Europe’s beacon burns less brightly

Europe’s Promise: Why the European Way is the Best Hope in an Insecure Age
By Steven Hill
University of California Press, $24.95 (£16.95)

Steven Hill admires a great deal about Europe. Road speed humps, high-speed trains, wind turbines, siestas, works councils, two-button flush toilets, energy-saving light bulbs, universal voter registration, proportional representation, public broadcasting networks, low-cost university education, naked saunas, organic farming, the Slow Food movement and home-cooked meals: you name it, he praises it.

When he describes the private allotments where some people grow their own vegetables, his lyricism, by the standards of modern political commentators, touches the stars: “A cross-section of Europeans – all walks and ages – till their gardens, unhurriedly plunging their fingers into the dark, rich soil.”

Hill, director of the political reform programme at the New America Foundation think-tank, has two purposes in writing this book. One is to set out the case that Europe’s methods of economic management, cradle-to-grave social support systems, democratic structures, ecological consciousness and temperate foreign policy are the way forward for the world. The global order is being remade, he says, and “what will emerge on the other side will be a new world based on the European model”. Europe is “a beacon for humanity’s future”, no less, and it holds “the greatest potential for the planet”.

Hill’s second goal is to show that the US, far from being an example for the world, is nowadays no model at all. Compared with Europe, he says, “the United States is behind in nearly every socioeconomic category”. Its economy is an “obsolete, hyper-militarised model” and, even under Barack Obama, is mired in an “antiquated free market ideology”.

US democratic institutions are “unrepresentative, divisive and disenfranchising”, characterised by de facto one-party fiefdoms and 70m unregistered voters – almost one-third of those eligible. The nation wastes colossal quantities of energy and fails to provide decent healthcare for millions of uninsured citizens. US foreign policy is “trapped in a Vietnam-era mentality of using military muscle and even invading nations as a way of dealing with unsavoury elements”.

No question, Hill makes you sit up and think. Unlike intellectually lazier writers, he does not buy the argument that the 21st century belongs inevitably to China. He is surely right in saying that Europe’s prosperous, peaceful and democratic social market economy looks attractive when contrasted with the unbalanced, excessively deregulated US model or with China’s politically repressive capitalism, Russia’s petrodollar authoritarianism, Japan’s corporate cronyism or conservative Islam. He makes a perceptive point, too, when he says that American conservatives play up Europe’s difficulties as a way of suppressing discussion of radical change in the US.

But Hill overstates his case. Europe, with its affordable universal healthcare, unemployment benefits, paid holidays and sick leave, childcare, time off for parents after a birth and inexpensive university fees, has certainly built an enviable form of social capitalism. But not once does Hill mention the huge budget deficits and public debts that are testing Europe’s monetary union today and threaten to overwhelm its comfortable way of life. In virtually every speech since his appointment last November, Herman Van Rompuy, the European Union’s first full-time president, has called on the EU to double its growth rate to 2 per cent a year. Mr Van Rompuy calls it “a matter of survival” for the European economic model.

Similarly, in pouring scorn on the US health system, Hill cites on several occasions a World Health Organisation study that ranked the US 37th in overall performance – but he omits to mention that the WHO conducted the study in 2000 and has never repeated the exercise because its methodology came under severe criticism. He underestimates the US lead in technology and first-class universities over Europe. His charge that US democracy lacks vibrancy seems out of place in the light of Mr Obama’s galvanising 2008 campaign and the upset of Scott Brown’s Republican victory in last month’s special Senate election in Massachusetts.

Hill is a lucid and engaging writer, and he recognises that not everything in Europe smells of roses. For example, Europe faces formidable problems in its declining birth rates and its reluctance, or inability, to integrate the millions of immigrants needed to sustain its prosperity in coming decades. Hill is right: the US model requires modernisation. But when it comes to welcoming the world’s huddled masses, Europeans could learn from their American cousins.

The writer is FT Brussels bureau chief