We Europeans find a lot of news of the United States in our media. Many of us follow with interest, much puzzlement and relatively little understanding of the posturing, the insults, the exaggerations. Obama doesn’t look much like a socialist to us… But I was hurt the other day by the nameless Republican figure who sneered that Obama was trying to make the US more like Europe – but that Europe was 20 years behind. Behind what?
I believe that we should all be able to cultivate a healthy nationalism, a pride and love of country. But perhaps we all also need to work harder to work our way up the league tables, by learning from each other’s best practice. Take education. The United States objectively has much to learn here; her ‘end of term report’ reads much like my school reports: ‘Could do much better. Needs to try harder.’ (see UNICEF’s “big picture” comparison of the performance of schools in the world’s rich industrialized nations.) The US is close to the bottom of many league tables of school achievement. But who has got it right? Here in Europe, the Finns seem to have got a lot of things right, and apparently they’re rather overwhelmed by the visiting delegations wanting to pick up good tips. But I find that highly encouraging: clearly in some fields, we are getting more ready to look around and see what we can learn from those who seem to be doing better than us.
The second item in our family budget after the rent (Geneva is right in the top ten of the ‘most expensive places in the world to live’) is our compulsory private health insurance premiums. (Those who cannot pay can get state help, and when we were poorer, we received a subsidy.) We’re just going through the annual psycho-drama of how much more our premiums will be for next year. I was slightly worried when we heard some months back that there was an American delegation visiting to see what they could learn from our health care system. We get excellent health care, but we’d go a long way to pay less. We’re feeling here that our system is world class in the quality of care, but seriously costly. But perhaps here too, if we look around, we might be able to learn from others.
I’m far from an expert on these questions, but I find it hard to believe in a free market and competition in this field. We have 92 insurance companies competing for my custom, and I could change companies every year, trying to follow the best offers – to considerable administrative expense to the companies concerned. But I think of the 92 boards and CEOs, the headquarters buildings. Can that really be more efficient than one national system? But let’s look around and learn what we can from others.
The prevention of suicide, drugs policy, the range of areas where we might learn something from others is perhaps endless. And such a search could give us all pride in discovering the one or two things that we can offer to the wider world community that we’re really good at! I would argue that perhaps the most interesting thing to study in Switzerland is what the European Union calls ‘subsidiarity’. A rather barbarous word for a precious concept. Wikipedia says: ‘Subsidiarity is an organizing principle that matters ought to be handled by the smallest, lowest or least centralized competent authority. The Oxford English Dictionary defines subsidiarity as the idea that a central authority should have a subsidiary function, performing only those tasks which cannot be performed effectively at a more immediate or local level.’
Here in Switzerland it’s not just a concept. It’s lived out experience. Nothing is decided on a Cantonal level that cannot be better decided by the commune (ours, Avully, has 1,783 inhabitants), and the Cantons will only pass up to the national, federal level what they have to. The cantonal armies were converted into the federal army with the constitution of 1848. And we have a common national currency only since 1850. We only recently decided to harmonize the start of the school year between cantons a few years ago, and we’ve voted against creating a national police force…
But there’s still much that we can learn from others….
Please don’t open yourself to being hurt by anything an American Republican says about Europe. Republicans constantly disparage Europe precisely because the American people cannot be allowed to “learn anything from others.” They and their Democratic Party collaborators, over time, and with no effort spared, have made America a paradise for the wealthy and a debilitating run on a treadmill to hell for everyone else, and they won’t have it any other way.
Americans are inoculated against considering alternatives to the status quo via the Myth of American Exceptionalism–the erroneous belief that the U.S. is the greatest country on Earth, so great, in fact, that all others can only hope to emulate us. That measure of hubris invites its antidote: Nemesis, and one can sense her moving over our land and working her mischief as we speak.
In short, we’re doomed. And that’s a good thing, because I believe the American colossus will have to collapse before it can be renewed. Otherwise, our rotten, increasingly dysfunctional system will just continue to perpetuate itself in a long, slow, painful decline that, in its desperate efforts to save itself, may result in we Americans taking the rest of the world down with us.
The outlines of just such an outcome are already visible, aren’t they? Isn’t that part of the reason why we’re here? Hoping against hope that the spiritual progressives, the “sensible people” can somehow save our communities and our planet from destruction?
Wishing you well,
Peter
Please understand, Andrew, that much of our news is filtered. It is slanted to support a corporate agenda, in many cases. Andrew, I believe that we already have a plutocracy in place. Where do we go from here?
Our political campaigns are quite different from yours. Do you have campaigns where unknown donors give hundreds of millions of dollars to the candidate of their choice? This is what happened when Citizens United became the law. People become confused when bombarded with one TV ad after another, dissing the opposing candidate. Unless you start digging and doing your own research, it’s hard to know where truth ends and fiction begins.
Having said all that (and believing that we can learn a lot from Europe), I begin to get defensive and wonder if there’s anything positive than Europeans can say about us? After all, Europe, too, faces severe economic challenges. If history serves me correct, didn’t Great Britain abandon economic nationalism that had built up that nation and embrace the free-trade dogma of the nineteenth century and from what I can tell, Britain never recovered from its addiction to free trade and now the U.S. is following in her footsteps. Republicans unite with Democrats as they hurry to change U.S. laws to bring them in line with the WTO.
I also want to second what Peter said and that is that when comments about you are coming from American Republicans, you must consider the source. The attitude is “there’s nothing to learn from anybody else when we’re already #1.” Their corporate media news channels perpetuate this myth.
Sometimes I just want to believe that “This, too, shall pass.” We’ll turn a corner and this will pass as just a very difficult time in our history. Then I remember that all empires, all civilizations pass away. Nothing lasts forever. In our time, empires collapse more suddenly than they did in the past. Is it just a tough time or the beginning of the end for this American empire?
Andrew I’ve noticed the anti European bias among a good many posts from Americans. It was good to read the posts from Peter & Elaine. Its not often on the net that I see Americans who will give credit where it’s due & also recognise that there are problems with the American political system. Most Americans feel that anything worthwhile has naturally emanated from the US. If it isn’t US manufactured or designed then it is undoubtedly inferior.The European Airbus aircraft are generally criicised as inferior. No US airlines use an Airbus. In addition to those disparaging views the aircraft is belittled because the Airbus company was originated with government funding so that it would give the Europeans the economic clout to be able to compete with the large US aviation companies. None of the European aircraft builders were big enough to go it alone. It was also very apparent that when the demise of the Concorde occurred the glee of many Americans was very apparent. It was clear that they didn’t like non Americans having a supersonic aircraft. Europe is seen as socialistic because of similar subsidies to industry designed to help them get started. Undoubtedly there are other subsidies in Europe that have been ongoing for many years such as the agricultural subidies but the same subsidies are provided to US farmers much to the disgust of Australian and New Zealand farmers who have to compete unaided against the inefficient US agricultural industry. Most Americans choose to ignore that fact
You will see plenty of hypocrisy in what many Americans post on the net. Just accept the fact that with the economic crisis descending on the US they will be struggling too much to claim any superiority. With their curency being so devalued & the competiton from Asia for energy the cost of imports will seriously impact on their economy & standard of living for decades.
I agree with Peter when he says “In short, we’re doomed. And that’s a good thing, because I believe the American colossus will have to collapse before it can be renewed”
Thanks to Andrew Stallygrass for sharing a few good ideals for growth of best practices in governance.
I believe in Andrews offering of always using the least central authority to administer codes, mores, laws and social guidelines. The smaller the group of thinkers, the larger the intellectual freedom of the group as regards representing the peoples interests apart from special interests.
The best practice path of sharing good methods of stewardship as regards public needs, changes in structures and mores to suit the average sentiments of the populace while considering dissenting views compassionately is an age old system that keeps central authority at bay while local authority and consensus built by discourse solves problems at the social level rather than at the higher administrative level .
Leadership of, for and by the people is of, for and by the people, not over their heads or out of their range of reach so to speak, but within the hearts of those whose lives are most effected by legislations, police actions and or mandates of consumption made by special interests which rob the coffers of people and their communities . In the US it is Insurance which is the chief armed robber, medical care mega barons the gluttons of our day and their masterful manipulators the press, bankers and investment house which encourage speculation on bets as regards the profits of such mega corporations. When laws, candidates for office, social tomes, foreign policy and domestic needs are assayed and assesed by the barons of wealth appropriation it will always be their way to place undo burdens upon their clientel or populous and relieve their own burdens to perpetuate their wealth growth in egotistical fashion, alway keeping the money in the family, which we the people seem to be excluded from.
The best practice is that which makes the people happy, allows them room to earn their keep and participate in their own governance as much as possible without paying into systems which benefit them not or actually harm them such as investments out of payroll which go deep south when the rains come, leaving the pensions, investments and middle earth saving in the hands of robber barons who say they want smaller government but know that truthfully they want private control over the populace and their monies.
Switzerland is in many ways the most conservative country in Europe, one in which ethnic divisions, great per capital wealth and the success in staying out the two World Wars explain its history.
The Republicans have been at war with what the see as the “European welfare state” (which they saw the New Deal leading to) since the end of WWII, a war that they associated with the larger cold war(“creeping socialism” inspired by either dupes or agents of “international communism” inside the Roosevelt and Truman administrations).
Telling Republicans that systems of socialized medicine have worked very well and have sharply reduced costs throughout Western Europe for generations, that public housing, education, and transportation social subsidies have produced more efficient work forces and a far better quality of life the the overwhelming majority of people througout the developed countries is a little like telling Nazis that their race theory is unscientific and socially destructive since it deprives society of the skills of excluded and persecuted groups.
What has to be done politically is to resist their initiatives and also to offer serious alternatives to their policies