The United States of Europe: The New Superpower and the End of American Supremacy

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While the United States flexes its economic and military muscles around the world as the dominant global player, it may soon have company. According to the Washington Post's T.R. Reid, the nations of Europe are setting aside differences to form an entity that's gaining strength, all seemingly unbeknownst to the U.S. and its citizens. The new Europe, Reid says, "has more people, more wealth, and more trade than the United States of America," plus more leverage gained through membership in international organizations and generous foreign aid policies that reap political clout. Reid tells how European countries were willing to discontinue their individual centuries-old currencies and adopt the Euro, the monetary unit that is now a dominant force in world markets. This is noteworthy not just for exploring the considerable economic impact of the Euro, but also for what that spirit of cooperation means for every facet of Europe in the 21st century, where governments and citizens alike believe that the rewards of banding together are worth a loss in sovereignty. Reid's most compelling portrait of this trend is in the young Europeans known as "Generation E" who see themselves not as Spaniards or Czechs but simply as Europeans. To illustrate America's obliviousness to this trend, Reid tells of former GE CEO Jack Welch, who never bothered to factor European objections into a proposed multi-billion dollar merger with Honeywell, leading to the deal being torpedoed and Welch disgraced. But what is most striking in The United States of Europe is the contrast between the new Europe and the United States. The Europeans cannot match the raw military size of the U.S., but by mixing wealth with diplomacy and continental unity (helped along by antipathy toward George W. Bush's brand of Americanism), they are forming an innovative and powerful superpower. --John Moe


From Publishers Weekly
While "old Europe" is most often portrayed as more bark than bite in its differences with the current U.S. administration, NPR commentator and former Washington Post European bureau chief Reid finds the E.U. as a whole "determined to change a world that has been dominated by Americans." The opening chapters quickly summarize everyday Europeans’ love-hate relationship with the States, the legacies of the 20th-century wars, and the creation of the Euro. The center chapters present GE as a case study in transatlantic trade gone wrong ("Welch’s Waterloo") as well as other snafus that show Europe attempting to dominate market share of everything from cell phones to pharmaceuticals. A chapter detailing what’s left of Europe’s welfare states is followed by a relatively bleak assessment of Europe’s armies, and the spin that the E.U. is betting on economic "soft power" for eventual global dominance. The concluding chapters warn that the U.S. ignores Europe’s new 25-nation strong union at its economic and political peril, but also draw attention to Europe as a huge, tariff-free market and potential sharer of global burdens. There’s little surprising here, but Reid’s primer on recent U.S. European relations genially summarizes an evolving, if often reluctant, partnership.Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.


From Bookmarks Magazine
Anyone who even glances at international headlines already knows there’s a powerful new presence emerging in what used to be known as "the Old World." Reid provides a strong introduction to the EU’s unprecedented exercise in international cooperation. While some reviewers take issue with what they view as overstatement, oversimplification, or selective inclusion of facts, most, if not all, agree with Reid’s underlying message: Americans need to pay far more attention to the activity across the Atlantic. We’ve been duly warned. Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.


From Booklist
*Starred Review* On the heels of another similarly themed and provocatively titled selection, Jeremy Rifkin's The European Dream,^B this book argues that Americans--particularly those subscribing to Robert Kagan's "let Old Europe eat crepes; we're going it alone" foreign policy--miss the fact that the European Union, not the U.S., is emerging as the true superpower of the twenty-first century. But whereas Rifkin's book points toward increasingly divergent moral values, Reid's emphasizes economics: the solidity of the euro, the long reach of European corporations, and the unignorable power of Europe's enormous marketplace, which, as Reid shows us, former General Electric CEO Jack Welch learned the hard way. It's essentially an argument about "soft power," bolstered by some eye-opening statistics (did you know that, after this spring's expansion, Europe's GDP is greater than America's?) as well as a perceptive discussion of the catalytic forces of anti-Americanism and the pan-European Generation E. Reid does not duck the Kaganites' predictable criticism--that such success is possible because the U.S. is busy keeping the wolves at bay--but rather offers that, for whatever reason its success, the EU is simply not to be dismissed. For that matter, nor is this prescient book. Brendan Driscoll
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Book Description
In May 2004, the European Union will add ten new member states-including Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary, among others-to become a union of twenty-five nations. While this might seem a fairly innocuous and minute shift of political semantics for most Americans, the enlargement will increase the population of the EU to 450 million citizens, making it larger (in population) and richer (in GDP) than the United States-not to mention that the EU has more trade than the United States and more votes on the UN Security Council and all other international organizations. This New Europe is determined to flex its political and economic muscle on the world stage. The Continent has moved much further than most Americans realize toward the dream of a "United States of Europe," to borrow Winston Churchill's term.

T. R. Reid's The United States of Europe lays bare the ways in which the EU is positioning itself to be a global counterweight and second superpower, on equal footing with the U.S.A. Reid traces the rise of the EU from the days when Churchill and other visionaries set out in the post-World War II rubble to find a means to end war in Europe. He shows how this remarkably successful effort to "create peace" also created a global economic and political power that is often at odds with the United States. This drive toward unity has been accelerated by the powerful mood of anti-Americanism (or, at least, anti-Bushism) that has swept the Continent since the war in Iraq.

In addition to the political ramifications of the EU, The United States of Europe shows the great impact this alliance is having on the global economic market. The euro, which now has more daily users than the dollar, is fast becoming a reserve currency and a new standard for global finance, a globally recognized replacement for the once-almighty dollar. Unification has spawned a generation of European corporate managers who have led firms like Nokia, Airbus, BP, Vodafone, and Red Bull to catch and surpass their U.S. competitors in global markets.

The European Union, from its beginnings as an experiment in statecraft, has rapidly emerged as a resounding success; yet Americans have so far managed to ignore the geopolitical revolution under way across the Atlantic. Reid's book shows how quietly-and not so quietly-Europe is developing itself into an economic, political, and cultural powerhouse.


About the Author
T. R. Reid has covered the U.S. Congress, national politics, and four presidential campaigns for The Washington Post. He was the Post's Tokyo bureau chief from 1990 to 1995 and then became head of the paper's London bureau, where he chronicled the stunning rise of the European Union at the dawn of the twenty-first century. Reid is now the Post's Rocky Mountain bureau chief and a popular commentator on National Public Radio. He is the author of three books in Japanese and five in English, including The Chip: How Two Americans Invented the Microchip and Launched a Revolution.


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Winston Churchill's dream is fulfilled: a former "coal-and-steel trading arrangement" has grown from common market into globally powerful international community. By many measures, writes Washington Post Rocky Mountain bureau chief Reid (Confucius Lives Next Door, 1999, etc.), the 25 states of the European Union outstrip the United States of America: they have more people, more money, more trade, more class. They have better food and wine; they have better health care, better social welfare, better public housing, better architecture. About the only thing they don't have better is a military, which suits them just fine as long as the US picks on Arabs and Afghanis and picks up the tab of empire. Most of those nations used to like us pretty well, writes Reid, until George W. Bush came along; whereas in 1998, he writes, "78 percent of Germans had a favorable view of the United States . . . in the wake of the war in Iraq, only 38 percent had a positive feeling," a trend echoed by public-opinion surveys in France, Italy, and even England. Though Europeans like us for our pop culture, Reid writes, they despise us for our lack of worldliness, our bluster, our devotion to capital punishment (which they esteem a particular barbarism). With the rise of Eurovision and its shiny blond pop singers (or its latest phenomenon, a Russian "techno lezpop duo"), they may not even need our pop culture much longer. In any event, Reid ably demonstrates, Europeans are charting their own course and are making impressive economic progress in the bargain: his case studies of the rise of Airbus, Nokia, and other firms make must-reading for business analysts, and his account of how the euro came to be universallyaccepted overnight (and, incidentally, how the euro symbol came into being) is an altogether fine piece of reporting. Salutary arguments abound here for those tired of homegrown complainers about high taxes and states' rights. A sturdy companion to Will Hutton's Declaration of Interdependence (2003), written with an eye to an American audience. Agent: Gail Ross/Gail Ross Literary Agency


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