European Dream

* Book: Jeremy Rifkin. The European Dream: How Europe’s Vision of the Future is Quietly Eclipsing the American Dream.

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Discussion

By Irena Ateljevic:

"Jeremy Rifkin, in his book The European Dream: How Europe’s Vision of the Future is Quietly Eclipsing the American Dream, claims that it is the European dream of a United Europe (in its potentiality) that is already a political manifestation of the coming era:

- The new European dream is powerful because it dares to suggest new history, with an attention to quality of life, sustainability, and peace and harmony. In a sustainable civilization, based on quality of life rather than unlimited individual accumulation of wealth, the very material basis of modern progress would be a thing of the past...The new dream is focused not on amassing wealth but rather, on elevating the human spirit. The European dream seeks to expand human empathy, not territory. It takes humanity out of the materialist prison in which it has been bound since the early days of the eighteenth century Enlightenment and into the light of a new future motivated by idealism. (Rifkin, 2005, pp. 7-8)

In the light of many EU controversies, hypocrisies and problems, claims could be easily interpreted as overtly idealistic. However, he stresses that dreams reflect hopes, not achievements; hence the notion of the potentiality in many of the tenets provided by the ideal of European dream. In elaborating his thesis Rifkin (2005) provides us with an overview of how the fundamental pillars of the modern era: individualism; the market-exchange economy, the ideology of property; and territory-bound-nation-state governance (forged with capitalistic markets) were created and how they are slowly getting interwoven with new spatial, economic, social and political arrangements of the global era. By giving us an overview of its political architecture and the historical making of the united Europe, its unique features of extra-territorial governance, constitution, internal workings and various policies, he gives us a realistic picture of Europe’s many hypocrisies and contradictions, yet, and this is the focus of my review, Rifkin also points to its many achievements and potentialities for advancing greater interconnectedness and mutuality, and a relational global consciousness.

First he presents an overview of the burgeoning network commerce and the ‘immateriality’ of the knowledge economy (it is estimated that approx. 40% of the European Union economy is already in the non-material, knowledge society) which is giving a birth to a new economic system based on the cooperative commerce of reciprocity and trust. Rifkin aptly describes the difference between the market and network economy: “markets are based on the pursuit of selfinterest, networks on shared interest” (Rifkin, 2005, p. 193).

Second he contrasts the politics of the nation-state era which operates along two poles of market and government; to the three-sector politics that include civil society which makes the new European dream realizable. In particular, in its embrace to share at least some governing power with civil society organizations (CSOs), Rifkin claims the EU is changing the governance landscape forever. He deals with the EU controversial policy issues of advancing both cultural diversity and universal human rights and how CSOs represent the social engine to preserve diversity while mobilizing public support behind universal rights’ agendas. They are, Rifkin (1995) claims, local, transnational and global players and the essential political partner for the EU regulatory state.

Third, he shows that the EU precautionary principle policy for regulating science and technology innovations, and the introduction of new products is successfully being used to review and even suspend experiments and innovations that potentially endanger the health of humans, environment, animals and plants. While acknowledging that the old Enlightenment paradigm to grow, exploit and colonize the Earth still pervades, Rifkin (2005) is of the opinion that this bold, cutting-edge initiative demonstrates a radically different view of nature and respect of Earth as the interconnected whole.

Overall, Rifkin’s (2005) analysis of change at the European level is a call to move from the current geopolitics - and its assumption that the environment is a giant battleground where we all fight for our survival—to biosphere politics, or the premise of the Earth as a living organism made up of interdependent relationships on which we all can only survive by stewarding the larger communities of which we are part.

In his latest book (Rifkin, 2009), The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis, Rifkin elaborates on this call to become more oriented towards mutuality and interconnectedness by providing a historical analysis of empathy, showing that humans are fundamentally empathic beings, and that society has become increasingly empathic throughout history. Referring to the beginning of biosphere consciousness, this latest book asks whether we can “reach global empathy in time to avoid the collapse of civilization and save the Earth” (Rifkin, 2009, p. 3)."

(http://www.integral-review.org/issues/vol_9_no_2_ateljevic_visions_of_transmodernity.pdf)

More information

• Rifkin on The Empathic Civilization