Connectivity and Relatedness in European Life

I am reading and blogging about Jeremy Rifkin's book The European Dream: How Europe's Vision of the Future Is Quietly Eclipsing the American Dream. He talks a lot of about connectivity in Europe. U.S. law , society and politics seems to be guided by the 18th and 19th Century worhsipping of the autonomy of the individual. This leads to the belief that security comes from being autonomous, and autonomy comes from amassing property. This simplistic design leaves most U.S. citizens lacking a sense of community and a sense of belonging.

Rifkin explores how Europeans have dealt with the alienation and threat of narcissim that comes with modern society. He examines how Europeans find meaning through "connectivity," "relatedness" and "imbeddedness." I found several eamples of this myself in the way European countries organize their legal systems and in how professionals organize their life.

While U.S. politicians and judges seems always to be scared of "losing sovereignty" and attempt to find security through unilateralsim, this is the contrary to the approach of most countries and is quite ineffective and impractical. For example, take the wikipedia page of The Netherlands: "Among other affiliations the country is a founding member of the European Union (EU), NATO, OECD, WTO, and has signed the Kyoto protocol. With Belgium and Luxembourg it forms the Benelux economic union. The country is host to five international courts." For another example, take the page of Slovenia: "Slovenia is a member of the European Union, the Eurozone, the Schengen area, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, the Council of Europe, NATO, UNESCO, WTO, and UN." Such connectivity.

With that connectivity comes strength. Considering how quickly the toxic assets in the U.S. were exported to banks in other countries as well as the general international dimensions of finance and banking, people could never solve the problem by working through just one country. Mr. Obama understands this. That is why you see the G20 taking the lead here and Obama increasing U.S. partnerships in many areas.

The leaders (Merkel, Balkenende, Sarkozy, etc) of all the major European governments understand this. All three of those leaders are from the right of the political spectrum in their home countries. If conservatives in the U.S., with their knee-jerk anti-internationalism find themselves out of step with nearly all the other conservatives in the world, maybe they should re-evaluate their stance. If they truly believe that Obama or another person from the left who will rise is a radical communist/socialist/fascist, etc, then why wouldn't they want to set-up long-term stabilizing support networks from the same multi-national organizations that have been set-up specifically to assist each other in preventing authortarian leaders and new Hitlers from rising again in any of the member countries?

As for a more individual example, take one of my professors. He has studied and taught in Ther Netherlands, France, Germany, Italy, U.S., UK, and Canada. Currently, he teaches law in Maastricht and in Germany, he works in the administrative part of the University, he is a deputy justice on an appeals court here, as well as President of the Netherlands Comparative Law Association, board member of the International Association of Legal Science and co-founder and Editor-in-Chief of the Electronic Journal of Comparative Law, member of the international editorial board of the Russian Journal of Comparative Law, co-founder and member of the board of the Dutch Inter-University Foundation for the Study of European Private Law and member of the Collegio dei docenti del Dottorato in Studi giuridici comparati ed europei of Trento University (Italy). Wow, such connectivity and divided loyalties. This is the reality of the modern professional man/woman, and increasingly the same will be true for U.S. professionals as well.

Can this connectivity lead to prosperty, predictability and stability? Can people learn to work together on some projects when necessary and still maintain high levels of personal economic freedom? Well, I think you may find the answer here: "The Netherlands has one of the most free market capitalist economies in the world, ranking 12th of 157 countries according to the Index of Economic Freedom." This has gone hand-in-hand with the long-standing recognition by the Dutch people that certain projects require joint effort. They learned this long ago, not from Karl Marx (as is the common incorrect stereotype of European left countries in the U.S.), but from the weather. Since most of The Netherlands in below sea level, they learned that unless the people worked together on their shared problem of too much water, they would all have their property reduced to nothing. Literally. Simply approaching this problem individually just led to dumping water on your neighbour's lands endlessly. Thus, when one finds a good method of deciding which projects should be joint-efforts and which should be individual efforts, one can maintin strong individual freedoms and a sense of maning and connectivity to others.