(2 of 2)
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.