"Steven Hill ends the transatlantic debate over which economic and political system is superior: Europe wins. While America and China fight for oil and minerals, Europe already achieves more with less. Indeed, the path to the American Dream is the European Way."—Parag Khanna, author of The Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order

"Like a reverse Alexis de Tocqueville, Steven Hill dauntlessly explores a society largely unknown to his compatriots back home. Sweeping away the ideological posturing, he shows us exactly how the modern European Way works and the promise it holds for an America which has slipped to become, in terms of social, economic and energy policy, the Old World."—Hendrik Hertzberg, senior editor, The New Yorker

"Europe's Promise should startle, inform, and galvanize Americans in raising the ante in favor of a political economy where people matter first."—Ralph Nader

"As Steven Hill compellingly argues in his excellent Europe's Promise: Why the European Way Is the Best Hope in an Insecure Age, Europe has become a dynamic, transformational force in the world and stands as a clear model of success on so many fronts that we must push reset in our assessment of Europe's course. Americans today should learn a bit about how Europe has quietly and incrementally added to its size and global weight and maintained an innovative approach to broad public challenges like renewable energy, capital punishment, social welfare, and even corporate dynamism."—Steve Clemons, publisher and editor of the political blog, The Washington Note

"Europe's Promise is a provocative and illuminating book that should lead Americans to think hard about our own assumptions and priorities. By closely examining Europe's economic and political practices, Hill reveals a new Europe that has become the world's leader during this century challenged by global economic crisis, climate crisis, and new geopolitical tensions. In these times of hope and fear, read this captivating book to discover new and creative models for building a better future."—Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor and publisher of The Nation

"Hill's book is an elegant and counterintuitive manifesto for a new politics of interdependence that could take the world through the turmoil of the economic and global warming crises."—Mark Leonard, Executive Director, European Council on Foreign Relations

"What can the United States learn from Europe? If you believe what's said in Washington, the answer is 'not much'. If you read Steven Hill's intelligent, broad-ranging, and deeply researched book, you'll find the correct answer is 'a great deal'—and now is the time to learn it."— Prof. Jacob S. Hacker, Yale University, author of The Great Risk Shift: The New Economic Security and the Decline of the American Dream

From The Guardian, February 8, 2010
www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/feb/08/european-parliament-crisis
(excerpt)
US economists and Nobel laureates Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz appear sanguine about Europe, with Krugman arguing recently in the New York Times that the European welfare state and social market economy have survived the financial crisis well and represent a more successful and enviable model than America's. Steven Hill, a director at the Washington-based New America Foundation, has just published a book, Europe's Promise, which argues that "the European way is the best hope in an insecure age".

He dismissed talk of the EU being "marginalised" in a G2 world. On the contrary, he emphasised that the Obama White House was under pressure from the EU on climate change and financial regulation. "This, of course, is the exact opposite of the view that 'Europe is irrelevant'. Europe is actually hyper-relevant," he said. "Obama knows that Europe is leading in these ways, and he would like to follow to some extent, but he is having a hard time delivering."

From the Financial Times, February 8, 2010
Review of Europe's Promise: Why the European Way is the Best Hope in an Insecure Age by Steven Hill
Review by Tony Barber
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/52f7432c-140b-11df-8847-00144feab49a.html
(excerpt)

Steven Hill, director of the political reform programme at the New America Foundation think-tank, has two purposes in writing this book. One is to set out the case that Europe's methods of economic management, cradle-to-grave social support systems, democratic structures, ecological consciousness and temperate foreign policy are the way forward for the world. The global order is being remade, he says, and what will emerge on the other side will be a new world based on the European model. Europe is a beacon for humanity's future, no less, and it holds the greatest potential for the planet.

Hill's second goal is to show that the US, far from being an example for the world, is nowadays no model at all. Compared with Europe, he says, the United States is behind in nearly every socioeconomic category. Its economy is an obsolete, hyper-militarised model”and, even under Barack Obama, is mired in an antiquated free market ideology.

US democratic institutions are “unrepresentative, divisive and disenfranchising”, characterised by de facto one-party fiefdoms and 70m unregistered voters almost one-third of those eligible. The nation wastes colossal quantities of energy and fails to provide decent healthcare for millions of uninsured citizens. US foreign policy is trapped in a Vietnam-era mentality of using military muscle and even invading nations as a way of dealing with unsavoury elements”.

No question, Hill makes you sit up and think. Unlike intellectually lazier writers, he does not buy the argument that the 21st century belongs inevitably to China. He is surely right in saying that Europe’s prosperous, peaceful and democratic social market economy looks attractive when contrasted with the unbalanced, excessively deregulated US model or with China's politically repressive capitalism, Russia's petrodollar authoritarianism, Japan's corporate cronyism or conservative Islam. He makes a perceptive point, too, when he says that American conservatives play up Europe's difficulties as a way of suppressing discussion of radical change in the US…Europe, with its affordable universal healthcare, unemployment benefits, paid holidays and sick leave, childcare, time off for parents after a birth and inexpensive university fees, has certainly built an enviable form of social capitalism.

Hill is a lucid and engaging writer, and he recognises that not everything in Europe smells of roses. For example, Europe faces formidable problems in its declining birth rates and its reluctance, or inability, to integrate the millions of immigrants needed to sustain its prosperity in coming decades. Hill is right: the US model requires modernisation. But when it comes to welcoming the world's huddled masses, Europeans could learn from their American cousins.

Foreign Affairs
Reviewed by Andrew Moravcsik
January/February 2010
Read Article Here
In this timely and provocative book, Hill, known primarily as an analyst of U.S. state and local reform, argues that the "social capitalist" policies of European countries represent best practices in handling most of the challenges modern democracies face today. By contrast, the United States is often dysfunctional. When indirect fees, private out-of-pocket costs, and taxes are all included, Americans pay as much as Europeans for public services but end up with much less. Europe's health care, social welfare, environmental policies, labor rights, "smart power" projection, and multiparty parliamentary governments are consistently more efficient, more just, and less fractious than the United States' libertarian, militaristic, two-party, money-driven, separation-of-powers alternatives. Hill can be breathlessly wordy, and, like some other Europhiles, he occasionally indulges in armchair social psychology -- but the overall argument rests on solid data. It explains why in most areas, it is Europe's constitutional forms, economic regulations, and social values, not those of the United States, that are the most popular models for new democracies. The oldest one should take note.

Review of Europe’s Promise
“Who wins in U.S. vs Europe contest?”
Feb 12, 2010
By Bernd Debusmann
Reuters International
http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2010/02/12/who-wins-in-u-s-vs-europe-contest/

In these days of renewed gloom about the future of Europe, a quick test is in order. Who has the world’s biggest economy? A) The United States B) China/Asia C) Europe? Who has the most Fortune 500 companies? A) The United States B) China C) Europe. Who attracts most U.S. investment? A) Europe B) China C) Asia.

The correct answer in each case is Europe, short for the 27-member European Union (EU), a region with 500 million citizens. They produce an economy almost as large as the United States and China combined but have, so far, largely failed to make much of a dent in American perceptions that theirs is a collection of cradle-to-grave nanny states doomed to be left behind in a 21st century that will belong to China.

That China will rise to be a superpower in this century, overtaking the United States in terms of gross domestic product by 2035, is becoming conventional wisdom. But those who subscribe to that theory might do well to remember the fate of similar long-range forecasts in the past. At the turn of the 20th century, for example, eminent strategists predicted that Argentina would be a world power within 20 years. In the late 1980s, Japan was seen as the next global leader.

The latest pessimistic utterances about Europe were sparked by a debt crisis in Greece which raised concern over the health of the euro, the common currency of 16 EU members. Plus U.S. President Barack Obama’s decision to stay away from a U.S.-EU summit scheduled for May in Madrid, with a new EU leadership structure that should have made it easier to answer then U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s famous question: “Who do I call when I want to talk to Europe?”

There are still several numbers to call in the complex set-up, giving fresh reasons to fret to those crystal-gazers who see the future dominated by the United States and China, the so-called G-2.

Pundits who see the European way of doing things as a model for the United States (and others) to follow are few and far between, not least, says one of them, Steven Hill, because most Americans are blissfully unaware of European achievements and, as he puts it, “reluctant to look elsewhere because ‘we are the best.’”

As foreigners traveling through the United States occasionally note, the phrases “we are the best” and “America is No.1″ are often uttered with deep conviction by citizens who have never set foot outside their country and therefore lack a direct way of comparison. (They are in the majority: only one in five Americans has a passport).

Hill, who heads the political reform program at the New American Foundation, a liberal Washington think tank, has just published a book whose title alone is enough to irk conservative Americans: Europe’s Promise. Why the European Way Is the Best Hope in an Insecure Future.

STUBBORN PRECONCEPTIONS
It marshals an impressive army of facts and comparative statistics to show that the United States is behind Europe in nearly every socio-economic category that can be measured and that neither America’s trickle-down, Wall Street-driven capitalism nor China’s state capitalism hold the keys to the future.

While China’s growth has been impressive, says Hill, the country remains, in essence, a sub-contractor to the West and is racked by internal contradictions.

“When I talk to American audiences,” Hill said in an interview, “many find the figures I cite hard to believe. They haven’t heard them before. U.S. businesses making more profits in Europe than anywhere else, 20 times more than in China? 179 of the world’s top companies are European compared with 140 American? That does not fit the preconceptions.”

Such preconceptions exist, in part, because U.S. media have portrayed Europe as a region in perpetual crisis, its economies sclerotic, its taxes a disincentive to personal initiative, its standards of living lower than America’s, its universal health care, guaranteed pensions, long vacations and considerably shorter working hours a recipe for low growth and stagnation. “In the transmission of news across the Atlantic, myth has been substituted for reality,” says Hill.

He is in good, though numerically small, company with such views. The economists Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman, both Nobel prize winners, also have positive outlooks for Europe. In a recent column in the New York Times, Krugman said that Europe is often held up as evidence that higher taxes for the rich and benefits for the less well-off kill economic progress. Not so, he argued. The European experience demonstrates the opposite: social justice and progress can go hand in hand.

The relative rankings of countries tend to be defined by gross domestic product per capita but Hill points out that this might not be the best yardstick because it does not differentiate between transactions that add to the well-being of a country and those that diminish it. A dollar spent on sending a teenager to prison adds as much to GDP as a dollar spent on sending him to college.

On a long list of quality-of-life indexes that measure things beyond the GDP yardstick — from income inequality and access to health care to life expectancy, infant mortality and poverty levels — the United States does not rank near the top.

So where is the best place to live? For the past 30 years, a U.S.-based magazine, International Living, has compiled a quality-of-life index based on cost of living, culture and leisure, economy, environment, freedom, health, infrastructure, safety and climate. France tops the list for the fifth year running. The United States comes in 7th.