Day of Empire_ How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance--And Why They Fall - Amy Chua [159]
Although most Europeans would undoubtedly say that they oppose global bullies and would prefer a world with no hyperpower, it is nevertheless true that a primary goal behind the EU is to create a political entity large and strong enough to rival the United States. Because the EU's formula for amassing power is essentially one of strategic tolerance, one critical question becomes how well the EU's model of tolerance can compete with that of the United States.
At first glance, it might seem that the EU has already outdone the United States on the tolerance front. Not only has the EU become a magnet for nations (a kind of strategic tolerance for which there is no current U.S. parallel), but it has also adopted a set of individual rights at least as tolerant as those famously set forth in the U.S. Constitution.
But the reality is more complex. Throughout the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, while the United States was draining brainpower from all over the world and vaulting to the forefront of the computer revolution, Europe could not remotely keep up. By the late 1990s, countries such as Germany and Great Britain had serious shortages of skilled information technology (IT) workers, and it looked increasingly like Europe was missing the high-tech boat. Even today, the powerhouse Western European states are still scrambling to attract highly skilled foreign professionals, engineers, and IT technicians while a stream of such international talent continues to flow into the United States. Why so, if Europe is so tolerant?
The answer is that the EU's tolerance has been primarily directed inward, not outward—a strategy for uniting Europe, not for attracting third world immigrants into Europe or for turning the European states into multiethnic immigrant societies like the United States. When the EU's Charter of Fundamental Rights speaks of “free movement of persons,” it is not guaranteeing the freedom of Africans to move to Norway. On the contrary, during the very decades when the European Union was coming into being, the general attitude toward immigration throughout most of Europe was quite hostile.
In the last quarter of the twentieth century, Great Britain, France, and Germany at various points declared themselves “zero immigration” countries.28 From the 1970s until about 2000, the non-European populations of the European states consisted principally of migrant or “guest workers” (often from former colonies) and their families, refugees claiming asylum, and illegal aliens drawn by relatively generous welfare and social service programs. More problematically, the European nations did little to promote the cultural or political assimilation of the poor migrant communities that sprang up in and around major cities.
Today, leading European countries such as France, Germany, and the Netherlands are still experiencing chronic shortages of skilled labor even while unemployment fuels frustration and alienation in their poor migrant communities. Despite recent immigration reforms openly aimed at attracting high-tech workers from countries such as India, Korea, or China, the EU nations continue to lose out to more popular destinations, in particular, the traditional “immigrant nations” of Australia, Canada, and the United States.29
The German experience is telling. In order to create its own Silicon Valley, the government created in the late 1990s a new German green card specifically directed at attracting foreign IT professionals, particularly from countries such as India. Germany hoped to lure at least 20,000 highly qualified migrants a year. But unlike its American counterpart, which is a relatively sure path to naturalization, the German green card offered no possibility of citizenship. As Fareed Zakaria writes, “Germany was asking bright young professionals to leave their country, culture, and families;