With a new ice age gripping Britain and the United States, some see fairer skies over mainland Europe. Jeremy Rifkin's The European Dream is a veritable celebration of "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"--you get the idea. This is a truly dreadful book, which is too bad, since Rifkin's heart obviously beats on the left side of his chest. Badly written to the point of self-parody--"We became existential nomads, wandering through a boundaryless world full of inchoate longings in a desperate search for something to be attached to and believe in"--it is also very uninformed.

To Rifkin, his own country is a coercive melting pot; "the European Dream, by contrast, is based on preserving one's cultural identity and living in a multicultural world." Try telling that to a Muslim schoolgirl or an Orthodox Jewish teacher in France, forced to uncover their heads. Rifkin's Eurotopia of prosperous farmers, protected workers and environmental enlightenment might reflect his own social circle: "Almost everyone I know in Europe among the professional and business classes has some small second home in the country somewhere--a dacha usually belonging to the family for generations. While working people may not be as fortunate, on any given weekend they can be seen exiting the cities en masse." But it doesn't give him much of a handle on the destruction of local agricultural markets in Portugal or Greece, the exploitation of migrant labor in Spain, urban squalor in Scotland or the scale of environmental devastation in Poland and eastern Germany.

Rifkin's European Übermenschen are kind, gentle and terribly concerned about the Third World. Europe's $8 donation for each sub-Saharan African does look generous compared with American stinginess--less so in light of the $913 a head Europeans spend subsidizing their cows. Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schröder may be heroes of the antiwar movement, but part of the price of solidarity was German backing for French efforts to block reform of the Common Agricultural Policy--a system of subsidies paid mostly to wealthy West European farmers who then dump cheap food on Third World markets, driving out local producers. Germany also dropped many of its objections to a draft European Constitution whose author, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, is better known for accepting diamonds from a cruel Central African dictator than for progressive zeal. (Giscard's most recent claim on public attention was his pronouncement in Le Monde that if Turkey were allowed to join the EU, "in my opinion, it would be the end of Europe.")

If Europeans haven't quite built the cooperative commonwealth, what have they built? The EU, writes T.R. Reid, betraying just a hint of patriotic anxiety, already has "a president, a parliament, a constitution, a cabinet, a central bank, a bill of rights, a unified patent office, and a court system with the power to overrule the highest courts of every member nation. It has a 60,000 member army (or 'European Rapid Reaction Force' to be precise) that is independent of NATO or any other outside control. It has its own space agency with 200 satellites in orbit and a project under way to send a European to Mars before Americans get there."

As befits a reporter for the Washington Post, Reid follows the money. Mario Monti is hardly a household name even in London, but as the EU Director General for Competition he scuttled American management idol Jack Welch's biggest deal, a merger between GE (based in Connecticut) and Honeywell (headquarters in New Jersey). Last year Monti slapped Microsoft with a $600 million fine and ordered the firm to rewrite the Windows operating system. Far from the hidebound dirigiste cripple conjured by Mead or Kagan, Reid's "United States of Europe" is an economic superpower fully capable of challenging the USA. Indeed, the euro has already put the dollar in the shade. Reid, who headed Post bureaus in Tokyo and London, really earns his trench coat with his account of the European currency's unexpected triumph (Kissinger was famously dubious; George Will flatly predicted "it will not work").

Europe's other enormous achievement is a half-century of peace on what was once the killing floor of the West. Much of the credit may well be due to the cold war, and a lot of the rest to American aid and protection. Still, the growth of what the Germans call Zivilmacht--harder than Harvard professor Joseph Nye's "soft power," a muscular sense of civil society as a force in world affairs--is one fruit of Europe's long peace. The European social model is the other. Here again it is important to be clear on what that model is not--in a word, socialism. But the breadth of the European consensus, and a sense of how wide the Atlantic has become on these matters, can be seen when Reid quotes the leader of Norway's conservative Christian Democrats: "We have decided that raising a child is real work. And that this work provides value for the whole society. And that the society as a whole should pay for this valuable service. Americans like to talk about family values. We have decided to do more than talk; we use our tax revenues to pay for family values." And Norway isn't even in the EU!

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