Some Well-Wishing Advice from Europe

By Dominique Moisi The author is associate director of the French Institute of International Relations and editor of Politique Etrangere.

Nineteenth century Europe had two dreams: socialism and America. Those who wanted to improve their lives could either fight for a more egalitarian society at home or move across the Atlantic to join a new nation. The 20th century has seen the triumph of America -- if by America one means democratic pluralism. America has won not only the ideological battle but the cold war as well. Socialism, certainly in its Soviet Marxist incarnation, has failed. The Soviet Union retains large military forces, but it is no longer a superpower; in fact, it finds itself fighting for its very survival.

America is immensely popular in Eastern Europe. Newly liberated, East Europeans crave for America, for them a mixture of freedom and modernity, of the Statue of Liberty, of Coca-Cola and of blue jeans -- a symbiosis between liberating principle and pop culture. West Europeans, celebrating the regained unity of the Continent and the prospect of a renaissance there, also yearn to keep close to America. Still not autonomous in terms of security, they want Americans to stay on European soil, not only to provide a balance vis-a-vis the remaining military power of the Soviet Union but also vis-a-vis the inevitable political and economic weight of Germany. More profoundly, Europeans see the continuation of an American presence as insurance against the possible return of dark nationalist and xenophobic impulses from their past.

In the Persian Gulf, the U.S. has the dubious honor of being virtually by itself in the front line. There is simply no substitute for American leadership: for the time being, the U.S. stands alone in the global power category.

Yet the contrast between America's global position and its internal condition is painful. Just stroll through America's cities and consider the dark side of daily life. As someone who travels regularly to the U.S., who was partly educated there, whose vision of life has been transformed by the openness and dynamism of American society, and who cherishes the generosity of its political principles and respects the strength of its democratic creed, I can only witness the deterioration in American life with dismay and sorrow.

A country that is bound to lead should not have cities whose centers look like Third World slums or sections of Beirut. It should not have a lackluster educational system or an infrastructure that is falling apart. It should not have people being turned away by hospitals because they lack insurance, or dying in the street of drug overdoses, or becoming victims of random crime because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The great society dreamed of by John Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. and planned by Lyndon Johnson has not come to pass. America's racial problem is exacerbated by the de facto exclusion of blacks from the core of national politics, in part because, traditionally Democrats, they face an age of Republican hegemony in the White House. In an era of weakened Federal Government, blacks feel increasingly isolated. It was the Federal Government, after all, that saved them twice in history: from slavery in the 19th century; from segregation in the 20th. The reduction of that government's powers by a new American consensus has led to the political marginalization of blacks.

Economically, the U.S. has become a consumer society that no longer produces, a market where others sell and no longer buy. When one looks at patents, levels of education and financial power, America is losing the economic battle against Japan, if not yet against Europe.

Americans are aware of their problems but refuse to confront the fact that in order to maintain their influence in the world, they must change their life-style. Americans have no constitutional right, for example, to cheap gasoline. In Europe we pay the same price for a liter of gas as Americans pay for a gallon -- or four times as much.

The additional amount we lay out goes to taxes that provide the infrastructures that make our cities civilized and safe. Yet we do not feel cheated at the pump. Instead of being lulled by a reassuring Reagan line or a comforting Bush stance, Americans should accept the necessary: sacrifices and more taxes.

America cannot give the impression that it wants power without incurring risk, influence without cost. There is a contradiction, exemplified by the gulf crisis, between internationalist principle, which is supported by most Americans, and emotional isolationism, which is psychologically self- sufficient and takes account of the outside world only when it directly impinges on America. Americans must not harbor the illusion that they can recover inner strength by dissociating themselves from the affairs of the world. America needs to assume its dual role as a world power and as a healthy society. To be fully respected in tomorrow's world, it has to reform internally. There is no alternative to higher taxes.

In the necessary attempt to reform itself, America can learn from the outside world, particularly from Europe. America may epitomize, in European eyes, democracy and insurance against old, inner European evils; it may incarnate, in the eyes of Chinese students, freedom; it may even constitute paradise for Albanian refugees who, having been taken in by France earlier this year, besieged the U.S. embassy in Paris to be allowed to move to the land of their dreams.

What Americans should learn from Western Europe is how to instill a greater sense of social justice; what they should learn from Eastern Europe, which has just emerged from 40 years of darkness, is how to frame the kind of solidarity that has been lost in the extreme individualism and consumerism of modern American life. Socialism may have failed, but the plea for social justice that made it thrive echoes more than ever through the streets of American cities. America, the winner, has the historical responsibility to confront this challenge.