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| Europe |
| VDH: Soft Power, Hard Truths (about Europe) |
| 2005-02-22 |
| From the Wall Street Journal's dead tree op-ed page. Requires subscription, so given here uncut. Recent books have raved that the European Union is the way of the future. In contrast, a supposedly exhausted, broke and post-imperial United States chases the terrorist chimera, running up debts and deficits as it tilts at the autocratic windmills of the Arab World. That caricature frames the visit of the president to Europe as transatlantic pundits demand a softer George Bush, Condoleezza Rice and Donald Rumsfeld. Stop the childish bickering and the tiresome neocon preening, we are lectured ad nauseam by Euro and American elites. Don't divide Europe, we hear endlessly. Even though the European press, EU leaders, and their wild public have dealt out far more invective than they have received, American circumspection is the order of the day, the expected magnanimity from the more aggressive (and stronger) partner. Europe is huffy, but strangely tentative in its new prickliness. Short-term positive indicators -- trade surpluses, the strong euro, low inflation and expansion of the EU -- are showcased to prove that its statism and pacifism are the preferable Western paradigm. But privately bureaucrats in Brussels are far more worried about different and scarier long-term concomitant signs: high unemployment, static rates of worker productivity, low birthrates, Islamicist minorities, looming unfunded entitlement obligations, and a high-sounding pacifism that is being increasingly seen world-wide as base appeasement by friend and enemy alike. The adage goes that the European Union counts on a more sophisticated and nuanced "soft power." In reality, that translates to using transnational organizations and its own economic clout to soothe or buy off potential adversaries, while a formidable cultural engine dresses it all up in high sounding platitudes of internationalism and multilateralism. Everything from idly watching Milosevic and the Hutus butcher unchecked to unilateral intervention in the Ivory Coast or no action in Darfur usually finds either the proper humanitarian exegesis or the culpable American bogeyman. Yet contrary to the mythologies of Michael Moore and the high talk of Kyoto, most of the international sins of the recent age -- selling a reactor to Saddam, setting up a new arms market in China, whitewashing Hezbollah, or subsidizing Hamas -- were the work of European avatars of peace. |
| Posted by:trailing wife |
| #8 Good piece. Europeans need to decide if they want to go the Islamist route - satisfied with assigning blame instead of assigning accountability. |
| Posted by: 2b 2005-02-22 11:17:51 PM |
| #7 an exploding number of Euros Well, with number of euros exploding, Houston, we would have already bigbadaboom a problem. Perhaps "rapidly increasing number" would be a better verbal device. I am not convinced, though. Eastern Europens still have some life juice in their bloodstream and they have a genetic memory of Islamic thread (I inherited it too). Western Europe is so pussified that in my humble view, they are already 1/3 on a slippery slope. |
| Posted by: Sobiesky 2005-02-22 11:13:21 PM |
| #6 I won't write off Europe, because it is such a big market, and an exploding number of Euros - including in France - are beginning to understand what has to be done with the Muslim enemy. Any Secular - even Commie mutts - can be educated. Koranimals are immune to reason. Any politician in the West who kisses enemy asses, needs to be tossed into the discreditation hole and left there. Hate for Muslims is good. I love Hate. |
| Posted by: ITolYouSoLucy 2005-02-22 9:52:12 PM |
| #5 Or as we Jerseyans usually say Badabing! |
| Posted by: Parabellum 2005-02-22 6:40:18 PM |
| #4 amoral in its inability to act, quite ready to preach to those who do VDH does it again. This is exactly what is wrong with Europe in that short sentence. |
| Posted by: JerseyMike 2005-02-22 3:43:41 PM |
| #3 Ach, my bad. Didn't notice the page 71 link. |
| Posted by: Ptah 2005-02-22 2:18:45 PM |
| #2 Thanks TW. A bit shorter than his usual essays, but it seems that brevity forced him to up the intensity. |
| Posted by: Ptah 2005-02-22 2:17:04 PM |
| #1 The population trends in Europe coupled with the state welfare could spell serious problems in the future. Our Soc Sec and Medicare problems, caused in large part by population trends and expectations, are dwarfed by the problem in Europe. See, e.g., The Global Baby Bust, FA, 6/04, http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20040501faessay83307/phillip-longman/the-global-baby-bust.html?mode=print "With a shrinking labor supply, Europe's future economic growth will therefore depend entirely on getting more out of each remaining worker (many of them unskilled, recently arrived immigrants), even as it has to tax them at higher and higher rates to pay for old-age pensions and health care." This, of course, will require increasing importation of workers, who often come from Islamic countries (Turkey, et cetera). |
| Posted by: Kalchas 2005-02-22 1:22:09 PM |