THE QUIET POWER OF EUROPE

[Anonymous]

http://www.newsweek.com/id/220516
THE QUIET POWER OF EUROPE
It’s often easy to view Europe as an aging continent in
terminal decline. Pundits and politicians lament that the European Union
is weak, riven by conflict, and unable to translate its size and wealth
into hard power. Or, as British Foreign Minister David Miliband put it
last week, “the European whole is less than the sum of its parts.”Yet
such charges of drift and decline miss a stark reality. As the 20th
anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall arrives next week, Europe
finds itself more united, prosperous, and secure than at any time in
history. EU members have become some of the planet’s most adroit
globalizers, opening themselves to the world while keeping in place
their extensive social services—Germany alone exports as much as China.
The continent has also fared better than expected in the downturn.
Europe’s unemployment rate now bests America’s, and France and Germany
managed to escape the recession faster than the United States.Things
look almost as good on the political front. In the years since communism
ended, the EU has doubled in size, and its population will pass 500
million next year. The Union, often decried as dysfunctional, has
reached another important milestone: the Lisbon Treaty, a quasi
constitution that streamlines decision making, has just been approved by
the last of the 27 members. Its passage will curtail the veto that gave
even tiny members the ability to block major projects, and will create a
new post of EU president, who will be empowered to speak on the Union’s
behalf.Thanks to this record, another half dozen countries are pushing
to join. Enlargement has become a huge source of soft power as well, a
potent weapon for spreading Europe’s influence. Turkey, for example, has
enacted a long chain of reforms over the past two decades to improve
its candidacy, and Albania, one of Europe’s most backward states,
recently announced it would become the world’s first Muslim-majority
country to allow gay marriage—just to show Brussels it can meet EU
standards on human and civil rights.The EU is even beginning to extend
its power beyond its neighborhood. EU countries now have some 100,000
soldiers, 60,000 diplomats, and countless aid workers deployed
worldwide. And the cliché that Europeans avoid fighting is wrong: 21
European states have soldiers in Afghanistan, where they’ve suffered a
full third of the Coalition’s combat deaths. Europe, in other
words—despite its nature as an often bickering club of nations—has
already become a global power. True, the EU method—slow, ungainly, and
often incremental—may be boring to watch. But that method is working
just fine, and its prospects look better than ever

[Author]

November 17, 2009 at 10:52 AM