State of the union

Published 28 February 2005

Why Europe Will Run the 21st Century Mark Leonard Fourth Estate, 170pp, £8.99 ISBN 0007195311 The Missing Heart of Europe Thomas Kremer The June Press, 254pp, £11.99

I read two books and I am bombarded with two visions of the Continent. In one, I see an oasis of enlightenment that others are desperate to emulate. In the other, I am confronted by a conformism and control from which I am desperate to extricate my country. If only either was true. Both books make compelling if in-complete accounts of our still unresolved relationship to the European Union.

Mark Leonard is the young man who brought us "cool Britannia". It was his phrase, and in those naive and bombastic first years of Blairism in action, his views were sought by a Labour government desperate for "modern" ideas as it approached the millennium. How quaint it all seems now. Leonard has recently quit as head of the ultramodern Foreign Policy Centre to join the more august Centre for European Reform. He remains a voice to be reckoned with.

Whatever he turns his mind to Leonard cannot help but exude enthusiasm. He regards as benign what he calls the "invisible Europeanisation of power" taking place across British politics. He draws some of his thinking from Emmanuel Todd, whose After the Empire: the breakdown of the American order, published just over a year ago, suggested that US military dominance was masking an inexorable imperial decline. It has now become fashionable to see China and India as future rivals to a declining United States. Leonard argues that the European Union, the most successful voluntary association of states in history, will play an increasingly important role as a pivot between these competing forces.

Leonard challenges head-on the conventional wisdom in the UK that Europe's more managed markets are economically damaging and socially debilitating. He responds with a succession of alternative statistics to the Blairites and Brownites who extol the virtues of the leaner and meaner US model. Taking into account Americans' longer working week, living standards in Europe are superior, he writes. If you add what he calls the "sunk costs" of a more unpredictable climate, inferior public services and greater inequality, west European earnings are greater. European capital investment in other parts of the world is at least as high, while many third countries are turning to the euro rather than the dollar for their currency reserves. The underlying message, more in keeping with France's intellectual tradition, is of a certain cultural superiority inherent in Old Europe. While America bombs its way around the world, Europe is engaged in what Leonard endearingly calls "the revolutionary power of passive aggression", using its clout more subtly, such as persuading Russia to sign the Kyoto Protocol.

The new multipolar world that Leonard is eager to embrace will, he says, revolve around regions. Europe, through its geography as much as anything else, will be well placed. He lists 109 countries of the Eurosphere, comprising the whole of Africa, the Middle East, the Balkans and the former Soviet states. In a disdainful aside to the neoconservatives and their Project for the New American Century, Leonard concludes that this process will lead to the emergence of a New European Century, "not because Europe will run the world as an empire, but because the European way of doing things will have become the world's".

Thomas Kremer is not young. He does not do hip. Born and raised in Transylvania, he was deported to Bergen Belsen, escaped to Switzerland and in 1945 emigrated to the land that emerged as Israel. A philosophy graduate of Edinburgh and the Sorbonne, he became involved in child psychology and then turned his talents to inventing games, including the Rubik's Cube. He has lived for decades in Devon. His background matters. Kremer is an avowed Anglophile. He admires what he calls "eccentric" countries such as the UK and others on the periphery of Europe that, in his eyes, promote individuality, and he abhors what he calls the collectivist approach of the Franco-German axis. He regards EU institutions as "undisciplined, corrupt, interfering, ineffective and power-hungry". He notes: "What holds the axis together is the desperation of the political establishment of both countries to hang on jointly to the levers of EU power."

There is more to Kremer than your average tweed-jacketed, Little Englander Eurosceptic. His background testifies to that. He is right to say that the magnificent achievements of European culture in the fields of philosophy, music, the law, language, literature, art and architecture "have their roots in individual societies with a sense of self-identity. To preserve the creative sources and cross-fertilisation of cultures it is vital not to merge the European nations into a standardised, politically homogenised state." But where is the evidence that Euro-creativity has been stifled by Euro-conformity? I don't see it anywhere, not in the UK, not in supposedly heinous France or Germany.

Perhaps what the debate really masks is a cultural battle between the metropolitan-cosmopolitan world of Europe's big cities that Leonard represents and the more sedate world that Kremer would like to inhabit. The reality, at the risk of sounding like a Blairite triangulator, is more prosaic than portrayed by either author. The EU is not the paradise described by the exuberant Leonard. Nor is it the purveyor of misery, as the ever-fearful Kremer suggests. There is much that is wrong with it, but it has brought a half-century of prosperity and peace. If it were not so popular and successful, would there be so many countries queuing up to join it?

John Kampfner's new book on the Labour government and Europe, Dangerous Liaisons, will be published by the Free Press in the autumn

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