Europe

The French will soon hold a referendum on the European constitution. Polls, which are usually less reliable than futures markets, show that NON vote is ahead of OUI vote.

I was interested if there is a betting market on this vote which I think is more important in its impact on the world than the election in Britain. I checked Intrade and couldn’t find anything. Is anyone aware of any other markets?

Yet another good article, reviewing yet another book which “discovers” that French culture has a deeply rooted animosity against the United States. (Via Arts and Letters Daily). The book, The American Enemy: The History of French Anti-Americanism, by Phillipe Roger, sounds like a solid, scholarly treatment of this topic. Of course, popular works on this theme have abounded recently.

Roger started out researching right wing French anti-Americanism in the 1930s: ”I started working on a small piece … I didn’t realize at all that I had to go back two centuries.” This should come as no surprise. In fact, even a scholarly treatment of French anti-Americanism that — correctly — projects it back as far as the 18th Century misses a large part of the story. First, French anti-Americanism is just the most recent chapter in one of the oldest rivalries in the world — the struggle between France and England, which continued on into a struggle between France and the British Empire, and continues today in a continual state of animosity between France and the daughter polities of that Empire, most importantly the United States, which we are coming to think of as the Anglosphere.

So, this story can be projected back far further than two centuries. I had an earlier post on this topic called “The French Have Always Been Like That”, which focused on a review essay by Walter Russell Mead called “Why Do They Hate Us? Two Books Take Aim at French Anti-Americanism”. Mead pointed out that

Both in France and beyond, new anti-Americanism is simply old Anglophobia writ large. Anti-Anglo-Saxonism has been a key intellectual and cultural force in European history since the English replaced the Dutch as the leading Protestant, capitalist, liberal, and maritime power in the late seventeenth century.

The Mead quote also points out another important fact, French anti-Americanism is merely European anti-Americanism at its most intense. James Ceasar in his Reconstructing America : The Symbol of America in Modern Thought takes up this theme. (He had a short version of this argument in The Public Interest (You have to go to “Previous Issues”, then to the Summer 2003 issue.)

When the smoke cleared at the end of the Cold War we did not behold a new world. Instead, we saw that Western unity had been an unusually strong during the Cold War, due to a perceived shared danger. But with that danger gone much remained as it had always been. The Soviet threat highlighted the historical unity of the West. This unity is real. However, within that unity there have always been many rivalries and animosities. With the advent of more or less democratic government throughout Europe and the development of nuclear weapons, the possibility of any shooting war between these countries and any Anglosphere country is off the table. Nonetheless, other means of opposition and confrontation short of open, armed conflict are available. The two communities have different values and see the world in different ways. The conflict between the continental European states, especially France, the European state par excellence, and the offshore opponent, England, is a fundamental, structural element of world politics. It is not a problem with a solution. It is a permanent feature which needs to be considered and worked around in all dealings between Britain and Europe, or America and Europe, or the Anglosphere generally and Europe.

The surprising thing is that people continue to be surprised by this.

My son-in-law forwarded “Germany Is Tired of Footing the European Bill” (from On-Line English edition of Der Spiegel). It discusses preparations for June 16-17 when

Europe’s heads of state will come together for their next summit and to ratify the European budgetary framework for the coming years. What may sound like a routine yawner is really a meeting at which nothing less than the future of Europe will be decided — and especially Germany’s role in that future. On those two days in June, the assembled heads of states will decide how much each member state should pay to Brussels and how much it should receive in payments from Brussels, if anything.

The potential pitfalls are huge; the European Commission’s proposals in this regard are completely unacceptable to the German government. According to the current draft of the legislation, which bears the relatively innocuous-sounding title “Financial Forecast for 2007 to 2013,” the EU’s budget will increase from about €100 billion this year to €158 billion in 2013. This increase would have serious consequences for Germany, which, as Europe’s largest economy, pays by far the most into the common budget. Between now and 2013, Germany’s contribution to the EU would almost double, to about €40 billion. Instead of the current 8 percent of its federal budget, Berlin would then be required to send more than 10 percent of its budget to Brussels.

The authors observe that

the Germans send significantly more money to Brussels than they receive back. In 2003, the difference amounted to €7.7 billion, making Germany the biggest net contributor by a long shot. Only the Netherlands and Sweden pay more on a per capita basis.

This article in the Scotsman from last January made the EU look very bad, and it was widely quoted in the blogospehre:

TSUNAMI-struck Thailand has been told by the European Commission that it must buy six A380 Airbus aircraft if it wants to escape the tariffs against its fishing industry.

While millions of Europeans are sending aid to Thailand to help its recovery, trade authorities in Brussels are demanding that Thai Airlines, its national carrier, pays £1.3 billion to buy its double-decker aircraft.

Read more

A new report was recently released that has very few surprises for people who read the blogs. According to a study conducted by a European Union small business organization named Eurochambres, the United States economy is about 20 years ahead of the EU in just about every category. (You can read the report yourself, in PDF format, here.)

The study is surprisingly frank in its assessment of the EU’s chances to catch up with the US. Even with the best possible conditions it will take decades or even more than a century for the EU to achieve parity. And this will only happen if hard decisions are made right now.

One thing I also found to be very refreshing is that the report makes no bones as to which country the EU is trying to best. Claims that Europe is merely trying to find a more efficient system of internal governing without looking to become a rival of the US are becoming less credible with every year.

It appears to me that the biggest problem the EU faces is the drain on the economy due to its cradle-to-grave Socialist-style welfare system. For some reason, I don’t see the report even mentioning this directly. This is probably because the retirement and government subsidized benefit system is a big sore point in the EU. Proposed cuts in these benefits, even changes that we in the US would have characterized as being mild to middling, have been met with a great deal of protest by the voters.

Right now the US has a greater degree of political influence, military power, cultural dominance and economic might than any other society in the history of the world. It’s obvious that this state of affairs can’t continue forever. But it’s also obvious that the EU isn’t going to move to the head of the line if they can’t get a handle on the situation created by their own internal policies.

(Big slobbery hat tip to Ace.)