In Europe

a situation unparalleled in history.
    It was, at the same time, an unparalleled movement with regard to democratisation and human rights. During the last half-century, the Council of Europe, set up in 1949, developed into a pan-European organisation in this regard. The greatest success is the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. There, citizens can file actions directly against their state – uniquely in the annals of international law – for violations of human rights. And often enough, their claims are honoured. The Court's authority is enormous: its verdicts are legally binding, resonate throughout the legal systems of all affiliated states, and no one would dream of ignoring them.
    In addition, the unification was also the most important European process of modernisation since the Napoleonic regime in the early nineteenth century. At this moment, the EU comprises the largest economy in the world. According to estimates from the European Commission, some two and a half million jobs were created as a direct result of the further relaxation of internal borders in 1993. With the introduction of the euro, member states have finally been forced to put their own economic households in order. Thanks in part to the European markets, Italy has grown in the course of fifty years from an impoverished land into a prosperous nation. Something similar is taking place in Ireland: employment there has doubled in the last fifteen years, unemployment has almost disappeared, and for the first time in human memory the Irish are not emigrating to the United States, but are returning from there to their mother country. Within a single generation, Spain, with the help of a great many European facilities, has been transformed from an infirm dictatorship into areasonably modern country. In this regard, the latest expansion of the Union's membership has also been extremely successful: the economies of most of the new member states are growing faster than expected.
    The eyes of Asia have also been turned on the European experiment. In 1967, the first members of ASEAN (the Association of South-East Asian Nations) – Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand – committed themselves to form a ‘zone of peace, freedom and neutrality’. By 1999, all ten East Asian countries had joined that organisation. In 2001, the East Asian vision group, including Korea, Japan and China, published a series of recommendations which, if carried out, may lead to an Asian counterpart of the EU: the East Asian Community. There is even talk of the introduction of an Asian ‘euro’ somewhere around the year 2020.
    The success of the European model, despite the many problems, has also caught the attention of increasing numbers of Americans. Europe still cannot hold a candle to the dynamism, flexibility and energy of American society, but when it comes to quality of life the average citizen of the Old World – particularly its western regions – has quietly left his American cousin in the dust. Average life expectancy in Europe is longer, there is less poverty, daily life is safer, there is considerably more leisure and holiday time for all, one can – at least for the time being – retire much earlier, social security facilities are often more generous and, even in Slovenia, the infant mortality rate is lower. And with regard to modernisation of the infrastructure: today, in 2006, a high-speed train begins its trip between Paris and Lyon – lasting a little less than two hours – almost every thirty minutes, and nobody finds that remarkable. The one daily Amtrak service between San Francisco and Los Angeles, a comparable distance between comparable population concentrations, takes almost a full day, and plans for a high-speed line are no more than doodles on the drawing board.
    America is, in short, no longer Europe's shining example, not by any means. Almost unnoticed, we on this continent have taken a road completely our own.‘Europe,’ writes the American social-economic publicist Jeremy Rifkin, ‘had become a huge laboratory for rethinking humanity's future. In many respects, the European Dream is the mirror opposite of the American Dream. While the American Dream emphasises unrestrained economic growth, personal wealth and the pursuit of individualself-interest, the European Dream focuses more on sustainable development, quality of life and the nurturing of community.’
    No one foresaw the current EU. Who would have