America - Maybe Not So Different From Europe After All?

So argues UCLA historian Peter Baldwin in a highly interesting article in the British magazine, Prospect.

Two key excerpts:

Americans are also thought of as diehard individualists who live in a society of sharp elbows and an ethos of live and let live. They are imagined to be unusually anti-governmental in their political ideology; practically anarchists by European standards. Yet a Pew Foundation survey in 2007 found that proportionately fewer Americans worried that the government had too much control than did Germans and Italians, with the French at the same level and the British just a percentage point lower. And a higher percentage of Americans trust their government than all Europeans, except only the Swiss and the Norwegians (although no people, truth be told, demonstrate much faith in their elected representatives.)

But talk is cheap, and these findings may indicate desire as much as reality. The trust of Americans in their state apparatus, then, can be measured more concretely by their willingness to pay taxes. Unlike many Europeans, Americans pay the taxes required of them. Only in Austria and Switzerland are the underground economies as small. Tax avoidance is over three times the American level in Greece and Italy. The archetypal Montana survivalist—so beloved of the European media—holed up in his shack, determined to resist the government’s impositions, is as uncharacteristic of America as the Basque or Corsican separatist, ready to kill for his cause, is of Europe.

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If there is anything that most separates American society from Europe, it is the continuing presence of an ethnically distinct underclass. Even as other outsiders have successfully assimilated, the tragic resonances of slavery in the black urban ghettos of America continue to prevail. Indeed, take out the black underclass from the crime statistics and American murder rates fall to European levels, below those in Switzerland and Finland, and even squeaking in under Sweden. Child poverty rates, which are scandalously high in the US, fall to below British, Italian and Spanish levels if we look at the figures for whites only. PISA scores for American whites (ranking secondary school proficiency) come above every European nation other than Finland and the Netherlands. This is not to excuse the atrocious negligence with which the problems of racism have been dealt in the US. But it does suggest that, far more than any grand opposition of worldviews or ideologies, it is the still unresolved legacy of slavery that distinguishes—to the extent anything does—America from Europe. Whether Obama’s election will mark a turning point in this respect remains to be seen.

And if it is this distinct urban underclass that most distinguishes the US from Europe, Europeans should take notice. Europe’s birthrates have plummeted and immigration continues unabated. It is a demographic certainty that an ethnically and religiously distinct lower class in Europe will grow in the decades to come. Perhaps Europe will turn out to have been lucky. Having instituted universalist social policy, highly regulated labour markets and redistributive fiscal policy in the belief that it was all, so to speak, being kept “in the family,” Europe may weather the expansion of its social community. On the other hand, the social fabric may fray.

No one is arguing that America is Sweden. But nor is Britain, Italy, or even France. And since when does Sweden represent “Europe”—at least anymore than the ethnically homogenous, socially liberal state of Vermont does America? Europe is not the continent alone, and certainly not just its northern regions. With the entrance of all the new EU nations, it has just become a great deal larger. These new entrants are not just poorer than old Europe. They, like Europe’s many recent immigrants from Asia and Africa, are religious, sceptical of a strong state, unenthusiastic about voting and allergic to high taxes. In other words, from the vantage of old Europe, they are more like Americans. And so as Europe expands, the argument made here for western Europe—that the differences across the Atlantic have been exaggerated—will become irrefutable.