TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/102990/1029640.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 6.3 KB | 132 lines

                                                                                ESSAY, Page 116

Some Well-Wishing Advice from Europe


By Dominique Moisi

[The author is associate director of the French Institute of
International Relations and editor of Politique Etrangere.]


    Nineteenth century Europe had two dreams: socialism and
America. Those who wanted to improve their lives could either
fight for a more egalitarian society at home or move across the
Atlantic to join a new nation. The 20th century has seen the
triumph of America -- if by America one means democratic
pluralism. America has won not only the ideological battle but
the cold war as well. Socialism, certainly in its Soviet
Marxist incarnation, has failed. The Soviet Union retains large
military forces, but it is no longer a superpower; in fact, it
finds itself fighting for its very survival.

    America is immensely popular in Eastern Europe. Newly
liberated, East Europeans crave for America, for them a mixture
of freedom and modernity, of the Statue of Liberty, of
Coca-Cola and of blue jeans -- a symbiosis between liberating
principle and pop culture. West Europeans, celebrating the
regained unity of the Continent and the prospect of a
renaissance there, also yearn to keep close to America. Still
not autonomous in terms of security, they want Americans to
stay on European soil, not only to provide a balance vis-a-vis
the remaining military power of the Soviet Union but also
vis-a-vis the inevitable political and economic weight of
Germany. More profoundly, Europeans see the continuation of an
American presence as insurance against the possible return of
dark nationalist and xenophobic impulses from their past.

    In the Persian Gulf, the U.S. has the dubious honor of being
virtually by itself in the front line. There is simply no
substitute for American leadership: for the time being, the
U.S. stands alone in the global power category.

    Yet the contrast between America's global position and its
internal condition is painful. Just stroll through America's
cities and consider the dark side of daily life. As someone who
travels regularly to the U.S., who was partly educated there,
whose vision of life has been transformed by the openness and
dynamism of American society, and who cherishes the generosity
of its political principles and respects the strength of its
democratic creed, I can only witness the deterioration in
American life with dismay and sorrow.

    A country that is bound to lead should not have cities whose
centers look like Third World slums or sections of Beirut. It
should not have a lackluster educational system or an
infrastructure that is falling apart. It should not have people
being turned away by hospitals because they lack insurance, or
dying in the street of drug overdoses, or becoming victims of
random crime because they were in the wrong place at the wrong
time.

    The great society dreamed of by John Kennedy and Martin
Luther King Jr. and planned by Lyndon Johnson has not come to
pass. America's racial problem is exacerbated by the de facto
exclusion of blacks from the core of national politics, in part
because, traditionally Democrats, they face an age of
Republican hegemony in the White House. In an era of weakened
Federal Government, blacks feel increasingly isolated. It was
the Federal Government, after all, that saved them twice in
history: from slavery in the 19th century; from segregation in
the 20th. The reduction of that government's powers by a new
American consensus has led to the political marginalization of
blacks.

    Economically, the U.S. has become a consumer society that
no longer produces, a market where others sell and no longer
buy. When one looks at patents, levels of education and
financial power, America is losing the economic battle against
Japan, if not yet against Europe.

    Americans are aware of their problems but refuse to confront
the fact that in order to maintain their influence in the
world, they must change their life-style. Americans have no
constitutional right, for example, to cheap gasoline. In Europe
we pay the same price for a liter of gas as Americans pay for
a gallon -- or four times as much.

    The additional amount we lay out goes to taxes that provide
the infrastructures that make our cities civilized and safe.
Yet we do not feel cheated at the pump. Instead of being lulled
by a reassuring Reagan line or a comforting Bush stance,
Americans should accept the necessary: sacrifices and more
taxes.

    America cannot give the impression that it wants power
without incurring risk, influence without cost. There is a
contradiction, exemplified by the gulf crisis, between
internationalist principle, which is supported by most
Americans, and emotional isolationism, which is psychologically
self-sufficient and takes account of the outside world only
when it directly impinges on America. Americans must not harbor
the illusion that they can recover inner strength by
dissociating themselves from the affairs of the world. America
needs to assume its dual role as a world power and as a healthy
society. To be fully respected in tomorrow's world, it has to
reform internally. There is no alternative to higher taxes.

    In the necessary attempt to reform itself, America can learn
from the outside world, particularly from Europe. America may
epitomize, in European eyes, democracy and insurance against
old, inner European evils; it may incarnate, in the eyes of
Chinese students, freedom; it may even constitute paradise for
Albanian refugees who, having been taken in by France earlier
this year, besieged the U.S. embassy in Paris to be allowed to
move to the land of their dreams.

    What Americans should learn from Western Europe is how to
instill a greater sense of social justice; what they should
learn from Eastern Europe, which has just emerged from 40 years
of darkness, is how to frame the kind of solidarity that has
been lost in the extreme individualism and consumerism of
modern American life. Socialism may have failed, but the plea
for social justice that made it thrive echoes more than ever
through the streets of American cities. America, the winner,
has the historical responsibility to confront this challenge.