Speakers Corner Liberal Social

Um excelente artigo do Tony Judt de 2005, sobre 3 publicações que abordam as quaildades, e divergências entre a União Europeia e os Estados Unidos da América.

The United States of Europe: The New Superpower and the End of American Supremacy by T.R. Reid.

Free World: America, Europe, and the Surprising Future of the West
by Timothy Garton Ash

«For the EU today isn't just an interesting blueprint for interstate governance without the drawbacks of supranational sovereignty. Europe experienced the twentieth century— invasion, occupation, civil war, anarchy, massacres, genocide, and the descent into barbarism —to a degree unmatched anywhere else. The risks inherent in a "war of choice" (Iraq), or the abandonment of international agencies in favor of unilateral initiative, or an excessive reliance on military power, are thus clearer to Europeans than to most other peoples: "Europeans want to be sure that there is no adventure in the future. They have had too much of that." The United States, by contrast, had no direct experience of the worst of the twentieth century — and is thus regrettably immune to its lessons.»
(...)
"Globalization" isn't primarily about trade or communications, economic monopolies or even empire. If it were it would hardly be new: those aspects of life were already "globalizing" a hundred years ago. Globalization is about the disappearance of boundaries — cultural and economic boundaries, physical boundaries, linguistic boundaries — and the challenge of organizing our world in their absence. In the words of Jean-Marie Guéhenno, the UN's director of peacekeeping operations: "Having lost the comfort of our geographical boundaries, we must in effect rediscover what creates the bond between humans that constitute a community."

To their own surprise and occasional consternation, Europeans have begun to do this: to create a bond between human beings that transcends older boundaries and to make out of these new institutional forms something that really is a community. They don't always do it very well and there is still considerable nostalgia in certain quarters for those old frontier posts. But something is better than nothing: and nothing is just what we shall be left with if the fragile international accords, treaties, agencies, laws, and institutions that we have erected since 1945 are allowed to rot and decline — or, worse, are deliberately brought low. As things now stand, boundary-breaking and community-making is something that Europeans are doing better than anyone else. The United States, trapped once again in what Tocqueville called its "perpetual utterance of self-applause," isn't even trying.

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