Euramaerica

Talk about upending accepted certainties! While Europe is now in the hands of right-of-centre parties (France, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Denmark and David Cameron pacing restlessly in the wings), America has “gone socialist.” Nationalising the financial sector by the back door, considering massive subsidy of production industries, increasing state spending on healthcare and education, promising big investments in all manner of greenery, and limiting executive salaries: is Barack Obama beating Europe at its own game? “We are all socialists now,” Newsweek trumpeted in February, predicting that, “as entitlement spending rises over the next decade, we will become even more French.” General Jack D Ripper, Dr Strangelove’s nemesis, who fulminated against fluoridation of the water as another of communism’s nefarious advances, must be rotating in his Valhalla.How quickly things change. It seems just a few months ago that the presidency of the younger Bush—unilaterally going to war, refusing to submit to international treaties, disparaging the seriousness of global ecological catastrophe—convinced bien pensant opinion that the gulf between the US and Europe was stark and growing ever wider. Indeed, old and well-worn mental ruts are hard to steer out of. It remains a staple of political discourse on both sides of the Atlantic that Europe and America are worlds apart. Everyone knows this. The “wide Atlantic” thesis claims that there are fundamental differences between Europe and America. These are the contrasts: America believes in the untrammelled market, Europe accepts capitalism but curbs its excesses. Social policies either do not exist in America or are more miserly than in Europe. America’s lack of universal health insurance means that many people die young and live miserably. Because the market dominates, America’s environment is less cared for. Since social contrasts are greater in America, crime is much more of a problem than in Europe. Meanwhile Europeans are secular; Americans are much more likely to believe in God and accept a role for religion in public life. The two societies are thus divided along several faultlines: competition vs co-operation, individualism vs solidarity, autonomy vs cohesion. This is all familiar. But is it true? With the Obama administration moving the US to the left there is a perception of the Atlantic narrowing again, to the dismay of American conservatives—being “too European” is a stick Obama’s opponents are fond of beating him with. But were the contrasts between Europe and the US ever as great as both sides imagine? One way of answering this question is to look at the quantifiable evidence. Not all differences can be captured by numbers, but statistics allow us a first pass over the terrain and to compare reliably. If we compare four areas: the economy, social policy, the environment and—hardest of all to quantify—religion and cultural attitudes, the evidence in each case allows two conclusions. First, Europe is not a coherent or unified continent. The spectrum of difference within even the 16 countries of western Europe (which is what we are mainly looking at here) is far broader than normally appreciated. Second, with a few exceptions, the US fits into this spectrum. Either, then, there is no coherent European identity, or—if there is one—the US is as European as the usual candidates. Europe and the US are, in fact, parts of a common, big-tent grouping—call it the west, the Atlantic community, or the developed world.
***It is universally observed that America is an economically more unequal society than Europe, with greater stratification between rich and poor. Much of this is true. Income is more disproportionately distributed in the US than in western Europe. In 1998, for example, the richest 1 per cent of Americans took home 14 per cent of total income, while in Sweden the figure was only about 6 per cent. Wealth concentration is another matter, however. The richest 1 per cent of Americans owned about 21 per cent of all wealth in 2000. Some European nations have higher concentrations than that. In Sweden—despite that nation’s egalitarian reputation—the figure is 21 per cent, exactly the same as for the Americans. And if we take account of the massive moving of wealth offshore and off-book permitted by Sweden’s tax authorities, the richest 1 per cent of Swedes are proportionately twice as well off as their American peers.What about poverty, not the same thing as inequality? Because inequality is greater in America, relative poverty is by definition also higher. But absolute poverty rates look different. If we take absolute poverty to be living on the actual cash sum equivalent to half of median income for the original six nations of the EU, we see that many western European countries in 2000 had a higher percentage of poor citizens than the US; not only Mediterranean countries, but also Britain, Ireland, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Finland and Sweden. Unemployment benefits in the US, often portrayed as derisory in the European media, are actually higher than in many European nations. Greece, Britain, Italy and Iceland spend less than the US on unemployment, measured per capita. The US welfare state is often portrayed as miserly and undeveloped compared to Europe. And so it is, if the standard is taken to be Sweden or Germany. But if we look at the span of social policy across Europe, a different picture emerges. Of course, America has no universal system of health insurance. Michael Moore’s 2006 film Sicko will ensure that no one forgets that. As a result, 15 per cent of its population is not covered. There is no question that being uninsured is unfair and brutal, nor that the lack of universal health coverage is the most pressing problem of American domestic politics. The true disgrace of American healthcare is that infant mortality is higher than anywhere in Europe. President Obama seems determined not to let the financial crisis sidetrack his promise to improve access to health insurance. Yet despite the too large fraction of those who are not insured, Americans are relatively healthy and well-serviced by their healthcare system—to judge by disease survival rates. For diabetes, heart and circulatory disease and strokes, the incidence rates and the number of years lost to sickness are firmly in the middle of the European spectrum. And for the four major cancer killers (colorectal, lung, breast and prostate), all European nations have worse survival rates than the US. Looking also at other forms of social policy, we see that the US fits broadly into the lower half of the European spectrum. As with its unemployment assistance, US spending on disability benefits is higher than in Greece and Portugal per capita, and practically at the same level as France, Italy, Ireland and Germany. (All figures used for comparison here account for differences in costs of living). State pensions in the US may fall into the lower half of the European spectrum. But examine instead the total disposable income of the retired in America as a percentage of what the still active receive. Only in Austria, Germany and France do the elderly fare better.It is commonly known that the American state does not help out much in terms of family provision. Parental leave is not statutory and there are no guarantees that women can reclaim their jobs after pregnancy. Family allowances as such do not exist. On the other hand, if one counts resources channelled via the tax credit system, as well as outright cash grants and services, and if one measures them as a percentage of GDP, the US ranks higher than Spain, Greece and Italy for family benefits. Public spending on childcare (daycare and pre-primary education) puts the US into the middle of the European scale. Total spending on pre-primary care per child is higher than anywhere but Norway.True, public social spending in America—that is, monies channelled through the state—is low compared to many European countries. But other avenues of redistribution are equally important: voluntary efforts, private but statutorily encouraged benefits (like employee health insurance) and taxes. Given all of these, the American welfare state is more extensive than is often realised: the total social policy effort made in the US falls precisely at the centre of the European scale. And if we shift our focus to education, the contrasts across the Atlantic are, if anything, reversed. A higher percentage of Americans have graduated from university and from secondary school than in any European nation. America’s adults are, in this sense, better educated than Europe’s. And the US lavishes more money per child at all levels of education than any western European nation. Europeans often believe that good US schools are private and serve only an elite. Yet American education is, if anything, less privatised than most European systems. Public education was among the first social programmes to receive massive public funding in the US and this has remained the case ever since.Simone de Beauvoir was convinced that Americans do not need to read because they do not think. Thinking is hard to quantify; reading less so. And Americans, it turns out, do read. The percentage of illiterate Americans is average by European standards. There are more newspapers per head in the US than anywhere in Europe outside Scandinavia, Switzerland and Luxembourg. The long tradition of well-funded public libraries in the US means that the average American reader is better supplied with library books than his peers in Germany, Britain, France, Holland, Austria and all the Mediterranean nations. They also make better use of these public library books than most Europeans. The average American borrowed more library books in 2001 than their peers in Germany, Austria, Norway, Ireland, Luxembourg, France and throughout the Mediterranean. Not content with borrowing, Americans also buy more books per head than any Europeans for whom we have numbers. And they write more books per capita than most Europeans too.