Toynbee's European dream

I missed it when it first came out, but Polly Toynbee of The Guardian had a missive last Friday about the current troubles in Euroland, and Britain’s place within Europe. Since the disintegration of European unity is an issue in which America plays no obvious part, naturally the US featured prominently in her analysis.

Essentially Toynbee urges Blair to make nice with his European detractors primarily because Europe is not America. She chastises Blair and Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown for irritating the European mainland by pretending to be too much like America.

The subtle differences that Brown, Blair and Chirac have frivolously over-emphasised are minuscule compared with the great difference with America. Blair and Brown have done Britain a deep disservice by spreading the false notion there is some magic neo-liberal formula Britain has embraced…

The New Deal was a vital ingredient in transforming the employment climate here, but it was never some American welfare-to-work slavery. Yet, with Blair and Brown hammering on about how the French and Germans must "liberalise" employment practices, that's the impression we give.

Americans, I’m sure, will be surprised to learn that “welfare-to-work slavery”, otherwise known to them simply as, er, self-reliance, is a uniquely American characteristic. They might also wonder, if this is what Europeans call “slavery”, what one might call it when the government not only doesn’t encourage you to work, it actually prevents you from working (via what is known in typically obscure Eurospeak as the “48-hour Working Time Directive”.) Toynbee provides the answer: “reasonable”.

Toynbee really takes off as she thinks about the future.

It will take visionary leadership to persuade people that Europe's great mission has been spreading democracy to fascist and communist dictatorships, not by invasion but by the soft power of embrace.

Indeed it will. Especially given how difficult it is to actually come up with a fascist or communist dictatorship that has, in fact, been won over to democracy by Europe’s warm embrace. To be sure, Europe has done well with the embracing part (think Castro, Arafat, even Saddam). But as for that democratic transformation…well, I’m at a loss.

Finally, she culminates with a grand delusion:

A recent Newsweek global survey found how profoundly anti-American the world has become in the Bush era, and that unites Europeans: 77% of Germans, 64% in Britain, saw his re-election as a threat to world peace. It showed the American dream dead outside America: most of the world looks instead to the European way and that is what the EU is for.

Is it true that the American dream is dead outside of America? Surely there is a better way of establishing the fact than asking a bunch of Germans how much they really, really hate Bush’s foreign policy. Like, for instance, looking at migration statistics perhaps? It has long been a joke that the only thing bigger than the anti-American protests outside a givenUS embassy is the line of people inside the embassy trying to get a visa. It turns out that, in the three years of available data since Bush has been president, the US has admitted 2.8 million legal immigrants into the US, including 450,349 from Europe itself…presumably people who are intimately familiar with the “European way”, whatever that means. And on top of that 2.8 million there is an additional 2.4 million temporary workers who come to the US to work without immigrant status. Let’s not even get started on the approximately 350,000 illegal immigrants who come to the US annually. And these figures are undoubtedly dampened by the tightened security and immigration policies adopted post-9/11.

For sure some of these people (like middle-eastern terrorists, perhaps) are entering the US in the hopes of getting it to adopt a more “European way”. But I suspect that most of them are, indeed, scrambling to get a piece of that American dream which is, no doubt much to Toynbee’s annoyance, alive and well throughout the world.