Britain--think that the European Union is okay for their country but is obviously very good generally.
And this, it seems to me, takes us to the very heart of the political economy of European integration Let me tell you some simple percentages about the way the European Union works, to illuminate the fundamental imbalance between representation and taxation which is at the heart of the story of European integration.
Today, Germany accounts for around a quarter, a little under a quarter, of the combined gross domestic product of the entire European Union. It accounts for just over a fifth, 22 percent, of its population. It accounts for 16 percent of the seats in the European Parliament; around about 11 percent of votes on the Council of Ministers, though that process of voting is, of course, under a process of reform. In fact, if the draft treaty isn't enacted after enlargement, Germany's share of votes in the Council of Ministers will fall to 8 percent. But if you look at net contributions to the European budget in the years 1995 to 2001, Germany contributed 67 percent.
So you get between 8 and 11 percent of the decisive votes in the Council of Ministers, that is, the key decision making body of the European Union, but you--by which I mean "you" as Germany--contribute two-thirds towards the combined budget.
Now, that's all very well, ladies and gentlemen, if Germany is the fastest growing economy in Europe. But as I've already pointed out to you, it is today the slowest growing economy in Europe. It is, in fact, the sick man of Europe. And although the German economy is very large, it is far from clear why, when it has not grown at all in the past six quarters, why the German economy should continue to subsidize the economies of the smaller, poorer countries of Southern and now also Central Europe.
My estimation, ladies and gentlemen, is that the train is still running, but there ain't no gravy anymore. And as that reality gradually dawns, the process of European integration, which I believe has depended from its very inception on German gravy, is bound to come to a halt. Who, after all--who is going to pay for those, and I quote, "maximum enlargement-related commitments," to the 10 new member states which have been capped at 40 billion euros? The general assumption appears still to be that the German taxpayer will pay that money. I see no reason whatsoever why that should be the case.
But ladies and gentlemen, I didn't come here this evening to make a purely economic argument. What I've said I think is in fact a sufficient argument to explain the end of the process of European integration as we have known it up until this point. But I have one last argument to make that is not, in the end, an economic argument at all.
The fundamental problem that Europe faces, more serious than anything I've mentioned so far, is senescence. It's a problem that we all face as individuals to varying degrees, but from society to society the problem of senescence, of growing old, varies hugely. In the year 2050, which is less remote than it may at first sound, current projections by the United Nations suggest that the median age of the European Union countries, the EU 15, will rise from 38 to 49--a Europe of 49-year-olds. It will rise in the United States, too. I wish I had time to tell you about the problems that you are going to face, because then it would stop you feeling the complacency that you may have begun to feel this evening.
The situation in the United States is not great at all in this respect, but it is--and I believe this is the most one can say--better than the situation of the European Union. The German population will in fact decline--absolutely, not in relative terms--absolutely, from 82 to 67 million. Falling populations will be a characteristic feature of the hitherto dominant societies of Western Europe. An increase in retirement ages will not help. It is not the answer. It would not suffice to alter the problems that will beset the social security systems of Western Europe. The implicit liabilities of the German social security system at the moment are currently around about 270 percent of German GDP. There are problems with the social security and Medicare systems in this country--very serious problems indeed; I've written about that. But the problems in Europe are much worse, and they will bite politically much sooner.
There is only one way out for this continent, and that is immigration. There is an obvious source of youthful workers who aspire to nothing more than a better standard of living all around Europe. All around Europe there are countries whose birth rate is more than twice the European average, significantly more than double it. The trouble is that nearly all these countries are predominantly Muslim countries. Not only that, but there is, right next door to the European Union, in fact between the European Union and Iraq, a country which now has a very plausible claim to European Union membership. And that country is Turkey.
Turkey's per capita income is in fact, by some measures, higher than that of Hungary, Latvia, and Lithuania, all of which are about to enter the European Union--certainly higher than those Balkan economies that hope to be in the next, or next but one, wave. The arguments against Turkish membership--and the Turks have been pressing for some form of membership since the 1980s--are getting weaker and weaker. And you know the only one that is left? And it's one most often heard among German conservatives, but occasionally it slips out of a French mouth, too--that argument is a cultural argument. The argument is that fundamentally Europe is a Christian entity. Its cultural roots are different from those of Ottoman Turkey. That Europe is in a sense a latter day secular version of Christendom.
Ladies and gentlemen, I only wish that were true. The reality is--and it is perhaps the most striking cultural phenomenon of our times--that Western and Eastern Europe are no longer in any meaningful sense Christian societies. They are quite clearly post-Christian--indeed, in many respects, post-religious--societies. In the Netherlands, Britain, Germany, Sweden, and Denmark, less than 1 in 10 of the population attends church even once a month. A clear majority do not attend church at all. There are now more Muslims in Britain, indeed in England, than Anglican communicants. More Muslims attend mosque weekly than Anglicans attend church.
In the recent Gallup Millennium Survey of Religious Attitudes conducted just a couple of years ago, more than half of all Scandinavians said that God did not matter to them at all. This, it seems to me, makes the claim to a fundamental Christian inheritance not only implausible but downright bogus in Europe. The reality is that Europeans inhabit a post-Christian society that is economically, demographically, but, in my view, above all culturally a decadent society.
They cannot, though they will try, resist forever the migration that must inevitably occur from south and from east. They will try. Indeed, they try even now to resist the migration that really ought legally to be permissible from the new member states to the old member states after May the 1st. Even that has become contentious. Increasingly, European politics is dominated by a kind of dance of death as politicians and voters try desperately and vainly to prop up the moribund welfare states of the post-Second World War era, but above all to prop up what little remains of their traditional cultures.
I understand Samuel Huntington is worried that Mexican culture is taking a firm root in this country and shows no sign of being dissolved into the traditional American melting pot. I read an alarmist article by him in Foreign Policy this week. Well, I have good news for him. Long before the mariachis play in Harvard Yard, long before that, there will be minarets, as Gibbon foretold, in Oxford. Indeed, ladies and gentlemen, there already is one. The Center for Islamic Studies is currently building in my old university a new center for Islamic studies. And I quote, "Along the lines of a traditional Oxford college around a central cloistered quadrangle, the building will feature a prayer hall with traditional dome and minaret tower." It will open next year. I wonder what Gibbon would have said.
Thank you very much.
By Niall Ferguson
Posted: Thursday, March 4, 2004
Well, thank you very much indeed, Chris, and thank you also to Lynde and Harry Bradley, whose generosity makes this series of lectures possible. And thank you also for turning off your cell phones.
I want to speak this evening about what may seem a rather dramatic subject--the end of Europe, by which I don't mean its disappearance from the map, but a fundamental transformation in the political and economic institutions of the European Union.
In order to illustrate my argument, I want to take you back very far in time. In fact, I want to take you back to the year 732. In Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, in Chapter 52, Part 2, he describes what might have happened if the Muslim that had invaded across the Straits of Gibraltar and invaded Spain and then France in the year 711 had won what became known in the West as the Battle of Poitiers. So let me quote Gibbon, that much greater Oxford historian.
"A victorious line of march had been prolonged above 1,000 miles from the Rock of Gibraltar to the banks of the Loire. The repetition of an equal space would have carried the Saracens to the confines of Poland and the highlands of Scotland. The Rhine is not more impassable than the Nile or the Euphrates, and the Arabian fleet might have sailed without a naval combat into the mouth of the Thames. Perhaps"--and here is the quintessential Gibbon--"perhaps the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford and our pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Mohammad."
Some of you who know my work on empire may have anticipated that this evening I would talk about empire. Indeed, American empire is the subject of my forthcoming book. But I thought we'd done empire last year in this very room. And so what I want to talk about what instead is a different notion. It's a little neologism of my own. It's "impire," with an "i". It's about what happens when a political entity, instead of expanding outwards towards its periphery exporting power, implodes, when the energies come from outside into that entity.
And I want to try and suggest to you that the face of Europe today and in the coming decades was unwittingly, or perhaps presciently, foreseen by Gibbon in that characteristically ironical passage. I want to try to suggest to you that the end of Europe is not merely an economic phenomenon but will in fact prove to be a cultural phenomenon. Europe will turn out to be not an empire in the sense that I think the United States is today--that is to say, an expansive geopolitical entity--not a rival or a competitor or even a counterweight to the United States, but almost its antithesis, something that is drawing political energies into it, that is perhaps even being colonized by exogenous forces.
So that's my argument.
I think it's fair to say that Americans, if I dare to generalize, regard the European Union as a relatively serious entity. I think they see it as economically comparable, at least in scale, with the United States, with, after all, a combined gross domestic product that, by some measures at least, is very nearly equal to that of the United States. Indeed, given exchange rate movements at the moment, I suspect that when they work out the combined GDP of the EU for 2004 and compare it with that of the United States, it may come out slightly higher, even in current dollar terms. Americans see a strong European currency, belying the predictions of "Cassandras" that the euro would fail. They see, if they look closely, evidence that, at least by some measures, West European productivity is not far behind that of the United States. They see, perhaps above all, an equal in trade negotiations.
Nor is it only as an economic counterweight that Americans take Europe seriously. In simple demographic terms, the European Union is a larger entity than the United States and will be larger still with the accession of May the 1st of this year of 10 new countries. With its population of 450 million people, the Europe of 25 will be one and a half times larger than the United States.
Americans also detect in Europe a cultural challenge, perhaps even a cultural rival. It's not just that, like my sparring partner from last year, Robert Kagan, they detect in Europeans a kind of Venusian aversion to the exercise of military power as compared with the Martian--or marshall--American preference for the use of force, they also see profoundly different attitudes towards, for example, the welfare state. And they detect--and I think with some reason--a certain hostility to the United States that has perhaps become more averse in the last few years than it was before.
Americans also see a political process, a constitutional process going on in Europe, which, at least for a time last year, seemed to suggest the emergence of a genuine federal United States of Europe. And although that constitution has been put on the back burner, the draft treaty for a European constitution--to give it its proper name--is not, ladies and gentlemen, by any means a dead letter. Those who look closely at the way the European Union works will recognize that, at least in legal terms, it already is a federal system in the American sense, that the European Court is in ever sense the equal of the Supreme Court in the United States. It is the highest legal instance in Europe.
And then, if one looks at the small print of the draft constitution, one sees ways in which the central federal institutions, or quasi-federal institutions of the EU are gaining in power. Were that draft treaty to be implemented, then the rules of qualified majority voting, which allow countries to have rules imposed upon them by a majority, these rules would be extended to cover many more areas of European policy.
And in diplomatic terms, too. Who could mistake the reality that at least some European powers, perhaps traditional great powers of Western Europe, can exercise at least a kind of disruptive influence on American power? The world is not really unipolar so long as the European Union enjoys the unique distinction of having two members on the United Nations Security Council who are permanent members.
There are other respects in which I think Americans should take Europe seriously in the international sphere, and they're often underestimated. Europeans contribute a great deal more, and have contributed a great deal more, in terms of official aid to developing countries in recent years. They've contributed substantially more to peacekeeping missions organized by the United Nations. My future colleague Joe Nye at Harvard talks about soft power, and detects a certain decline in the soft power of the United States. He might equally well, it seems to me, argue that the soft power of the European Union has been growing steadily and that as the world--if the Pew Global Attitude Survey is anything to go by--becomes hostile to the United States, so, subtly and implicitly, it becomes more friendly to the European Union.
So whether you read Robert Kagan or the very different work that's been produced by scholars like Sam Huntington, John Mearsheimer, Charles Kutchen, it's clear that serious American thinkers take the European Union very seriously indeed. But what I want to do this evening is to suggest to you that they should not take it so seriously, that in fact the European Union, in all of these respects that I have just listed, is actually flattered by such comparisons.
On the contrary, when we look closely at the way in which the European Union is evolving and try to set its evolution in some kind of historical perspective, I believe it becomes apparent that, far from approaching a kind of parity with the United States, whether in economic and cultural and political or in international terms, in reality the European Union is an entity on the brink of decline and even of dissolution.
Now, for the avoidance of doubt, I'm not saying that the European Union will disappear as an institution in our lifetimes. Institutions, in Europe particularly, tend not to disappear. They just decline in their power. Like, for example, today's Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development--once the prototype of a far larger post-Marshall Aid Europe, today a harmless agency for gathering data and producing economic reports. And ladies and gentlemen, Europe is littered with such agencies, which once embodied grandiose plans--think, for example, of the Bank for International Settlements, the International Labor Organization. There's scarcely a European capital without the relic of some past plan for great greater European integration.
My suggestion is not that the European Union will vanish, but simply that its institutions are in danger of atrophying and that it, too, may one day be no more than a humble data-gathering agency with expensive but impotent offices in the City of Brussels and elsewhere.
Let me try to illustrate to you why I think this is. There are really three parts to my argument, one of which is quite obvious and I will deal with as swiftly as possible. And that is, essentially, to point out why so many of these apparent signs of rapid integration, of approaching parity with the United States are false signs.
The second and more interesting part of the argument is to do with a fundamental historical insight into the way that the European Union or, to be precise, the process of European integration, has always functioned from its very inception until the present. I want to draw on the work of recent scholars, not all of which will be known to you, to suggest that there is a key to understanding the process of European integration, and that key can be summed up in a single phrase: German gravy.
Finally, having bored you near to unconsciousness with economics, I will soar away from such dry matter and offer a third cultural argument to the effect that Europe may not only experience a kind of institutional decline, but that its very culture is in itself authentically, and in the true sense of the word, decadent. So my conclusion will be as much cultural as economic.
First, the economics. In every year of the last decade but one--that was 2001--the economy of the United States has grown in real terms faster than that of the European Union. In every year of the last eight years but one, productivity has grown faster in the United States than in Europe. If you look at the average of unemployment--and these are the standardized measures of unemployment that the OECD uses--you can see that on average over the last decade unemployment in the European Union has been nearly double what it has been in the United States.
Why is this? I think there are two ways of explaining European economic under-performance in the past decade. One of them is that the labor market and indeed markets generally are more rigid, are less flexible than those of the United States. Another of them is simply that the monetary policy of the European Central Bank has been somewhat inept, or at least somewhat unbalanced, in the way that it has treated the different members of the euro zone. The key points about economic under-performance in Europe is that it is principally, or at least predominantly, a German story.
It is richly ironic that only 20 years ago scholars were warning that Germany was going to supersede the United States itself as one of the great economic powers, along, of course, with Japan in the world. In truth, those of us who were living in Germany in the 1980s could see an impending economic crisis in that country, a crisis that German reunification temporarily postponed in an orgy of deficit finance and government contracts.
Now we see the reality. There is a profound problem in the German economy that would be there whether the Bundesbank was still in charge of monetary policy in that country or not. The problem is worsened by the fact that, under the ECB, interest rates in Germany are probably around 100 basis points higher than they should be. And given that the German economy is roughly a third of the economy of the euro zone, an unhealthy Germany is an unhealthy European economy.
I want to add a little footnote to this story. If you look closely at man-hour statistics, the productivity of, say, a Frenchman in a single hour compared with his American counterpart, there is in fact nothing to choose between them. As a worker, a Frenchman is just as efficient as an American. It's less true, but comparable, in the case of a German worker. One of the biggest differences, in fact, in economic terms between Western Europe--and its true in some measure of Eastern Europe, but principally between Western Europe and the United States, has been a divergence in working hours. In the past decade or so, Americans have steadily worked more hours per year. In fact, according to figures from the OECD, the average American in employment works nearly 2,000 hours a year--and hours a year are a good measure to see just how much work people are doing. The average German, ladies and gentlemen, works fully 22 percent less of the year. And the figures are actually larger if you consider, for example, the Dutch. Between 1979 and the present, the length of the working year grew in the United States. Or, if you want to put it in more conventional terms, the vacation shrank.
Precisely the opposite happened in Europe. In Europe, working hours diminished, vacations grew Labor participation also diminished. Fewer and fewer of the population actually entered the labor market altogether. And that in many ways explains that differential in GDP growth rates as well as anything I could suggest to you. And it's a little hint of what I'm going to say in a minute, that this, I think, is more than just an economic phenomenon. In some ways it is a symptom of that cultural malaise in Europe that I want to see as a critical part of the end of Europe.
To put it very crudely and to hint at what I'm going to say later, it is the work ethic itself. Whether you call it a Protestant work ethic or simply a work ethic, it is that which seems to be most obviously in decline. And it is, I think, noteworthy that the decline in working hours is most pronounced in what were once distinctly Protestant countries of northwestern Europe. Once.
I would, if time permitted, talk some more about the economic and political implications of European enlargement. I would, if time permitted, like to suggest to you that the acquisition of 10 new states, most of them in Central and Central Eastern Europe, does not necessarily portend great advantages either for those new member states or for the older member states of Western Europe. Let me merely point out that one respect in which Central European economies have coped with their relatively lower productivity compared with Western Europe since the ending of communist rule in those countries nearly 15 years ago has been by working longer hours. In fact, the Czechs are among the very few people in the world today who work more hours per year than the Americans.
My question, and it is a rhetorical one, though it may invite further comment--not least from my good friend Radek Sikorski, a greater expert in these matters than I can ever claim to be--but my question is, really, whether East Europeans who have discovered the benefits of economic liberty since the fall of the Berlin Wall may not find that liberty circumscribed by the mass of regulations and rules that emanate daily from Brussels.
I could also talk about the extent to which, despite the appearance of a greater European cultural identity, in reality, a certain fragmentation of European culture is still very evident in the many euro-barometer polls that have been conducted over the past years. It's clear that a sense of Europeanness, far from growing at the expense of national identity, has, if anything, suffered something of a decline in recent years.
I could, if time permitted, dwell on why it is that the draft constitution for a European treaty has been grounded, or beached, perhaps even sunk by recent political events in Europe. Some of you will be familiar with these stories; others will be indifferent to them. I would rather proceed at speed to the second part of my argument.
In other words, the conventional points that suggest an approaching European parity with the United States, be they economic, cultural, or political, are points which are at best arguable and, in my view, largely false.
But now let me broaden my argument. Let me introduce a certain historical perspective. I'm not, as anybody who has read the book Virtual History will know, an economic determinist or any kind of determinist. I do not, in fact, regard economics as in some sense the driving force of human history. But there are exceptions to that rule. There are certain processes which are primarily economic in their character. And I think it's true to say that European integration is one of those processes.
There's been some very good work on the history of European integration done recently. It hasn't been, I think, widely enough understood or received. Perhaps the most interesting work has been produced by the venerable British historian Alan Millwood, but it's also been complemented by the young Harvard historian Andrew Muravchik. Between them, working independently, they've arrived at a new interpretation--and I think it deserves to be called a new interpretation--of why European integration happened at all after the Second World War.
Instead of the conventional view that a few saintly figures, like Jean Monnet, realized a vision of European integration to prevent the recurrence of war in Europe and generally make everybody happier and better off, they argue that what happened, beginning with the negotiations that produced the European coal and steel community, the nation states of Western Europe, beginning with the six that produced the ECSC--the coal and steel community--made very limited concessions of sovereignty in the pursuit of the national economic interest; and, to be quite specific, in pursuit of the interests of well represented economic groups within their societies, principally heavy industry and small agriculture.
If one understands the process of European integration in these terms--essentially an economically driven set of deals between still largely sovereign nation states--one thing becomes abundantly clear. And that is, ladies and gentlemen, from the very outset this process relied on what I rather crudely called a moment ago "German gravy." It was the Germans who, from the very word go, were prepared to subsidize the other parties in the process of European integration.
To give you just one example: The fundamental bottom line of the coal and steel community was that German taxpayers would prop up the inefficient coal mines of Belgium at the cost of hundreds of thousands of marks. In the same way, it was German taxpayers who paid the development aid to the French colonial empire, aid that was an integral part of the Treaty of Rome. It's often forgotten that where the British saw a choice between empire and Europe, and dithered and hesitated about that choice, the French did what I always do whenever I see a choice. They said, We'll have both, please.
Not only did the French seek to retain their African empire and what was left of their Asian empire within the structures of the emerging European community, but, with a brilliant stroke of diplomacy, they insisted that the other members, the other five members that signed the Treaty of Rome should subsidize their own colonies. And so it was that, in an extraordinary deal that was done in 1956-57, Conrad Adenauer agreed to payments to French colonies that came very largely from German taxpayers. A common agricultural policy, which became the single largest item in the budget of the European community, was from its very inception underwritten by net contributions from German taxpayers. That was how it worked.
If you add up all the--to use the technical term--unrequited transfers that Germany has paid through the European budget since its inception, one of the most striking facts that I can offer you is that the total exceeds the amount that Germany was asked to pay in reparations after the First World War. It is more than 132 billion marks, the sum that the Germans in the 1920s insisted would bankrupt them if they paid it. Well, they paid it. They paid it not as reparations, but as net contributions to the European budget.
And that, I think, explains one of the more striking findings of recent European survey data. Euro-barometer surveys show that there's a real discrepancy between what people think about the European Union relative, as it were, to the general good and what they think about the European Union relative to their own national good. And it's an almost perfect correlation. Countries that are net gainers, net recipients from the European budget think that the European Union is quite good, but they think it's even better for their own country. Countries which are net donors to the European budget--and that principally means Germany, but also in some measure Britain--think that the European Union is okay for their country but is obviously very good generally.
And this, it seems to me, takes us to the very heart of the political economy of European integration Let me tell you some simple percentages about the way the European Union works, to illuminate the fundamental imbalance between representation and taxation which is at the heart of the story of European integration.
Today, Germany accounts for around a quarter, a little under a quarter, of the combined gross domestic product of the entire European Union. It accounts for just over a fifth, 22 percent, of its population. It accounts for 16 percent of the seats in the European Parliament; around about 11 percent of votes on the Council of Ministers, though that process of voting is, of course, under a process of reform. In fact, if the draft treaty isn't enacted after enlargement, Germany's share of votes in the Council of Ministers will fall to 8 percent. But if you look at net contributions to the European budget in the years 1995 to 2001, Germany contributed 67 percent.
So you get between 8 and 11 percent of the decisive votes in the Council of Ministers, that is, the key decision making body of the European Union, but you--by which I mean "you" as Germany--contribute two-thirds towards the combined budget.
Now, that's all very well, ladies and gentlemen, if Germany is the fastest growing economy in Europe. But as I've already pointed out to you, it is today the slowest growing economy in Europe. It is, in fact, the sick man of Europe. And although the German economy is very large, it is far from clear why, when it has not grown at all in the past six quarters, why the German economy should continue to subsidize the economies of the smaller, poorer countries of Southern and now also Central Europe.
My estimation, ladies and gentlemen, is that the train is still running, but there ain't no gravy anymore. And as that reality gradually dawns, the process of European integration, which I believe has depended from its very inception on German gravy, is bound to come to a halt. Who, after all--who is going to pay for those, and I quote, "maximum enlargement-related commitments," to the 10 new member states which have been capped at 40 billion euros? The general assumption appears still to be that the German taxpayer will pay that money. I see no reason whatsoever why that should be the case.
But ladies and gentlemen, I didn't come here this evening to make a purely economic argument. What I've said I think is in fact a sufficient argument to explain the end of the process of European integration as we have known it up until this point. But I have one last argument to make that is not, in the end, an economic argument at all.
The fundamental problem that Europe faces, more serious than anything I've mentioned so far, is senescence. It's a problem that we all face as individuals to varying degrees, but from society to society the problem of senescence, of growing old, varies hugely. In the year 2050, which is less remote than it may at first sound, current projections by the United Nations suggest that the median age of the European Union countries, the EU 15, will rise from 38 to 49--a Europe of 49-year-olds. It will rise in the United States, too. I wish I had time to tell you about the problems that you are going to face, because then it would stop you feeling the complacency that you may have begun to feel this evening.
The situation in the United States is not great at all in this respect, but it is--and I believe this is the most one can say--better than the situation of the European Union. The German population will in fact decline--absolutely, not in relative terms--absolutely, from 82 to 67 million. Falling populations will be a characteristic feature of the hitherto dominant societies of Western Europe. An increase in retirement ages will not help. It is not the answer. It would not suffice to alter the problems that will beset the social security systems of Western Europe. The implicit liabilities of the German social security system at the moment are currently around about 270 percent of German GDP. There are problems with the social security and Medicare systems in this country--very serious problems indeed; I've written about that. But the problems in Europe are much worse, and they will bite politically much sooner.
There is only one way out for this continent, and that is immigration. There is an obvious source of youthful workers who aspire to nothing more than a better standard of living all around Europe. All around Europe there are countries whose birth rate is more than twice the European average, significantly more than double it. The trouble is that nearly all these countries are predominantly Muslim countries. Not only that, but there is, right next door to the European Union, in fact between the European Union and Iraq, a country which now has a very plausible claim to European Union membership. And that country is Turkey.
Turkey's per capita income is in fact, by some measures, higher than that of Hungary, Latvia, and Lithuania, all of which are about to enter the European Union--certainly higher than those Balkan economies that hope to be in the next, or next but one, wave. The arguments against Turkish membership--and the Turks have been pressing for some form of membership since the 1980s--are getting weaker and weaker. And you know the only one that is left? And it's one most often heard among German conservatives, but occasionally it slips out of a French mouth, too--that argument is a cultural argument. The argument is that fundamentally Europe is a Christian entity. Its cultural roots are different from those of Ottoman Turkey. That Europe is in a sense a latter day secular version of Christendom.
Ladies and gentlemen, I only wish that were true. The reality is--and it is perhaps the most striking cultural phenomenon of our times--that Western and Eastern Europe are no longer in any meaningful sense Christian societies. They are quite clearly post-Christian--indeed, in many respects, post-religious--societies. In the Netherlands, Britain, Germany, Sweden, and Denmark, less than 1 in 10 of the population attends church even once a month. A clear majority do not attend church at all. There are now more Muslims in Britain, indeed in England, than Anglican communicants. More Muslims attend mosque weekly than Anglicans attend church.
In the recent Gallup Millennium Survey of Religious Attitudes conducted just a couple of years ago, more than half of all Scandinavians said that God did not matter to them at all. This, it seems to me, makes the claim to a fundamental Christian inheritance not only implausible but downright bogus in Europe. The reality is that Europeans inhabit a post-Christian society that is economically, demographically, but, in my view, above all culturally a decadent society.
They cannot, though they will try, resist forever the migration that must inevitably occur from south and from east. They will try. Indeed, they try even now to resist the migration that really ought legally to be permissible from the new member states to the old member states after May the 1st. Even that has become contentious. Increasingly, European politics is dominated by a kind of dance of death as politicians and voters try desperately and vainly to prop up the moribund welfare states of the post-Second World War era, but above all to prop up what little remains of their traditional cultures.
I understand Samuel Huntington is worried that Mexican culture is taking a firm root in this country and shows no sign of being dissolved into the traditional American melting pot. I read an alarmist article by him in Foreign Policy this week. Well, I have good news for him. Long before the mariachis play in Harvard Yard, long before that, there will be minarets, as Gibbon foretold, in Oxford. Indeed, ladies and gentlemen, there already is one. The Center for Islamic Studies is currently building in my old university a new center for Islamic studies. And I quote, "Along the lines of a traditional Oxford college around a central cloistered quadrangle, the building will feature a prayer hall with traditional dome and minaret tower." It will open next year. I wonder what Gibbon would have said.
Thank you very much.
Tuesday, March 02, 2004
More Than Money
By DAVID BROOKS
Published: March 2, 2004
If the polls are to be believed, this could be the last day of John Edwards's presidential campaign. But before we bid him adieu, it's time for one last ladling of praise and blame.
Edwards deserves some praise because he is the only major candidate who talks consistently about the poor. The problem is that he talks about poverty in an obsolete way, which suggests he has learned nothing from the past 40 years.
Edwards talks about poverty in economic terms. He vows to bring jobs back to poor areas and restrict trade to protect industries. He suggests that if we could take money from the rich and special interests, there'd be more for the underprivileged.
This kind of talk is descended from Marxist theory, which holds that we live in the thrall of economic conditions. What the poor primarily need is more money, the theory goes.
The core assumption is that economic forces determine culture and shape behavior. As William Julius Wilson wrote in "The Truly Disadvantaged," "If ghetto underclass minorities have limited aspirations, a hedonistic orientation toward life or lack of plans for the future, such outlooks ultimately are the result of restricted opportunities and feelings of resignation originating from bitter personal experiences and a bleak future."
Conservatives, on the other hand, believe that liberals have it backward. In reality, culture shapes economics. A person's behavior determines his or her economic destiny. If people live in an environment that fosters industriousness, sobriety, fidelity, punctuality and dependability, they will thrive. But the Great Society welfare system encouraged or enabled bad behavior, and popular culture glamorizes irresponsibility.
We've now had a 40-year experiment to determine which side is right, and while both arguments have merit, it's clear the conservatives have a more accurate view of poverty.
For decades welfare programs funneled money to the disadvantaged, but families dissolved and poverty rates remained stubbornly high. Then the nation switched tack in the mid-1990's, embracing policies that demanded work. Many liberals made a series of horrifying predictions about what welfare reform would do to the poor. These predictions, based on the paleoliberal understanding of poverty, were extravagantly wrong.
Now many scholars from across the political spectrum agree that money alone will not significantly improve the lives of poor families. "Not only does behavior matter," Isabel Sawhill of the Brookings Institution wrote in The Public Interest last year, "it matters more than it used to. Growing gaps between the rich and poor in recent decades have been exacerbated by a divergence in the behavior of the two groups." If you graduate from high school, wait until marriage to have kids and work full time (at whatever job), it is almost certain that you will not remain poor.
Sawhill's research indicates that we could double the amount we spend on welfare programs, and we would not make an important dent in poverty. But if we could somehow give people the inner resources they need to hold onto a job, and bring illegitimacy rates back to 1970 levels, then poverty rates would plummet.
There are as many kinds of poverty as there are poor people. As David K. Shipler writes in his wonderfully observant new book, "The Working Poor," it takes emotional dexterity to climb out of poverty, as well as job skills. The poor often have "less agility to navigate around the pitfalls of a frenetic world driven by technology and competition."
While conservatives were right about the basic nature of poverty, liberals are right when they point out that simply getting people off welfare and into the world of work is not enough. Welfare reform means more single mothers are working, but they are having a hard time making progress into the middle class. We're going to need support programs to complete the successes of the 1990's.
All of this is absent from the world Edwards describes on the campaign trail. It is absent from the populist worldview lately embraced by John Kerry. President Bush's compassionate conservative agenda, which was based on the idea that conduct matters most, remains unfulfilled.
We are moving toward a consensus on how to address the diverse problems that cause poverty. But when you go out on the campaign trail, you find politicians spreading polarizing disinformation. Edwards is right to talk about poverty, but by resorting to crude, populist rhetoric, he is leading in the wrong direction.
By DAVID BROOKS
Published: March 2, 2004
If the polls are to be believed, this could be the last day of John Edwards's presidential campaign. But before we bid him adieu, it's time for one last ladling of praise and blame.
Edwards deserves some praise because he is the only major candidate who talks consistently about the poor. The problem is that he talks about poverty in an obsolete way, which suggests he has learned nothing from the past 40 years.
Edwards talks about poverty in economic terms. He vows to bring jobs back to poor areas and restrict trade to protect industries. He suggests that if we could take money from the rich and special interests, there'd be more for the underprivileged.
This kind of talk is descended from Marxist theory, which holds that we live in the thrall of economic conditions. What the poor primarily need is more money, the theory goes.
The core assumption is that economic forces determine culture and shape behavior. As William Julius Wilson wrote in "The Truly Disadvantaged," "If ghetto underclass minorities have limited aspirations, a hedonistic orientation toward life or lack of plans for the future, such outlooks ultimately are the result of restricted opportunities and feelings of resignation originating from bitter personal experiences and a bleak future."
Conservatives, on the other hand, believe that liberals have it backward. In reality, culture shapes economics. A person's behavior determines his or her economic destiny. If people live in an environment that fosters industriousness, sobriety, fidelity, punctuality and dependability, they will thrive. But the Great Society welfare system encouraged or enabled bad behavior, and popular culture glamorizes irresponsibility.
We've now had a 40-year experiment to determine which side is right, and while both arguments have merit, it's clear the conservatives have a more accurate view of poverty.
For decades welfare programs funneled money to the disadvantaged, but families dissolved and poverty rates remained stubbornly high. Then the nation switched tack in the mid-1990's, embracing policies that demanded work. Many liberals made a series of horrifying predictions about what welfare reform would do to the poor. These predictions, based on the paleoliberal understanding of poverty, were extravagantly wrong.
Now many scholars from across the political spectrum agree that money alone will not significantly improve the lives of poor families. "Not only does behavior matter," Isabel Sawhill of the Brookings Institution wrote in The Public Interest last year, "it matters more than it used to. Growing gaps between the rich and poor in recent decades have been exacerbated by a divergence in the behavior of the two groups." If you graduate from high school, wait until marriage to have kids and work full time (at whatever job), it is almost certain that you will not remain poor.
Sawhill's research indicates that we could double the amount we spend on welfare programs, and we would not make an important dent in poverty. But if we could somehow give people the inner resources they need to hold onto a job, and bring illegitimacy rates back to 1970 levels, then poverty rates would plummet.
There are as many kinds of poverty as there are poor people. As David K. Shipler writes in his wonderfully observant new book, "The Working Poor," it takes emotional dexterity to climb out of poverty, as well as job skills. The poor often have "less agility to navigate around the pitfalls of a frenetic world driven by technology and competition."
While conservatives were right about the basic nature of poverty, liberals are right when they point out that simply getting people off welfare and into the world of work is not enough. Welfare reform means more single mothers are working, but they are having a hard time making progress into the middle class. We're going to need support programs to complete the successes of the 1990's.
All of this is absent from the world Edwards describes on the campaign trail. It is absent from the populist worldview lately embraced by John Kerry. President Bush's compassionate conservative agenda, which was based on the idea that conduct matters most, remains unfulfilled.
We are moving toward a consensus on how to address the diverse problems that cause poverty. But when you go out on the campaign trail, you find politicians spreading polarizing disinformation. Edwards is right to talk about poverty, but by resorting to crude, populist rhetoric, he is leading in the wrong direction.
