Day of Empire_ How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance--And Why They Fall - Amy Chua [158]
The EU's territorial expansion—not through military conquest but through a process of qualification and accession—represents an astonishing new form of strategic tolerance. In the past, with a coveted package of freedoms and economic incentives, countries such as the Dutch Republic or the United States made themselves magnets for individuals. With a new package of freedoms and economic incentives, the EU has made itself a magnet for nations.
In this sense, the EU is comparable to Rome. In its golden age, Rome too attracted entire peoples into its orbit. But Rome always had its legions, which could threaten to achieve by sword the incorporation of peoples who did not willingly submit. The EU has become a magnet for nations without force or even the threat of force. As the British author Mark Leonard puts it, the EU is a “post-imperial superpower,” increasing its dominion “not by threatening to invade other countries” but rather by dangling economic carrots. Rather than imposing democracy and the rule of law on other countries, the EU gives countries incentives to transform themselves. Rather than taking over governments, the EU, which has only a skeletal bureaucracy, works through national parliaments and local councils. Precisely because it is anti-empke, Leonard suggests, the EU eventually “will change the way the world works.”25
As part of its anti-imperial challenge to U.S. hegemony, the EU is seeking to establish itself as the world's true beacon of freedom, equality, and Enlightenment values. Even before 9/11, many Europeans saw their own societies—with their generally much more generous welfare systems and social services—as superior to that of the United States, offering more genuine tolerance and opportunity despite the rhetoric of the American Dream. In a 2000 survey, for example, the French public was asked, “As far as you're concerned, what kind of a country is the United States?” Forty-five percent answered “A nation of great social inequality,” and 33 percent said “A racist nation.” Only 24 percent answered “A nation where anyone can get rich,” and just 15 percent replied “A nation that welcomes immigrants.”26
Since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, European criticism of the United States has grown only more intense. In a 2003 article that appeared in newspapers throughout Europe, the eminent German and French philosophers Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida assert a European identity defined acerbically in opposition to the United States, highlighting Europe's softer approach to capitalism, its rejection of the death penalty, and perhaps most critically its “moral sensibility, informed by the memory of the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century and the Holocaust.” America's “unilateralism”—its perceived willingness to violate international law and to undermine the United Nations—is widely criticized in Europe, where from Ireland to Poland the maze of EU treaties and charters today offers the most progressive stance on human rights and nondiscrimination the world has ever known.27
There is, of course, a strategic dimension to all this. To reap the economic rewards of integration, the European states had to overcome their historical enmities, suppress their own nationalist tendencies (for example, relinquishing their national currencies), tolerate one another's religions, and ensure that workers and products from the various states would not be discriminated against in other states. In other words, if the EU's stirring