The European Dream

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Rifkin contends the European Union could one day become a true economic rival of the United States of America.

The European Dream: How Europe's Vision of the Future Is Quietly Eclipsing the American Dream is a book, by Jeremy Rifkin, published in September 2004. Rifkin describes the emergence and evolution of the European Union over the past five decades, as well as key differences between European and American values. He argues that the European Union, which he describes as the first truly postmodern governing body, has the potential to become a world superpower.

According to Rifkin, the "European Dream", which champions communalism, sustainability, and human rights over property rights and radical individualism, is better-suited to 21st century challenges than the "American dream" of personal fortune, which may be obsolete.

Rifkin explains Europe's opposition to the death penalty in a historical context; after losing so many lives to wars in the early and mid-20th century, Europe is opposed to state-sponsored killing as a matter of principle. He also discusses the European commitment to "deep play" ^[1], a notion which is absent in the United States.

[edit] Criticism and commentary

The French philosopher Bernard Stiegler is an admirer of Rifkin's work, referring in a recent essay on the future of Europe to The European Dream:

As Jeremy Rifkin’s recent work The European Dream suggests, the world expects a great deal from Europe, and Europe will not be able to constitute itself as a power unless it gives itself the means with which to respond to this demand. But, what is being asked of it? The world does not expect good intentions. It expects Europe to invent a new industrial model which is capable of interrupting the destructive process unleashed by the capture and unlimited exploitation of the libidinal energy of producers and consumers which will lead, in all domains, to a vast process of desublimation.

As this quotation already indicates, Stiegler argues that Rifkin, while recognizing the critical importance of Europe to the question of the global future, nevertheless does not penetrate to the crucial question, because he does not see the capturing and channelling of desire as the central destructive feature of contemporary capitalism. Rifkin fails to grasp that what consumer capitalism destroys first of all is primordial narcissism, a narcissism which is the foundation of desire as such, and hence the foundation of all dreams (including the European dream) and all future (including the European future):

If we must rethink motivation or, in other words, desire, then we must rethink the incommensurable as the best, and define the best as that which aims at a consistency and, in this consistency, aims at multiple consistencies (to on pollakhos legetai), a different plane, one which is not reducible to the calculability of the finite (in other words, reducible to comparisons). However, just as there is no question of a Providence here, there is no question of calling that which is true in the other plane a simple dream. This other plane cannot be a dream, or at least not in Jeremy Rifkin’s sense of a dream—unless we make this dream the principle of all politics and economics—but then it would be necessary to elaborate a general libidinal economy, which would be very unevocative of Rifkin, who seems not to see the libido as an issue in the world of capitalism, even though he is American, and who in any case supports his arguments with the summary analyses of narcissism proposed by Christopher Lasch. What Rifkin misses, along with Lasch, is that narcissism is the precondition of all dreams and all psyche, as the etymology of the word alone indicates.

[edit] Notes

^ "deep play" is the idea that culture, cultural institutions and community have value in themselves (look at for instance the various historical trusts in European buildings, or the widespread support for the welfare state). In the US it tends to be undervalued in favor of commerce and utilitarianism. Put bluntly, if something "makes no money, it has no value"; incidentally, this is very similar to the "philosophy" of ancient Romans, one of the most important civilizations in the history of Europe, who often quoted cui prodest?, in Latin "what is it for?"