What flamethrowers omit: American ‘values’ at war with America’s interests ─ Steven Hill’s Europe/U.S. values comparisons in Europe’s Promise: Why the European Way is the Best Hope in an Insecure Age are instructive.
Edited excerpts by Carolyn Bennett
Europe has about thirty cities with populations exceeding a million. The United States has ten cities with populations exceeding a million people.
Europe’s political and economic integration has grown steadily (though always subject to the recurring ups and downs of the economic cycle), increasing people’s personal wealth and security year after year. At the same time it has made fair and more equal distribution of that wealth a hallmark of its raison d’être. An American looking at the comprehensive and universal nature of the supports enjoyed by Europeans sees a strange wonder to behold.
Europeans on average are enjoying the highest of living standards, the most economic security: health care for all, paid parental leave (following the birth of a child), affordable childcare, monthly kiddie stipends, paid sick leave, free or inexpensive university education, ample retirement security, supportive elderly care, generous unemployment compensation, vocational training, efficient mass transportation, affordable housing, and more. They have an average of five weeks of paid vacation (compared with two for Americans) and a shorter workweek, plus a plethora of holidays thrown in. In some European countries, workers on average work per week a full day less than Americans do; yet enjoy the same standard of living.
Flame-throwing ‘Socialism,’‘welfare’ charges shout down attempts to shore up U.S. society and its people
Instead of figuring out an American version of these comprehensive supports for individuals and families, U.S. critics and Euro skeptics have dismissed Europe’s way as a ‘welfare state’ and ‘creeping socialism.’ … More accurately, Europe can be described as a ‘workfare support state’ rather than a welfare state.
(European-style workfare should not be confused with the stigmatized American workfare; it has a different meaning from that in the United States and is grounded in a different philosophy. American workfare is targeted exclusively at the poor and government welfare recipients, making it politically vulnerable. Europe’s workfare support system, however, is for everybody ─ middle class, rich, poor; its application is universal.) Europe’s system is part of the overall capitalist matrix in which Europe’s powerful economic engine produces the wealth needed to underwrite its comprehensive workfare supports; which, in turn, maintain a healthy and productive workforce that keeps the economy humming, like a well-tuned Swiss clock.
Europe’s workfare system has been grossly mischaracterized by Americans enthrall to a fundamentalist free market ideology. U.S. politicians are known for invoking the importance of ‘family values’ and a ‘work hard-get ahead’ creed. Indeed the United States is known as the inventor of the middle class, the attractive ideal that a good life is within reach for the vast majority of people. … [I]f America invented the middle class, Europeans have taken that good idea and run with it one giant step further. They have figured out how to set the middle class on a more solid and secure footing and put some meat on the bones of their family values.
Europe shores up social infrastructure
Europeans have established various vehicles to ensure their health, productivity, and quality of life, not only in the present, but also in the future. Properly understood, these workfare supports are a necessary part of infrastructure investment, just like the Obama administration’s fiscal stimulus spending on physical infrastructure such as bridges and roads, or spending on energy efficiency. However, ‘social infrastructure’ invests in the most precious resource of all ─ people ─ even as it helps create jobs and stimulates consumer spending, which are two major components of a modern economy.
While Europe and the United States both rely on a powerful capitalist engine as the core of their economies, the presence of a more robust social infrastructure is the reason that Europe has a higher level of economic security for its people than the United States has with its deregulated capitalism. This is Europe’s way of ensuring one of America’s chief principles ─ ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’ ─ with results that are vastly different from America’s ‘on your own’ society.
America’ s Militarism deepens war against its own
Following the fall of the Soviet bloc in the late 1980s, bipartisan policy in the United States continued funding huge military budgets ─ budgets three times larger than the combined budgets of all conceivable enemies.
U.S. military expenditures currently eat up more than 4 percent of America’s gross domestic product compared with Europe’s less than 2 percent of GDP spent on its military. The outlay works out to well over 20 percent of the U.S. federal government budget ─ not including huge expenditures on the Department of Homeland Security, the National Security Agency, the CIA, the Veterans Administration, or parts of NASA and the Department of Energy that are engaged in military-related activities. More than either Social Security outlays or the costs of Medicare and Medicaid combined.
Creating a European-like system of universal health care that includes the 47 million uninsured Americans would cost an additional $100 to $150 billion annually, only a fraction of one year’s expenditures on the Iraq war. Creating European-like universal childcare would cost $35 billion annually; the entire annual budget for the United Nations is only $16 billion. The amount spent by the U.S. government on research and development for alternative energy in 2006 was only $4 billion, while the amount spent on R&D for new weapons was $76 billion.
U.S. militarism has long been a core part of the American Way, doing triple duty as a formidable foreign policy tool, a powerful stimulus to the economy, and a usurper of tax dollars that could be spent on other budget priorities. ‘Our problems are those of a very rich country which has become accustomed over the years to defense budgets that are actually jobs programs and also a major source of pork for the use of politicians in their reelection campaigns’ [says prominent military critic Professor Chalmers Johnson].
This gargantuan difference in military spending is one of the greatest gaps between the American Way and the European Way. It is in some ways the elephant in the living room, which overshadows most other aspects of the transatlantic relationship.
The American Way of big-stick diplomacy, which has been practiced with varying degrees of success since the late nineteenth century, has perhaps overstretched its usefulness. Not only has it been marginally successful of late, it also is extremely expensive.
The European Union’s way of foreign policy uses carrots instead of a big stick. It succeeds not because of coercion but because it is attractive to countries wishing to join the E.U. or trade with it, and receive investment and foreign aid. Europe has become the world’s largest bilateral aid donor, providing more than twice as much aid to poor countries as the United States. The E.U’s velvet diplomacy also costs a lot less money, allowing those resources to be steered instead into social spending and workfare supports that better support families and individuals.
Sources and notes
Steven Hill is the author of Europe’s Promise: Why the European Way is the Best Hope in an Insecure Age (http://www.europespromise.org/). Hill is a political writer and director of the Political Reform Program at the New America Foundation, “which seeks to develop the best opportunities for reform, educate opinion leaders and the public about electoral alternatives, and encourage the formation of a broad-based coalition” http://www.newamerica.net/people/steven_hill See also http://www.europespromise.org/
“Letters to Washington” Pacifica Network’s Mitch Jesserich interviewed Steven Hill on the political differences between Europe and the U.S, January 25, 2010, http://www.kpfa.org/archive/id/58077
“Letters to Washington” looks at national politics from a progressive perspective
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