Science and technology are at the heart of a new culture war - pitting America's exuberance against Continental conservatism. Can we talk?
It's not easy being Europe in the 21st century. Just ask anyone: The United States is leaving the Old Continent behind again - this time to wallow in technological anachronism. In their disarmingly frank style, many Americans look across the Atlantic and mutter, "What a bunch of losers." Europe, they say, appears bent on confounding individual endeavor at every opportunity. The familiar list of complaints goes on: excessive state interference in all walks of life; punitive tax regimes; a pervasive envy of the rich and famous; and that oh-so-infuriating condescension.
The culture war has been brewing for the last decade. But how much did Europe and America ever have in common? The Soviet Union was the glue that bound together the two halves of NATO; since the Soviet Union's collapse, we have come to realize that the idea of shared cultural values between Europe and America is, mostly, an illusion.
Just as Americans see Europeans as hopelessly stodgy, many Europeans really do believe Americans are uncultured, even if the sentiment is buried under layers of patronizing rhetorical fluff. Ostentatious wealth is considered gaudy, while state intervention is often seen as a matter of conscience, not economics. Affluent societies have a moral duty to collect substantial taxes to assist the disadvantaged - the American health system, for example, is regarded as downright offensive, excluding a huge underclass from all but the most basic medical care.
European foreign-policymakers angrily accuse their American counterparts of being insufferably stupid for buying into a Hollywood-inspired fantasy like the National Missile Defense system. And European consumers are horrified by what they see as American complacency and ignorance over the potential hazards of genetically modified foods; in general, the uninhibited exploitation of nature is much more widely accepted in the US than it is in Europe.
While the transatlantic bickering and ridiculing continue, something interesting is happening on the ground: High tech and biotech clusters of immense energy and potential are mushrooming throughout Western Europe. The region boasts a young entrepreneurial class - hugely committed and highly educated - that is fashioning the core of what will be the most powerful trading entity in the world. The population of the European Union already stands at 375 million. This will increase over the next decade by a minimum of 60 million, as the first applicant countries from Eastern Europe are granted membership. Within two decades, the European market will be more than twice the size of America's.
Silicon Fen, in Cambridge, England, is now the second largest venture capital market in the world. As Hermann Hauser, the doyen of Cambridge VCs, puts it, "You ain't seen nothing yet!" His company, Acorn, founded in 1978, produced Britain's first PCs and went on to spawn a number of other new ventures. "If you add up the value of just three - ARM, Virata, and Autonomy - you have about $2 billion in vested and unvested options," Hauser enthuses. Much of this capital, he predicts, will be plowed back into new Cambridge businesses. "This will have a more important effect on companies in Cambridge than any venture capital, or any government initiative that might put $20 million here, $50 million there. A substantial part of the $2 billion will be recycled. All these planning assumptions that people have made are far too conservative."
Similar stories can be heard in Stockholm, Munich, Milan, Toulouse, and other European centers. Yet even more remarkable than the success of these clusters is their nearly total invisibility. Cambridge is the fastest-growing and most affluent city in the United Kingdom and home to its highest concentration of billion-dollar-plus companies. But the city's achievements receive no regular coverage in the British press. Public awareness of this rich and brave new world is negligible.
This apparent lack of interest in the new economy is a pattern repeated throughout Europe, although it is especially marked in the big three: Britain, France, and Germany. Change is happening. But Europe's innate conservatism has made it a recalcitrant host to the rapid transformation sweeping the globe. Among the most stubborn European traditions are a veneration of the state, an obsession with national identities and borders, and, most critical at this juncture, a suspicion of - not to say hostility toward - science and technology.
__Son of Frankenstein __
Instead of looking ahead to life on Mars or a disease-free world, Europeans look back into history, to episodes of destruction that could too easily be repeated.
Popular suspicion of technological and scientific progress in Europe began in the early 19th century, a period of epochal change that gave birth to the industrial city, with its wondrous Blake-ian monsters, its satanic mills housing vast, never-before-seen mechanisms and promising untold wealth for their owners. Central to the new ideology of Progress was the separation of the sciences into individual branches, each comprehensible on its own terms, and each contributing to a rational explanation of how the world functioned. It was at this moment that an 18-year-old named Mary Shelley began writing her 1818 novel, Frankenstein.
The impact of the industrial revolution on Shelley and her contemporaries was certainly comparable to the changes modern Europe is experiencing today. Shelley described her antihero, Victor Frankenstein, as a "modern Prometheus" who sought to acquire "new and almost unlimited powers" by sending an electrical charge through a patchwork of dead body parts. As an atheist, Shelley was concerned not about Frankenstein's challenge to God's order but to a Rousseau-esque natural order (in this she was an early environmentalist). She feared the application of science outside moral constraints. At the time, the question she posed regarding scientists' manipulation of life was, of course, pure fantasy. Today, it looks to many Europeans to be remarkably prescient.
Shelley's hugely popular book set the tone for many 19th-century novels and plays, especially in Germany and Britain, that portrayed science as the ruthless hammer of capitalism. Some, like Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, were simply misinterpreted as attacks on science. But others embraced the new disciplines: The naturalist movement expounded by Émile Zola and Henrik Ibsen attempted to create art using scientific methods of empiricism and an almost laboratorial reconstruction of social and psychological reality, while Jules Verne introduced to a mass audience the imminent possibility of space travel and an investigation of the Earth's core.
Despite its trepidation, Europe had a tradition of popular fascination with science, expressed in the proliferation of lectures and pamphlets on every conceivable subject - dinosaurs, industrial engineering, anatomy, medicine, exploration, and, above all, theories of evolution - and in the celebrity of such diverse theoreticians as Michael Faraday, Karl Marx, Charles Darwin, and Alfred Nobel.
Faraday, a noted professor of chemistry whose public talks at the Royal Institution of Great Britain were enormously successful, refused to participate in the preparation of poison gas for use in the Crimean War, establishing a strong precedent for scientists with a conscience. And, after wrestling with the philosophical implications of a family fortune made selling war matériel during the Crimean conflict and his own invention of dynamite, Nobel endowed five prizes, notably one for the greatest contribution to "fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses."
So, like Jekyll and Hyde, the European mind was split: One half dreamed of a Promethean victory over the gods, the other half feared their vengeful wrath.
The wrath came in cataclysmic doses, in the shape of two world wars whose cause, epicenter, and chief victim was Europe. Europeans were, of course, spared the ultimate nightmare of the atomic bomb (built chiefly by European eacute;migrés in the US), but they suffered an incomparably higher rate of death than the Japanese. Weapons technology tore the Continent to shreds, bequeathing a legacy of social conservatism that mystifies those without direct experience of the carpet bombing of civilians or occupation. As a result, many Europeans hold in contempt a scientific community that habitually disclaims moral responsibility for the consequences of research. The largest postwar protest movements in Europe were the campaigns against nuclear weapons and nuclear power.
Another manifestation of science's potential for evil had begun to reveal itself toward the end of the 19th century with the emergence of social Darwinism. In the biological sciences, this idea mutated into eugenics - the doctrine that society could weed out weaker, less able beings through selective breeding and genetic manipulation. Eugenics and social Darwinism were fashionable for several decades in both the United States and Europe. But it was in Mein Kampf that Hitler fused them into a coherent, fatuous, and destructive theory that he later tested on all manner of "imperfect" humans.
The Nazis' elevation of eugenics to the status of a science appeared to confirm Mary Shelley's worst fears. And the horrifying experiments performed in the Third Reich were not, it seemed, the unique behavior of mad scientists working under an insane regime. In the 1950s, British and American doctors exposed a practice widespread in the public hospitals of both countries: Babies were routinely being used as guinea pigs for vaccination trials without parental permission. No wonder there was a sense in postwar Europe that, on some level, science was out of control.
The British historian Michael Burleigh, for one, has warned against using the legacy of eugenics to discredit scientific progress. "Nazism invested natural laws with religious authority, so it is simpleminded to blame something so nebulously Hegelian as the 'spirit of science,' or indeed the technocratic character of modern medicine, for the inhuman policies of Nazi Germany." Yet the specters of Hitler and Mengele hover grimly behind the debates in Europe about gene manipulation and genetically modified organisms. The prospect of insurance companies demanding access to an individual's genetic information before issuing a policy smacks of Nazism to many Europeans. Dolly may have been cloned in Scotland, but the idea of human cloning is met with widespread revulsion here.
Thus, Europe's biotech innovators are operating in the middle of an ideological battleground. When a group of British doctors and researchers argued for further research on cloning human-embryo stem cells to advance the science of organ and limb replacement, theologian Klaus Berger urged German scientists to reject such work, drawing specific parallels to the Nazi eugenics program: "They also used the argument now being put forward that if we weren't to do it, then the Russians or Americans would."
The old fear of Frankenstein/Hitler has been fertilized by other, more revolutionary traditions. With the exception of the Basque paramilitary organization ETA, the most active terrorist units in Europe are operated by militant animal-rights campaigners. "They choose countries where prevailing social attitudes are permissive of strong protest, like Denmark or other Scandinavian countries," explains Crispin Kirkman, director of Great Britain's BioIndustry Association. "Then they take the same form of protest to a bigger country, like the UK."
Biotech demands a stable investment environment, but in Europe, any research involving animal experimentation is high risk. "The most serious effect for the industry is indirect, because of the way in which the Home Office manages the licensing procedures for doing animal work," says Mark Bodmer of Lorantis, a biotech firm in Cambridge specializing in immunology research. "To do even rather low-level small-animal work, you need licenses of three sorts concurrently. You have to have the personal licenses for the animal handler, the site license, and a project license, which defines what's going on. These things are administratively cumbersome. Rightly or wrongly, it's an effect of the animal-rights lobby that there's this highly bureaucratic system for regulation."
Nowhere is the popular hostility more pronounced than in the campaign against genetically modified organisms. Organic produce is steadily taking over the fruit and vegetable departments of supermarkets, and one major British chain, Iceland, announced last year that it would sell only organic produce. Within the World Trade Organization, this flat rejection of GM foods is already causing tension between the United States and the EU, as European countries refuse point-blank to import foods generally accepted on the other side of the Atlantic.
Mistrust and even ignorance of science is prevalent not just among ordinary people but among intellectuals as well, as Frank Schirrmacher, publisher of Germany's venerable Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, has discovered. At the heart of the famously archconservative FAZ is the feuilleton page, where Germany's intellectuals have long debated obscure points of 19th-century philosophy, the German soul, and the cultural legacy of Christendom. Recently, however, Schirrmacher stunned his public and many colleagues by turning this forum over to vigorous discussions of science and technology from America, including articles by Ray Kurzweil, Craig Venter, and Bill Joy. Schirrmacher says that FAZ's translation of Joy's April 2000 Wired essay, "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us," stirred by far the greatest response, both pro and con.
"We had the feeling that no one in Germany really knew what was going on in high tech and biotech," Schirrmacher explains. "There was no magazine here that reflected the reality of what was going on in the world, but when we printed Bill Joy's essay, the impact was so big that it became clear how badly this was needed." Schirrmacher's innovation has caused an uproar among German intellectuals, who have accused him of lowering the tone of the feuilleton. "At least it means I get through it quicker," scoffed Joachim Fest, perhaps the greatest living German historian, while an old-guard FAZ editor blurted out apoplectically: "This has nothing to do with culture whatsoever!" Across Europe, except in specialist magazines like Britain's New Scientist or Nature, one finds few of the detailed, well-written pieces on scientific and high tech research that appear regularly in The New York Times and The Washington Post.
In the spirit of Faraday and Darwin, Schirrmacher believes that addressing and embracing science and technology is a matter of survival. While he shares the concerns of many fellow Europeans about gene manipulation and cloning, that is all the more reason, he argues, for open, unprejudiced discussion. "The last public discourse about science was over the issue of nuclear power stations - 20 years ago!"
__The State We're In __
At first glance, the most powerful brake on Europe's embrace of the new economy appears to be the state. But that appearance is deceptive. Like so much in modern European culture, the state's pervasive presence emerged as a direct consequence of World War II. By 1945, people had lost patience with a system that delivered only bloodshed and class conflict. Near the end of the war, to head off internal unrest after troops were demobilized, the British government hastily drew up plans to provide universal health care and unemployment benefits. Elsewhere in Europe, the United States moved to prop up capitalism, thereby securing its largest overseas market; through the Marshall Plan, America pumped billions into the Continent (although its returns were handsome). The deal was the same across Western Europe: In exchange for political cooperation from its people, the state would provide them with housing, health care, and security in old age. And to pay for these benefits, governments would need to collect a lot of taxes.
This postwar pact remains immensely important - condemning it as anachronistic misses the point. As Cambridge's Hermann Hauser, no friend of state intervention, puts it, "The American instinct is to always vote for the individual: It's much safer to have the gun in the hands of an individual than to have the guns in the hands of the government. We tend to think the other way around. We feel secure with the government. The government protects you rather than the government being an institution that you need to be suspicious of."
Yet with Darwinian panache, Europe's entrepreneurs have adapted to the most troublesome bureaucratic obstructions. The starkest example can be found in the Continent's poorest and least developed nation, Albania. In the early 1990s, this mountainous country at the mouth of the Adriatic emerged as a total wreck from almost complete communist isolation. For almost half a century, people hadn't sneezed without the state's say-so. When it was exposed to the harshest light of capitalism (the crushing effect of a national pyramid scheme) in the summer of 1997, Albania's infrastructure collapsed and, for several weeks, literal anarchy reigned. Most of the population continues to live at subsistence level in a punishing climate. The state has reconstituted itself, but the degree of corruption is so intense that it is almost impossible for private enterprise to turn a profit.
Albania OnLine has thrived amid this chaos. Now the largest ISP (of 10) in Albania, it has more than 4,000 subscribers. After three years, the company is ready to break even, with unprecedented returns on an original investment of $300,000. While industrial production requires machines and vehicles that can sit rusting at the docks for months or years when bureaucrats fail to deliver on the bribes paid them by struggling businesses, Albania OnLine operates beneath the state's radar. "I enjoy an enormous advantage over other businesses - the bureaucrats simply do not understand my work," says Ylli Panariti, the ISP's 40-year-old chief. "All I have to do is import one server and I can start working. Because they cannot actually see an end product, they do not believe that the business has any value."
To get up and running, Panariti did have to bribe engineers at the state phone company, Albtel, and found himself unhappily dependent on its notoriously unreliable telephone grid. "Only 10 percent of the population has access to telephone lines and there are no links to the provinces," he says. Wireless technology solved both of Panariti's problems. Without paying kickbacks, Albania OnLine is servicing an increasing number of customers through a series of satellite and wireless points strategically stationed throughout the capital, Tiranë. As a result of its endemic corruption and primitive infrastructure, Albania - Europe's third world - is leaping into the forefront of wireless Internet connection.
Indeed, high tech is having its most dramatic impact on the periphery of Europe. Both Sweden and Ireland, for example, have embraced the new economy with zeal, though their chosen paths have yielded very different results.
Carl Bildt, Sweden's youthful prime minister in the early 1990s, grasped the implications of information technology almost as soon as he took office. He established a government commission, which in 1994 published a comprehensive report, "Wings to Human Ability," that set out a blueprint for wiring the nation. It was an unmistakably Swedish vision. As an economic liberal, Bildt recognized that this powerful motor would be fueled by the private sector. But as a Swede, he understood there was a social dimension to IT that he could not ignore either politically or morally. Therefore, his government emphasized the need to involve the education sector, and to ensure that groups such as the unemployed had equal access. "Everyone everywhere must be able to use information technology," the commission reported. It also stressed that IT should be used to promote Swedish culture and language - this in a country where a large part of the population speaks excellent English and has no hang-ups, as do the French, about its penetration into their vocabulary.
The Swedes have been as good as their word, integrating high tech into every area of their modified social welfare system - from schools to homes for the elderly, from Stockholm's innovative science park to snowbound villages in the north - in keeping with Scandinavia's utopian social ideals. High tech and biotech startups have been funded with both private and public capital, but the government has one of the highest R&D budgets in all of Europe.
The Irish experience stands in stark contrast. Its starting point was as far from Scandinavian affluence as one could get in Northern Europe. Until the late 1980s, the country's rural, subsistence economy was buckling under a massive foreign debt; its main export was people. Poverty and a suffocating social system drove hundreds of thousands into humiliating exile in the betting shops and construction sites of London, Liverpool, and Birmingham.
Inside a decade, the old Ireland has disappeared from view. In 1996, the government launched a program of modernization that embraced the American model of low taxes and high internal investment. Since then, this country of more than 3.6 million people has become the largest producer of software in the world. Economic growth rates have shot off the charts. Students and workers from the countryside and from the rest of Europe are pouring into Dublin, Limerick, and Galway to take up places in the technical colleges spawned by a carefully planned government education policy.
With quiet pride, the Irish have finally discarded the inferiority complex that always dogged their relationship with the old colonial master. Ireland is now importing British construction workers to build the factories commissioned by Microsoft and Intel. Soon there may be a string of jokes about thick English brickies, a happy payback for the volumes of sneering Irish jokes in which many English have delighted.
But the disruption to Irish culture has been extreme. While chronic poverty, mass emigration, and the straitjacket of the Catholic church have been flung onto the rubbish heap of history, new problems have followed. The once sleepy capital of Dublin is choked with traffic every day. Gangs of racist thugs target refugees who have flocked there in search of Ireland's increasingly mythical hospitality. With a flood of American and Irish yuppies driving up housing prices, there has been a dramatic rise in urban and rural homelessness.
To my mind, the social advances clearly outweigh the negative consequences, but inside the country, the transformation has touched on the delicate question of identity. Has Ireland merely replaced one master, the British, with another, the Americans? And is there a growing disconnect between the country's past and its future?
Some see Ireland's dependence on the US as unhealthy, and that view is sparking an anti-American backlash. "We are one huge aircraft carrier for American software in Europe," notes Brian Trench, a senior lecturer in communications at Dublin City University. "On board we have a crew of Portuguese, Turks, Hungarians, pumping out software in their languages for the local European markets." Irish intellectuals express the fear that the Celtic Tiger is cannibalizing its own traditions, manufacturing and marketing stereotypes of a culture that was once as influential and vibrant as any in Europe. "Riverdance has now moved ahead of U2 as Ireland's most lucrative cultural export," author John O'Mahony wrote recently. "Overall, the dynamic is not unlike the one that has colonized downtown Dublin with fake Irish pubs, whose emeraldy, signposty, plastic ambience proved such a huge hit in Manhattan that it was then reimported back into Ireland, widely supplanting the authentic item that inspired them."
No such angst accompanied Sweden's great leap forward during the 1990s, because Stockholm paid close attention to the local tradition of social responsibility. The importance of maintaining a national or regional identity during a time of tremendous economic and technological upheaval is not mere Eurobabble. "Information technology brings with it social problems," warns Edmund Stoiber, minister-president of the state of Bavaria. "Electronic nomads will begin to wander throughout the world but they will never feel at home. We are open to technological developments. But at the same time, we must preserve our traditions and values in order to give the people of Bavaria a clear sense of identity."
Government initiatives promoting high tech and biotech now proliferate throughout Europe. Yes, many betray the hallmarks of bumbling incompetence and chronic bureaucratization. But nothing testifies more eloquently to the possibility of the state acting as midwife to the new economy than Bavaria's magical transformation. With 15 percent of Germany's population, the state is home to 35 to 40 percent of the country's IT and biotech industries. It has distributed roughly $5 billion in grants, loan guarantees, and direct investment to entrepreneurs, schools, and colleges throughout the region.
Stoiber's massive program, dubbed the High Tech Initiative, matches every dollar plowed in from the outside, making shrewd use of money from the privatization of Bavarian state companies that began in the early 1990s. Most provincial German governments squandered such revenues on short-term current account fixes; and in Britain, the massive windfalls from privatization went mostly to shareholders and managers. By contrast, Stoiber has taken an economy that was dominated by agriculture and a few megaliths like Siemens and BMW, and turned it into a home for vanguard startups in every sphere.
__Borderline Behavior __
With the European Union, the Continent now has common laws, a shared (albeit somewhat hazy) moral vision, a single currency, and a real political identity. A little history is essential to appreciate what a spectacular sea change this represents. Until 1945, the mutual loathing between the Germans and the French was as intense as the bitterness between Palestinians and Israelis today. European nations were obsessed with their differences. Each felt threatened by its neighbors, and each new generation of Europeans expected to go to war against other Europeans. Asserting the right to be a Czech, an Italian, or a Norwegian was not just a matter of pride but ultimately one of survival. Cooperation wasn't a dirty word in Europe - it wasn't in the dictionary.
Any laptop user traveling in Europe can testify to the dogged legacy of this separatism. As late as the 1980s, it had yet to occur to European governments that standardizing telephone jacks and electric plugs could save everyone a lot of money and grief. Every country insisted on manufacturing its own idiosyncratic design. If you want to log on from different European countries, you still need a toolbox full of leads and adapters. The EU was designed to stop Europeans from killing one another, but almost as a byproduct it has brought about an unimagined technical and economic cogency (though countries such as Britain continue to revel in their eccentricities).
The multiple systems that have stunted the cellular phone industry's development in the US are a consequence of America's individualist obsession with economic competition. In Europe, cultural diversity and big government (on paper, a recipe for disaster) have actually combined to produce a spectacular success. "We Scandinavians spotted the value of mobile technology long before anyone else," explains Carl Bildt. "We invested in it, and persuaded the rest of Europe to adopt a common tech standard." Bingo! For once, Europe's countless commissions, committees, and parliaments operated in harmony with its business interests. The results have been staggering: Vodafone, Ericsson, Nokia, Telefonica. The auction of G3 broadband frequency licenses is generating billions of dollars in state revenue (as a consequence, the French and German governments have recently announced massive cuts in corporate taxes, releasing a new-economy trickle-down), and the cost of wireless devices to consumers is dropping rapidly.
Such moves toward standardization reveal how the European Commission, the EU's unelected but powerful government body, is steadily eroding the sovereignty of member states. Despite the obvious economic and technological benefits, this has brought resistance, sometimes fierce, from those who worry that their national identity and traditions will be swallowed up by a huge bureaucratic entity, the United States of Europe. These are uncertain times for the people of Europe. Where do their primary loyalties lie - do they consider themselves British, German, and Italian? Or are they Europeans? Already, a generation of young cosmopolites shows far less regard for national borders or identity, speaking a fluent, idiomatic American English and breezing in and out of Athens, Nuremberg, and Warsaw much like Americans travel from Miami to Chicago to Minneapolis.
So the new economy is hitting Europe in the middle of a profound crisis of identity. Europeans have always linked social stability to a clear sense of their individual national heritage and, more recently, to an equitable distribution of resources. They defend these traditions like terriers - the French, for example, take to the streets as a mob if there is the merest hint that their welfare system is under review.
The recent decision of a French court to impose punitive fines on Yahoo.fr if it failed to restrict access to sites selling Nazi memorabilia on Yahoo.com is a minor example, but one that proves the point. "The French government has to understand that we are working in a frontierless environment and that they can't apply laws that are applicable only within that country," says Fabiola Arredondo, the managing director of Yahoo Europe. "They aren't going to be able to reach across borders." Her position is reasonable, but it doesn't address the fact that the legal action enjoyed substantial popular support in France.
Europe's burgeoning Internet culture is about to provide an important clue to the Continent's future identity. Usage within the EU surged from 18 to 28 percent in 2000. Patrice Schneider, managing director of Netscape Europe, admits that nobody yet knows how Europeans will use the Internet, but he dismisses the fear that they will become hypnotized by an online glut of American culture.
"If you look at the biggest system in America, AOL," he notes, "it's geared to an aggregated audience, putting advertising in front of them, basically like TV." That may be attractive to a minority in Europe - the Finns, for instance, already spend a tremendous amount of time in front of the "white plastic box." (If you lived in Finland, land of snow and seasonal affective disorder, so would you.) But the idea of surfing the Net when you could be sitting on the Campo in Siena sipping a glass of averna is not only ludicrous to Italians, it might strike even American geeks as faintly ridiculous. Arredondo jests that Europeans "have lives ... they actually have hobbies, personal interests that they pursue. Consequently, what we've seen in the early days is that when they are on the Web, they actually spend less time than their counterparts in the US."
With Gallic passion, Schneider uses his favorite subject - food - to argue that Europeans will want to use the Net for convenience. "If I convince you I could stop you going to the supermarket for the rest of your life to get water, beer, everything that's heavy, giving you more time to go to the market and smell the fish you are going to buy" (he seizes an imaginary monkfish and breathes in its aroma lovingly), "as a weirdo European, I know you are going to say, 'Yes! I'm going to take time out of shopping ... to go shopping.' That is what will happen here."
Schneider believes this cultural difference has far-reaching political implications: "No, say the Europeans, the Net is not in the first instance a moneymaking thing. An online model that is solely generated at escalating shareholder value does not promote democratic values that benefit the community. Two key players, Blair and Jospin, the prime ministers of Britain and France, insist that this is not a business tool - it is something that will permeate society."
The EU has specifically identified the Net as a key instrument in bolstering social, education, and health policy - in other words, as an adjunct to the welfare state. Entrepreneurs can't simply wish away Europe's core structures, good or evil. The power of the huge nationalized phone companies, for example, may make life considerably more difficult for Net-based enterprises. But as Schneider says, "Sure, telephone companies are nationalized here and they have power. Yes! And they cheat the community. Yes! So what?! You just have to get on with it."
__Threats Without, Threats Within __
While many of Europe's problems are relatively tractable, there is one - the greatest challenge facing the region - that can be solved only by a fundamental shift in attitude: the conflict between immigration and national identity.
The identities of individual European countries rest upon opaque mixtures of historical and racial mythologies. Notwithstanding the Holocaust, German-ness is still defined by blood - if you can prove that you are a Volksdeutsche, you are entitled to citizenship. For outsiders to become French citizens, they must renounce ties with their original culture and accept the French constitution and, above all, the French language. Europe's nation-states are ancient, powerful entities whose traditions exert a significant pull on their citizens, especially on the white, indigenous communities.
Earlier this year, the government of Chancellor Gerhard Schröder discovered that Germany suffered from a chronic shortage of skilled high tech workers. There were 75,000 vacancies for IT workers in the country and only 10,000 Germans with the requisite qualifications. The government proposed handing out fast-track visas to 20,000 Indians and other immigrants with the desired skills. The response was deeply disturbing. "Kinder statt Inder " (children not Indians), thundered Jürgen Rüttgers, head of the conservative Christian Democrats in northwestern Germany. The failure of his crude racist campaign was a sign of progress. But though the government is now actively seeking high tech immigrants, those precious IT talents have turned their backs on Germany - not surprisingly, they would rather go to America.
Germany is not alone in its anti-immigrant mood. Egged on by the media, mainstream politicians in Britain feel free to use xenophobic rhetoric, warning against "a flood of refugees." In Austria, Jörg Haider's extreme right-wing Freedom Party has joined the government, and in Spain and Italy there has been a resurgence in murders and intimidation of foreigners.
This is a major concern for those Europeans wishing to promote and embrace the new economy. "You have to accept that you are going into a brain war," argues Stéphane Garelli, professor of global business at IMD International Business School in Lausanne, Switzerland. "But the import of skills and competencies into Europe immediately becomes a political problem. The recent poll in California reporting that there is now a nonwhite majority in the state was accepted without a murmur. Here in Europe, there would have been a riot."
Nor is the problem just Europe versus the third world. There is also a divide within Europe. In political terms, "Europe" and "the Europeans" usually translate as Western Europe. The EU excludes the eastern half of the Continent, with its vast impoverished agricultural sector, the war-inspired mafiosi of the Balkans, and the pathological states of Ukraine and Russia. Until the fall of communism, Western Europe demanded freedom for the East. Now it is doing everything in its power to stop Eastern Europeans from exercising one freedom in particular - the freedom to travel. The West has built a wall of rigid immigration controls, known as Fortress Europe, to shut out the disturbing inequalities that scratch and bark at its back door.
One extreme example of what Trotsky would have called the "combined and uneven development" of the new economy can be found in Bulgaria, in the southeast corner of the Balkans. As part of the Soviet bloc, Bulgaria was ordered by Moscow to develop Eastern Europe's computer industry - the result was one of socialism's great nonachievements, the Pravets computer, legendary in its uselessness. But a generation of despairing Bulgarian engineers grew up with the Pravets, learning in the process to compensate for its teeming glitches. Today, smart software companies are eager to hire Bulgarians as super problem-solvers - if you can fix a Pravets, debugging a Microsoft product is like falling off a log.
Talent exists in similar odd pockets all over the Continent, and it will find a way, legal or not, to seep through national borders. Illegal immigration is the EU's number one problem, and it will grow into one of the greatest population shifts in history. Under the aegis of mafia organizations as far apart as China and the Balkans, tens of thousands of people from Asia, Africa, and Eastern Europe are on the move every day toward Western Europe.
Roland Koch, one of Gerhard Schröder's chief advisers, recently suggested that "the fear of foreigners is linked to the dismantling of the nation-state involved in the construction of the EU." This is only half the story. The advanced nations of Europe are threatened from within their own borders. The second half of the 1990s saw a rise throughout the Continent in the gap between haves and have-nots, despite the dominance of modernizing left-of-center governments in Germany, Britain, and France. While it is too early to trace a digital divide based on class, it is possible to observe such a divide geographically. Within Germany, high tech and biotech wealth has crystallized in Hamburg, Cologne, Munich, Frankfurt, and Berlin, all (with the exception of East Berlin) part of the former West. In other parts of the country, but especially in what was East Germany, the collapse of traditional manufacturing has left large wastelands of unemployment and despair in its wake - fertile ground for racism and right-wing extremism. In southeast Britain, property values in the so-called Golden Triangle (Oxford, Cambridge, and London) are 15 times higher than in the depressed areas of the Midlands and the North.
Like the rest of the world, the small, overpopulated continent of Europe is struggling - painfully and blindly - with breathtaking scientific and technological change. A white majority that invented the national mythologies underpinning modern European culture lives in an almost perpetual state of fear that it and its way of life are about to disappear. Things may get ugly, but there's no turning back. The Continent will move ahead at its own tempo, confronting its own historical assumptions. But both Europe and the United States have a powerful incentive to engage in a deeper level of communication and move beyond the cultural caricatures that estrange them: They might actually learn something from each other.
