Dream On America
The U.S. Model: For years, much of the world did aspire to the American
way of life. But today countries
are finding more appealing systems in their own backyards.
by Andrew Moravcsik
Not long ago, the American dream was a global fantasy. Not only Americans
saw themselves as a beacon unto nations. So did much of the rest of the world.
East Europeans tuned into Radio Free Europe. Chinese students erected a replica
of the Statue of Liberty in Tiananmen Square.
You had only to listen to George W. Bush's Inaugural Address last week (invoking
"freedom" and "liberty" 49 times) to appreciate just how deeply Americans
still believe in this founding myth. For many in the world, the president's
rhetoric confirmed their worst fears of an imperial America relentlessly pursuing
its narrow national interests. But the greater danger may be a delusional
Americaone that believes, despite all evidence to the contrary, that the
American Dream lives on, that America remains a model for the world, one whose
mission is to spread the word.
The gulf between how Americans view themselves and how the world views them
was summed up in a poll last week by the BBC. Fully 71 percent of Americans
see the United States as a source of good in the world. More than half view
Bush's election as positive for global security. Other studies report that
70 percent have faith in their domestic institutions and nearly 80 percent
believe "American ideas and customs" should spread globally.
Foreigners take an entirely different view: 58 percent in the BBC poll see
Bush's re-election as a threat to world peace. Among America's traditional
allies, the figure is strikingly higher: 77 percent in Germany, 64 percent
in Britain and 82 percent in Turkey. Among the 1.3 billion members of the
Islamic world, public support for the United States is measured in single
digits. Only Poland, the Philippines and India viewed Bush's second Inaugural
positively.
Tellingly, the anti-Bushism of the president's first term is giving way
to a more general anti-Americanism. A plurality of voters (the average is
70 percent) in each of the 21 countries surveyed by the BBC oppose sending
any troops to Iraq, including those in most of the countries that have done
so. Only one third, disproportionately in the poorest and most dictatorial
countries, would like to see American values spread in their country. Says
Doug Miller of GlobeScan, which conducted the BBC report: "President Bush
has further isolated America from the world. Unless the administration changes
its approach, it will continue to erode America's good name, and hence its
ability to effectively influence world affairs." Former Brazilian president
Jose Sarney expressed the sentiments of the 78 percent of his countrymen
who see America as a threat: "Now that Bush has been re-elected, all I can
say is, God bless the rest of the world."
The truth is that Americans are living in a dream world. Not only do others
not share America's self-regard, they no longer aspire to emulate the country's
social and economic achievements. The loss of faith in the American Dream
goes beyond this swaggering administration and its war in Iraq. A President
Kerry would have had to confront a similar disaffection, for it grows from
the success of something America holds dear: the spread of democracy, free
markets and international institutionsglobalization, in a word.
Countries today have dozens of political, economic and social models to
choose from. Anti-Americanism is especially virulent in Europe and Latin
America, where countries have established their own distinctive waysnone
made in America. Futurologist Jeremy Rifkin, in his recent book "The European
Dream," hails an emerging European Union based on generous social welfare,
cultural diversity and respect for international lawa model that's caught
on quickly across the former nations of Eastern Europe and the Baltics. In
Asia, the rise of autocratic capitalism in China or Singapore is as much
a "model" for development as America's scandal-ridden corporate culture.
"First we emulate," one Chinese businessman recently told the board of one
U.S. multinational, "then we overtake."
Many are tempted to write off the new anti-Americanism as a temporary perturbation,
or mere resentment. Blinded by its own myth, America has grown incapable of
recognizing its flaws. For there is much about the American Dream to fault.
If the rest of the world has lost faith in the American modelpolitical, economic,
diplomaticit's partly for the very good reason that it doesn't work as well
anymore.
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY: Once upon a time, the U.S. Constitution was a revolutionary
document, full of epochal innovationsfree elections, judicial review, checks
and balances, federalism and, perhaps most important, a Bill of Rights. In
the 19th and 20th centuries, countries around the world copied the document,
not least in Latin America. So did Germany and Japan after World War II. Today?
When nations write a new constitution, as dozens have in the past two decades,
they seldom look to the American model.
When the soviets withdrew from Central Europe, U.S. constitutional experts
rushed in. They got a polite hearing, and were sent home. Jiri Pehe, adviser
to former president Vaclav Havel, recalls the Czechs' firm decision to adopt
a European-style parliamentary system with strict limits on campaigning. "For
Europeans, money talks too much in American democracy. It's very prone to
certain kinds of corruption, or at least influence from powerful lobbies,"
he says. "Europeans would not want to follow that route." They also sought
to limit the dominance of television, unlike in American campaigns where,
Pehe says, "TV debates and photogenic looks govern election victories."
So it is elsewhere. After American planes and bombs freed the country, Kosovo
opted for a European constitution. Drafting a post-apartheid constitution,
South Africa rejected American-style federalism in favor of a German model,
which leaders deemed appropriate for the social-welfare state they hoped to
construct. Now fledgling African democracies look to South Africa as their
inspiration, says John Stremlau, a former U.S. State Department official who
currently heads the international relations department at the University of
Witwatersrand in Johannesburg: "We can't rely on the Americans." The new democracies
are looking for a constitution written in modern times and reflecting their
progressive concerns about racial and social equality, he explains. "To borrow
Lincoln's phrase, South Africa is now Africa's 'last great hope'."
Much in American law and society troubles the world these days. Nearly all
countries reject the United States' right to bear arms as a quirky and dangerous
anachronism. They abhor the death penalty and demand broader privacy protections.
Above all, once most foreign systems reach a reasonable level of affluence,
they follow the Europeans in treating the provision of adequate social welfare
is a basic right. All this, says Bruce Ackerman at Yale University Law School,
contributes to the growing sense that American law, once the world standard,
has become "provincial." The United States' refusal to apply the Geneva Conventions
to certain terrorist suspects, to ratify global human-rights treaties such
as the innocuous Convention on the Rights of the Child or to endorse the International
Criminal Court (coupled with the abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo) only
reinforces the conviction that America's Constitution and legal system are
out of step with the rest of the world.
ECONOMIC PROSPERITY: The American Dream has always been chiefly economica
dynamic ideal of free enterprise, free markets and individual opportunity
based on merit and mobility. Certainly the U.S. economy has been extraordinarily
productive. Yes, American per capita income remains among the world's highest.
Yet these days there's as much economic dynamism in the newly industrializing
economies of Asia, Latin America and even eastern Europe. All are growing
faster than the United States. At current trends, the Chinese economy will
be bigger than America's by 2040. Whether those trends will continue is not
so much the question. Better to ask whether the American way is so superior
that everyone else should imitate it. And the answer to that, increasingly,
is no.
Much has made, for instance, of the differences between the dynamic American
model and the purportedly sluggish and overregulated "European model." Ongoing
efforts at European labor-market reform and fiscal cuts are ridiculed. Why
can't these countries be more like Britain, businessmen ask, without the high
tax burden, state regulation and restrictions on management that plague Continental
economies? Sooner or later, the CW goes, Europeans will adopt the American
modelor perish.
Yet this is a myth. For much of the postwar period Europe and Japan enjoyed
higher growth rates than America. Airbus recently overtook Boeing in sales
of commercial aircraft, and the EU recently surpassed America as China's top
trading partner. This year's ranking of the world's most competitive economies
by the World Economic Forum awarded five of the top 10 slotsincluding No.
1 Finlandto northern European social democracies. "Nordic social democracy
remains robust," writes Anthony Giddens, former head of the London School
of Economics and a "New Labour" theorist, in a recent issue of the New Statesman,
"not because it has resisted reform, but because it embraced it."
This is much of the secret of Britain's economic performance as well. Lorenzo
Codogno, co-head of European economics at the Bank of America, believes the
British, like Europeans elsewhere, "will try their own way to achieve a proper
balance." Certainly they would never put up with the lack of social protections
afforded in the American system. Europeans are aware that their systems provide
better primary education, more job security and a more generous social net.
They are willing to pay higher taxes and submit to regulation in order to
bolster their quality of life. Americans work far longer hours than Europeans
do, for instance. But they are not necessarily more productivenor happier,
buried as they are in household debt, without the time (or money) available
to Europeans for vacation and international travel. George Monbiot, a British
public intellectual, speaks for many when he says, "The American model has
become an American nightmare rather than an American dream."
Just look at booming bri-tain. Instead of cutting social welfare, Tony Blair's
Labour government has expanded it. According to London's Centre for Policy
Studies, public spending in Britain represented 43 percent of GDP in 2003,
a figure closer to the Eurozone average than to the American share of 35 percent.
It's still on the risesome 10 percent annually over the past three yearsat
the same time that social welfare is being reformed to deliver services more
efficiently. The inspiration, says Giddens, comes not from America, but from
social-democratic Sweden, where universal child care, education and health
care have been proved to increase social mobility, opportunity and, ultimately,
economic productivity. In the United States, inequality once seemed tolerable
because America was the land of equal opportunity. But this is no longer
so. Two decades ago, a U.S. CEO earned 39 times the average worker; today
he pulls in 1,000 times as much. Cross-national studies show that America
has recently become a relatively difficult country for poorer people to get
ahead. Monbiot summarizes the scientific data: "In Sweden, you are three
times more likely to rise out of the economic class into which you were born
than you are in the U.S."
Other nations have begun to notice. Even in poorer, pro-American Hungary
and Poland, polls show that only a slender minority (less than 25 percent)
wants to import the American economic model. A big reason is its increasingly
apparent deficiencies. "Americans have the best medical care in the world,"
Bush declared in his Inaugural Address. Yet the United States is the only
developed democracy without a universal guarantee of health care, leaving
about 45 million Americans uninsured. Nor do Americans receive higher-quality
health care in exchange. Whether it is measured by questioning public-health
experts, polling citizen satisfaction or survival rates, the health care offered
by other countries increasingly ranks above America's. U.S. infant mortality
rates are among the highest for developed democracies. The average Frenchman,
like most Europeans, lives nearly four years longer than the average American.
Small wonder that the World Health Organization rates the U.S. healthcare
system only 37th best in the world, behind Colombia (22nd) and Saudi Arabia
(26th), and on a par with Cuba.
The list goes on: ugly racial tensions, sky-high incarceration rates, child-poverty
rates higher than any Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development
country except Mexicowhere Europe, these days, inspires more admiration than
the United States. "Their solutions feel more natural to Mexicans because
they offer real solutions to real, and seemingly intractable, problems," says
Sergio Aguayo, a prominent democracy advocate in Mexico City, referring to
European education, health care and social policies. And while undemocratic
states like China may, ironically, be among the last places where the United
States still presents an attractive political and social alternative to authoritarian
government, new models are rising in prominence. Says Julie Zhu, a college
student in Beijing: "When I was in high school I thought America was this
dreamland, a fabled place." Anything she bought had to be American. Now that's
changed, she says: "When people have money, they often choose European products."
She might well have been talking about another key indicator. Not long ago,
the United States was destination number one for foreign students seeking
university educations. Today, growing numbers are going elsewhereto other
parts of Asia, or Europe. You can almost feel the pendulum swinging.
FOREIGN POLICY: U.S. leaders have long believed military power and the American
Dream went hand in hand. World War II was fought not just to defeat the Axis
powers, but to make the world safe for the United Nations, the precursor to
the World Trade Organization, the European Union and other international
institutions that would strengthen weaker countries. NATO and the Marshall
Plan were the twin pillars upon which today's Europe were built.
Today, Americans make the same presumption, confusing military might with
right. Following European criticisms of the Iraq war, the French became "surrender
monkeys." The Germans were opportunistic ingrates. The British (and the Poles)
were America's lone allies. Unsurprisingly, many of those listening to Bush's
Inaugural pledge last week to stand with those defying tyranny saw the glimmerings
of an argument for invading Iran: Washington has thus far shown more of an
appetite for spreading ideals with the barrel of a gun than for namby-pamby
hearts-and-minds campaigns. A former French minister muses that the United
States is the last "Bismarckian power"the last country to believe that the
pinpoint application of military power is the critical instrument of foreign
policy.
Contrast that to the European Unionpioneering an approach based on civilian
instruments like trade, foreign aid, peacekeeping, international monitoring
and international lawor even China, whose economic clout has become its most
effective diplomatic weapon. The strongest tool for both is access to huge
markets. No single policy has contributed as much to Western peace and security
as the admission of 10 new countriesto be followed by a half-dozen moreto
the European Union. In country after country, authoritarian nationalists were
beaten back by democratic coalitions held together by the promise of joining
Europe. And in the past month European leaders have taken a courageous decision
to contemplate the membership of Turkey, where the prospect of EU membership
is helping to create the most stable democratic system in the Islamic world.
When historians look back, they may see this policy as being the truly epochal
event of our time, dwarfing in effectiveness the crude power of America.
The United States can take some satisfaction in this. After all, it is in
large part the success of the mid-century American Dreamspreading democracy,
free markets, social mobility and multilateral cooperationthat has made possible
the diversity of models we see today. This was enlightened statecraft of
unparalleled generosity. But where does it leave us? Americans still invoke
democratic idealism. We heard it in Bush's address, with his apocalyptic proclamation
that "the survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success
of liberty in other lands." But fewer and fewer people have the patience
to listen.
Headlines in the British press were almost contemptuous: DEFIANT BUSH DOES
NOT MENTION THE WAR, HAVE I GOT NUKES FOR YOU and HIS SECOND-TERM MISSION:
TO END TYRANNY ON EARTH. Has this administration learned nothing from Iraq,
they asked? Can this White House really expect to command support from the
rest of the world, with its different strengths and different dreams? The
failure of the American Dream has only been highlighted by the country's foreign-policy
failures, not caused by them. The true danger is that Americans do not realize
this, lost in the reveries of greatness, speechifying about liberty and freedom.
With Christian Caryl in Tokyo, Katka Krosnar in Prague, Mac Margolis in
Rio de Janeiro, Tracy Mcnicoll in Paris, Paul Mooney in Beijing, Henk Rossouw
in Johannesburg and Marie Valla in London
Published in the January 31, 2005 issue of Newsweek International
© Copyright 2005 Newsweek International