Europe's Vicious Circle

The latest book written by JeanJacques Servan-Schreiber, the brilliant and versatile founder and editor of the Paris weekly L’Express, is neither an intellectual nor a literary achievement; it is a sociological phenomenon. Its enormous success in Western Europe shows that ServanSchreiber has, once again, known how to tackle the right subject at the right moment. After years of experts’ discussions on the so-called technology gap between the United States and Western Europe, after many fragmentary debates about the benefits and drawbacks of American investments in Europe, after De Gaulle’s charges that linked such investments with America’s balance of payments deficit, and Gaston Defferre’s indictment of the Gaullist regime for allowing the economic take-over of France by the United States while waging a lonely fight against American political imperialism, the time had come for a blunt,

The American Challenge

by Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber (Atheneum, $6.95)

readable, and popular analysis of America’s industrial and technological challenge to Europe.

Servan-Schreiber has put together data and analyses from a large number of sources, including OECD reports, studies by American and European scholars, and memoranda from American research institutes, He has the talent for presenting his facts in striking, often sensational fashion: American industry in Europe might well become the third industrial power in the world — after the United States and the U.S.S.R.; nine tenths of America’s investments in Europe are financed by European resources — “We pay them so that they can buy us out.” He shows that those investments are mainly in strategic — that is, the most advanced — sectors, especially electronics, and that the short-term advantages for Europe would be offset by the long-term disadvantages of a quasi-colonial domination. Yet the main message of the book is an appeal to Western Europeans to meet the American challenge not by restrictive measures, but by a sort of collective political determination to reorganize European social relations, management habits, education systems, and political institutions in order to become competitive again. Nothing short of a federal European government capable of defining and applying a unified industrial policy, of encouraging the transnational concentration of industrial firms, of giving massive state aid to industry (especially for research and development) will suffice.

Servan-Schreiber’s book is both a sharp description and a demonstration of the European predicament. It is at its best in its critical passages: when he denounces the sclerosis of social structure and education in the nations of Western Europe; when he points out the fiasco of purely national attempts at competing with American firms (as in the case of computers) and the tribulations of purely cooperative undertakings between Western European states (as in the cases of the Concorde airplane and the space program); when he criticizes the absence of a sense of industrial dynamism not only in the French right but also in the French left, with its dislike of competition, its attachment to bureaucracy, and its “opium of revolution.” ServanSchreiber may be right in saying that America’s challenge is that of reason, science, and organization. But the remedies he suggests indicate that reason, science, and organization by themselves do not determine solutions to problems that go far beyond management techniques and involve value choices and deep changes in social behavior.

The real puzzle — to which he does not address himself—is why the resurgent European nations have failed to meet the American challenge. The familiar answer, so dear to Jean Monnet and George Ball, the excessively small size of the nation-state, is only part of the story. Sweden and Japan, discussed by Servan-Schreiber in two brief appendices, have met the challenge. The answer must be sought at a much deeper level — where one also finds some of the reasons why the nation-state has been so resilient and the progress of Western European integration so disappointing (for General de Gaulle is not the only, or even the main, factor here). There is no European sense of purpose in the new industrial age; as long as this sense has not appeared, within and across borders, the remedies recommended by Servan-Schreiber will be either irrelevant or beyond reach, for we are dealing here with issues that are not easily fixable by governmental or supranational fiat.

First, there is no agreement among Western Europeans concerning the type of society chat should be created out of the present system of managed capitalism. Servan-Schreiber’s ideal is America — he quotes from J. K. Galbraith’s analysis of the “technostructure” in the new industrial state with approval. But the fact is that many Europeans, among the intellectuals and the young especially, continue to object to the ideal of the “affluent society,” in which social justice, as they see it, is merely a haphazard by-product of the rate of economic growth, and the workers are “integrated” through powerful unions convinced of the supreme virtues of productivity; they want to build a different kind of social order (although they are far from agreeing on a model); their reaction is best summarized by the remark of JeanMarie Domenach, the director of the French monthly Esprit: “Why fight the American system outside, if it is in order to adopt it inside?” They want to preserve, or to recreate, a separate European identity, one less dominated by values of economic rationality and “cost effective” management, by the conviction that the proper means define the right ends. They would prefer either a consensus around a different ideal, or a society altogether less wedded to consensus and more geared to conflict and contest.

Second, even if Europeans, within their separate nation-states, should come to recognize the American model as the best —= even for the realization of their goals of social justice, democratization, and participation — the passage from the national sphere of action to the federal one would still depend on whether the separate governments could agree on a joint political role for Europe in the world. For a pooling of wealth, welfare, and technology on the scale demanded by Servan-Schreiber presupposes a political agreement on the purposes to which the common goods would be used — that is, an agreement on the common good; and a joint willingness to entrust a federal government with the definition of the common good is not likely to emerge as long as the national definitions are either as far apart or as confused as they are now.

Finally, and most profoundly, the reason for this unwillingness and for the incapacity to overcome the domestic uncertainties about a new kind of society is the very resilience of those obsolete forms of political and social organization that ServanSchreiber denounces. If these forms were more flexible, less incapable of reform, there would be fewer Europeans distrustful of the capitalist ideal (for to them, capitalism means the old European, not the new American industrial, state); it is a vicious circle. If these patterns were less deeply rooted, even though they fail to meet the demands of the new industrial age, then purely national reforms could eliminate them, or national governments could delegate the task to a supranational agency. But the present drama in Europe, the reason why the American challenge is resented but not met, lies in the following contradiction: there are, on the one side, certain rigidities (in management, in education, in the separation between science, industry, and research) that have become massive obstacles to both economic and social progress, and also the resistance to change of all those who have benefited for so long from those obsolete structures. There are, on the other side, all those who have been so deeply conditioned by those structures that, despite their hostility to them, they find it hard either to conceive of anything really different, or to go about trying to change them in the bureaucratic and inefficient ways which are the only ones they know, yet which perpetuate evil or distort change. The trauma of educational reform in Western Europe is exemplary: the old system collapses, but the governments are unable to impose a new one, because they have no clear idea of what it should be, and they are caught between the conservatism of the majority of the challenged educators and the negative revolt — sullen for most, violent for some — of the students. Servan-Schreiber is right to call the problem political; he is wrong to confuse so often political with governmental. It is, as the French would say, a problem of civilization — of collective imagination and will.

In order to get to the nirvana of the postindustrial age, Western European societies would have to knowhow to get beyond the bourgeois age; for the time being they live, prosperously but uneasily, between its impressive and vinelike grip and attempts — sometimes short-ranged, sometimes desperate—at loosening its hold and redirecting its branches. It is not surprising that American industry, untroubled by Europe’s past and by any doubts about purpose and future, should have known how to move in, and thus left the tied Europeans torn between admiration and resentment.