Jonathan Todd

Dominique Strauss-Kahn, a former French finance minister, argued that “on Saturday 15 February (2003), a new nation was born on the street. This new nation is the European nation”.  This conclusion was drawn, notes Timothy Garton Ash, “from the simultaneous demonstrations across Europe on 15 February 2003, protesting against the Bush administration’s advance to war with Iraq … That summer there (also) appeared in many European newspapers an appeal for ‘the rebirth of Europe’, co-signed by Jacques Derrida and Jurgen Habermas, two of the continent’s most famous living philosophers”.

“What Habermas argues with philosophical density”, Garton Ash went on to note, “and Strauss-Kahn with eloquent political hyperbole, is that Europe is different from the United States, that in these differences Europe, is on the whole, better than the United States, and that a European identity can and should be built upon these differences – or superiorities. Europe, in short, is the Not-America”, as the David Bowie below song almost goes.

However, a new book by Peter Baldwin provides plenty of quantitative evidence for ”the way in which the presumed chasm dividing the Atlantic is not, in fact, nearly as deep as opinion among the chattering classes and their mouthpieces believes”. So, to be European is to be Not-American, which is hardly a positive sense of identity and isn’t even one based in fact. Why does Europe seem more comfortable with a negative sense of identity? And what might a more positive sense involve?

Baldwin provides something of an answer to the first of these questions: “Europe’s various cultures are ones still steeped in the lore of national stereotypes and quite happy to wring whatever elixir can be had from them … Having a transatlantic whipping boy is convenient and serves politically useful purposes, especially if there is little else that you can agree on. The purveyors of anti-Americanism in Europe appear to have rediscovered the truism that nothing unites like a common enemy. And the Bush administration played into their hands by serving up caricatures by the spadeful. It will be interesting to see how the European pundits deal with Obama once he does something they do not like. While Bush could be portrayed as an ignorant cowboy, which of the available stereotypes will they dare lambast Obama with?”

It was clear when Obama visited Europe in March that European governments did not give him the help he came looking for on troops in Afghanistan and co-ordinated fiscal policy. Obama may have been the change that Europeans wanted to see in the world but Europeans still ask what America can do for them, not what they can do for Obama. This was an attitude that Charles Clarke touched upon in a lecture to the Fabian Society last night.

It seems odd and unsatisfactory that Europe should both free ride on the back of America and seeks to be Not-America. It is welcome, then, that Clarke’s lecture pointed towards the stuff of a more positive future and identity for Europe. In 5 policy areas – financial regulation; justice and crime; migration; climate change and energy security; peace and security – Clarke argued that the EU’s policy interventions could be improved. These improvements would, he argued, make it easier for pro-Europeans to make their case in the UK. These are improvements that will produce an EU with what Roger Liddle, in a question from the floor, described as output legitimacy – which, it is said, “ is satisfied when the Union delivers what people expect from it”. These outputs will not be gained, however, denying British citizens the associated benefits, if the UK were to follow Eurosceptic strategy of David Cameron, claimed Clarke.

This is a strategy that has been widely criticised across the EU and certainly, it seems odd – but so does the persistent coolness of British voters towards the EU – when the case for further EU co-operation was made so convincingly by Clarke in respect of each of his chosen policy areas. His focus upon output legitimacy reminded me of the thinking behind a pamphlet by Mark Leonard. Liddle queried, however, whether pro-Europeans should be making a “bigger argument” than this.

He seems to hanker after an account of the philosophical underpinnings of the European project in an era of continued globalisation. Pro-Europeans will wonder whether this approach or an approach based upon outcome legitimacy will bring them most joy in the UK – and, incidentally, Clarke seems to think that neither will gain much traction in this country until the “boil is lanced” and a referendum on the UK’s membership of the EU is held and won – but the approach of Liddle seems more likely to lead to the stuff of a positive sense of Europe, at least. Somewhat similarly, Roger Casale, formerly Labour MP for Wimbledon, asked us to reflect upon the EU “not from inside but from outside”. He would seem to want us to consider what kind of world we would like to create and what role the EU might have in this. How might the EU, in other words, be the change that we want to see in the world?

I suspect that Clarke and Casale are approaching things from different ends of the same pro-EU telescope. Casale’s vantage point is the macro, global one, while Clarke’s is the micro, British street level upwards perspective. Both of their visions, however, are far more coloured, as the evolving realities of globalisation dictate, by the fusion of issues that were previously considered “domestic” and those that were once seen as “foreign” than a little-Englander view like Cameron’s would ever allow. The EU, I am sure, will be considered by both Clarke and Casale to be a key institution in terms of managing the globalising forces that drive these visions in a more humane and better way than can be the case at present.

However, Europeans will lack a real compass with which to address this task and a sense of identity that is more positive than being Not-America until it addresses the question posed by Casale. The EU’s history as a great liberating force in formerly fascist southern Europe and formerly communist central and eastern Europe should be a rich source of inspiration in tackling this question. This is the kind of answer – grounded in the Copenhagen criteria of institutions that guarantee democracy, the rule of law, human rights, the protection of minorities and a functioning market economy – that Mark Leonard put forward in Why Europe will run the 21st Century. It seems hard, nonetheless, to imagine that the prophecy of Leonard’s book will come true without some of the nuts and bolts policy revision that Clarke so well argued for - There certainly seems much scope for improvement in this respect as Wolfgang Münchau recently concluded that the EU, like a fish, is rotting from the head and Helmut Schmidt, the former German chancellor, laments that: ”The European Central Bank is the only institution in Europe that works well”.

These policy revisions may be undertaken a bit more speedily and efficiently if powered by the inspiring vision set out by Leonard – And it would be wonderful if in this vision Europe’s leaders can find more to agree upon than Baldwin notes they do at the moment. May be, then, I will know what it means to be European. It won’t be until this point that European cultures will really escape “the lore of national stereotypes” that Baldwin rightly argues they remain ”steeped in” and which Cameron is keen to give in to and which our present Not-America identity is more a symptom of than an escape from.

Interesting set of book reviews from Julian Le Grand in the latest Prospect. He comments intelligently on The Spirit Level by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett – a book which David Aaronovitch has also recently commented upon. Le Grand also reviews Unjust Rewards by Polly Toynbee and David Walker.

It’s worth a look. He advocates a policy on inheritance tax – also, wrongly, known as the death tax – that I previously been sympathetic to myself. This is to “hypothecate the revenues from inheritance tax to the new Child Trust Fund. In true Baconian fashion, the wealth of one generation would thus be used to fertilise the growth of the next. It might also make inheritance tax more popular, or at least less disliked”.

This hypothecation is fundamentally just: redistribution, via the Child Trust Fund, from those who are born into wealth to those who are not. It also challenges the misconception that the death tax tag encourages: that the person being taxed is the person who has died, rather than those who stand to inherit unearned wealth.

The death tax language perfectly framed the inheritance tax issue from the perspective of George W Bush’s Republicans, while the linking of inheritance tax and the Child Trust Fund nicely frames these policies from a Labour perspective. Framing policies in ways that speak to your values allow beachheads to be created – Policies that are easily understood by the public but which cut to the core of your governing philosophy. Selling council houses performed this function for Margaret Thatcher. The minimum wage did the trick for the early Blair years. Labour desperately needs to quickly establish other beachheads. Le Grand’s idea might be a good way to start.

I often find the Economist to be a beacon of sanity in an increasingly mad world. “When governments raise money”, they note in a fashion that demonstrates a grasp of Adam Smith’s principles of taxation, “they should first get rid of deductions and reverse unmeritocratic measures (such as George Bush’s repeal of America’s death tax) rather than jacking up income-tax to punitive levels”. Smith’s fourth principle stated that, “taxes should not discourage enterprise”.

Punitive income-tax discourages enterprise, while inheritance tax – that’s what it is, not death by a thousand cuts or some such, as even the Economist, disappointingly, suggest by use of the inappropriate “death tax” term – is a tax on unearned wealth. It, therefore, discourages enterprise and encourages Paris Hilton-like and other trust-funded behaviour. Nigella Lawson understands this – and she’s married to Charles Saatchi! So, why does the Adam Smith Institute find this so hard to understand?

Language matters in this debate. The well read will have noted that I have already citied Michael Graetz and Ian Shapiro’s fantastic study into the politics of this issue under President George W. Bush. By framing the tax as a “death tax” the administration succeeded in painting the tax collector as so heartless as to continue his collections beyond the grave; a cruel invader upon families at tragic times. However, inheritance tax is the right term because the person who loses out is the person who hasn’t worked for the wealth; the inheritor. I don’t care how upset the likes of Paris Hilton may get when their parents die, they still won’t have earned the wealth that they might inherit and the tax collector should still be paid. They should be enterprising enough to earn their own wealth. That’s part of what meritocracy means.

Luke Haines was, of course, being ironic when he sang that: “There’s nothing wrong with inherited wealth, if you melt the silver yourself”. And a few dodgy sex videos and what-not still doesn’t make it right, either – or change the fact that it is a tax on the unearned wealth of inheritance, not death.

The New York Review of Books has an absolutely wonderful feature on what is at stake in the US presidential election. Fourteen leading thinkers give their views.

Darryl Pinckney is amongst those who see parallels between Barack Obama’s campaign and Robert Kennedy’s bid in 1968. “Kennedy was on his was to the nomination and if he had survived the country could have taken a different path. This election has the same feeling, the sense that we are at a fork in the road, and must go one way or the other”.

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“Obama is forty-seven years old; McCain is seventy-two, old enough to be Obama’s father”, notes Russell Baker. “In classical mythology the son must kill the father to allow for the earth’s renewal”. So Obama represents, to mix the metaphors of Pinckney and Baker, the fork in the road for the earth’s renewal. And it is, indeed, the earth’s renewal, not simply America’s. This is in spite of the fact that, as Timothy Garton Ash observes, “many Americans still suffer from a touching delusion that this is their election. How curious. Don’t they understand? This is our election. The world’s election. Our future depends on it, and we live it as intensely as Americans do”.

Garton Ash speculates that “somewhere around 2000 may be marked by future historians as the zenith of American power” and he is certainly right that the two terms of President George W. Bush have seen “a substantial fall in the standing, credibility, attractiveness, and therefore power of the United States”. Nonetheless, this is the world’s election because the world still hankers after a US that they feel they can work productively with in tackling “issues that matter – climate change, an unraveling economy, entitlement spending, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, nuclear proliferation, countering terrorism without destroying civil liberties, and ‘cultural’ issues such as welfare, affirmative action, and abortion”.

Some of these issues listed by Andrew Delbanco clearly have more of a domestic flavour than others but the world realises that none of them have consequences which are entirely confined to America’s borders. This is where the mind-set of the world very much is and Ronald Dworkin looks forward to “radical change in the mind-set of Americans, who should understand that we are no longer law-givers dictating to the world but partners who must accept compromise and risk as others do”. The world desperately still wants to have the US as a partner but may abandon this as a possibility if America chooses the fork in the road represented by McCain.

The consequences of this eventuality are as truly fearful as the possibilities opened up by a President Obama are wonderful. Thus, I endorse the conclusion of Dworkin. “We Americans can do something great in November. Or we can do something absolutely terrible”.