Those Pesky European Citizens
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

Every policy decision has unintended consequences. One result of the U.S. decision to go to war in Iraq in 2003 was the splintering of what is quaintly known as the transatlantic relationship. With America and Europe’s marital discord suddenly going quite public, pundits who concern themselves with defining the new world order needed something new for the geopolitical lexicon. Having graced us with “Clash of Civilizations,” “End of History,” and “Pax Americana,” they came up with a new catchphrase: the “European Century.”
This argument, that Europe is poised to supplant the United States as the global ordering power, has various aspects: economic (the growth of various European corporations and the strong euro), political (the European Union as model for other regions), and sociological (Europe enjoys a higher quality of life than America). But it is above all unmistakably ideological, even idealistic, based on the idea that the natural progress of nations is toward integration.
Curiously, the proponents of this view are not generally citizens of the European Union itself. Continental Europeans are by and large an insular lot, more concerned with drafting their 300-plus page constitution and determining the official circumference of artichokes than theorizing about how to dominate the emerging world order. It falls to Americans such as Charles Kupchan (“The End of the American Era”) and Jeremy Rifkin (“The European Dream), and now a Brit, Mark Leonard, to make the case.
Mr. Leonard’s book (Public Affairs, 170 pages, $20), is an exemplar of that strange animal, the Europhile tract. It covers all the usual bases, while falling prey to many of the usual weaknesses. Europe is poised to usher in a new era, he argues, in which nations will congeal into regional conglomerates, interacting peacefully within and without. The success of the E.U. will act as a model and a spur to other areas of the world, which will turn away from American power politics, with its moral hectoring and unilateralist tendencies.
Mr. Leonard’s treatment of the E.U.’s real problems (lack of a common foreign policy, demographic decline, economic stagnation, etc.) is cursory and seems designed only to create the illusion of evenhandedness. He notes that many of the world’s largest corporations are European, but ignores the staggering unemployment rates in France and Germany, or the fact that between 1970 and 2000, the euro-zone area did not create a single net private-sector job.
He argues that the E.U. is creating new political identities, but glosses the steep demographic decline of majority populations and concurrent explosion of poor, poorly assimilated Muslims. No one can be certain just what identities will actually emerge.
Mr. Leonard concludes with a rousing paean to the regional union – heir, in his account, to the nation-state as building block of the global order. The nation-state was itself the balance between the two alternatives that had dominated most of history – tribe and empire. Like the ancient Greek city-state before it, it was conceived as the ideal unit for political engagement.
The supreme question for the regional union, like other political entities before it, is “Who rules?” For a real answer, one need only look to Jean Monnet, doyen of the original European Economic Community and spiritual godfather of the European Union.
He put his aims quite succinctly: “Europe’s nations should be guided towards the super state without their people understanding what is happening. This can be accomplished by successive steps each disguised as having an economic purpose, but which will eventually and irreversibly lead to federation.” Monnet’s vision was politics through the back door, and Mr. Leonard is an apt pupil. In his haste to position Europe at the vanguard of a New World Order, he presents his readers with a Europe suspiciously absent of Europeans (with the exception of the occasional technocrat).
Mr. Leonard’s endorsement echoes the European Union’s politicians and bureaucrats in ignoring the institution’s central fallacy. One way or another, regimes must have citizens, as the forgotten Europeans reminded the ministers of Brussels last spring, when the French and Dutch electorates resoundingly rejected the E.U. constitution. The E.U. strives to operate as a political entity while ignoring the realities of political systems. Sovereignty, engagement, deliberation, and statesmanship are as absent from “Why Europe Will Run the 21st Century,” as they are from the European Union itself.
Mr. Leonard was surely unlucky in his book’s timing, but it is fitting that he should find himself in the same boat as the leaders who blundered in expecting blithe approval from the citizens they took for granted for so long. How ironic that an apolitical union poised, in Mr. Leonard’s account, to guide a brave new apolitical world would find itself cruelly undone by simple politics.
Mr. Polansky is the managing editor of Heartland: The Eurasian Review of Geopolitics (www.eheartland.com).