Jeremy Rifkin
The European Dream
New York, Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, 2004
The American author Jeremy Rifkin, best known as a "futurologist", after having announced the end of the work, proclaimed hydrogen potentialities, envisaged the advent of a new globalized society - based on new information technologies - and stood up for animal rights, now reveals himself to be a good political scientist in his recent book, The European Dream.
One of its most important theories is enunciated in the subtitle: "How Europe's Vision of the Future is Quietly Eclipsing the American Dream" - that dream based on faith in individual achievement and responsibility, promising personal wealth and economic growth to those who commit themselves to hard work and risk-taking, and which is now plainly fading. In fact, in the United States people spend increasingly more time at work, receive lower salaries, have no time for leisure, and see their hopes for a better future slowly dissolving.
Europe, on the other hand, emphasizes "community relationships over individual autonomy, cultural diversity over assimilation, quality of life over the accumulation of wealth, sustainable development over unlimited material growth, deep play over unrelenting toil, and universal human rights, global cooperation rather than the unilateral exercise of power." The fact is that most European citizens can benefit from more social protection, longer life expectancy, a wider culture, more time for leisure, less poverty and crime, less blight and sprawl than Americans. The Old Continent seems to be overtaking the New World in many respects. In part this is the result of the unification process, which restored peace in the entire European territory, thereby allowing economic integration, business growth and the formation of a political transnational space without precedent in history.
Rifkin regards the European Union as an impressive success. Exploring European history (despite some lacunae and inaccuracies) in the post-World War II period, the author expresses, in a chapter entitled "United States of Europe," his positive judgment on the European Constitution's achievements, which he defines "the texture and the warp of the new European Dream." However, Rifkin has a static vision of this Union. He looks at the way it is, and not at what it should become in order to fully develop its potential and reach its goal. He gives a picture of the existing situation, neither venturing to comment, nor advancing proposals about what remains to be done to complete the European unification process. In fact, by signing the Constitution, the EU has taken only the first step towards federalism, though a very important one.
Further in his book Rifkin states that the European Union is the most avant-garde example of a new form of transnational government which is essential to regulate the globalization - a theory with which I completely agree. Moreover, Rifkin points at the European Union as a model for the entire world, a Dream which could be potentially universal. Europe becomes the new "city upon a hill" and its example will necessarily be contagious because within twenty-five years no nation will be self-sufficient. Europe has been the first to understand this. Others will follow.
Attempts to create free-trade areas and common, transnational institutions in different geographical regions - such as Mercosur in South America, African Union in Africa and particularly Asean in South-East Asia - are the first signals of such a tendency. Nevertheless, Rifkin writes that to extend the European Dream to the entire world requires the spread of a universal morality, entailing the will to fight for universal human rights.
In the book's final chapter the author suggests the possibility of creating a moral connection between the "self" and the "other than self" on a global scale and in a universal perspective. According to Rifkin, this might occur as a result of natural catastrophes, such as climate change, the spread of new viruses or lethal bacteria, famine, terrorist attacks, etc., showing the world that humankind is destined to be a single community.
Moreover, the commitment of youth will be essential, young people being more and more interconnected through the diffusion of new information technologies, redoubling the contacts among people. On this point, Rifkin finds it unacceptable that billions of people use these new means of communication for the sole purpose of exchanging information, trading in a worldwide market or just for fun. He reckons it necessary to find a unifying common purpose binding all these connections together so that everyone feels part of a huge whole: the biosphere.
From Rifkin's viewpoint, to stimulate awareness of the unity of humankind throughout the world (with the aim of realizing and asserting people's rights) it is necessary to appeal to the power of good ideas to conquer inhibitions and guide people toward a common good - a view which I personally find places too much reliance upon individual morality and strong will. In my view, Rifkin does not identify the incentives which would mobilize the citizens to recognise the need to extend democracy to a global area in which, with the passing of globalization, new interests and new rights must be regulated on the basis of the broader common interest. Furthermore, Rifkin proves to be completely unaware of the means of extending local rights to the entire world: namely, through federalism as a political formula combining different nations together. By this means countries will lose the power to wage war (all being associated) but acquire the ability to face problems relating to world safety, wealth and progress, not by individual action, but collectively.
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