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  • The Continental Plan
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Were You Born on the Wrong Continent?: How the European Model Can Help You Get a Life By Thomas Geoghegan NEW PRESS, 2010

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This should be a good time for a book that essentially asks Americans to learn from Europe, and especially from Germany. Few Western countries have managed the global financial and economic crisis as well as Germany, it seems, and its successful crisis management has a lot to do with those features of the German model that Thomas Geoghegan highlights as “blueprintable.” During the crisis, the institutional strength of the unions led to measures designed to maintain the high-skills backbone of the German economic model of high-quality exports. For Geoghegan, German industrial relations (and similar systems in other European countries) explain why not only the bottom two thirds of Americans would be better off in Europe; for him, that is a given, especially regarding the unemployed and people on welfare. No, he argues, “Europe is set up for the bourgeois,” too (p. 11), for the upper middle class, who get the same benefits, like six weeks of vacation, maternity leave, good pensions, and so on. His thesis is “that even people who are at the top or are in the top 20 percent by income are better off in a European social democracy than in a country like the U.S.” (p. 260).

While U.S. per capita GDP is higher than in most European countries, the quality of life is not. Just “go outside and walk around,” Geoghegan wants to tell the “Cato types” (p. 12). Thanks to the strength of the European unions, there is an “invisible GDP” (p. 14) of lower inequality, better public services and goods, and perhaps most importantly from the perspective of an American professional, lower working hours—the average German worked almost four hundred fewer hours than the average American in 2006. Geoghegan marvels at the fact that, with these far fewer hours, Europeans manage to get to nearly the per capita GDP of Americans, and he ponders the question of what could be done with all these saved hours—reading, traveling, learning foreign languages? As someone who once unsuccessfully tried for months to find a co-worker in the congressional office of Bernie Sanders—an American socialist after all—to go have an actual lunch break in a restaurant instead of eating microwave-heated noodle soup at the desk, I am definitely with him.

Writing well before the 2010 midterm elections, but already in the midst of the Tea Party frenzy, Geoghegan must have known his arguments would be a hard sell in the U.S., even without the Greece crisis. He thus opens his book by repeatedly assuring his readers that he is “no European socialist.” I doubt very much that this will help him in a country where a sizable minority of the population, without being ridiculed daily in the media, upholds the belief that a harmless middle-of-the-road Democrat like Barack Obama is, indeed, a socialist. And, of [End Page 100] course, American exceptionalism is not an ideology reserved for the right. So there is definitely the danger that this treatise will be a case of preaching to the choir.

Now, as a European socialist, am I part of that choir? Let’s just say I would very much like to agree with Geoghegan, but I do have my reservations. First, like almost any American liberal that I have ever talked to about his or her European experience, Geoghegan goes somewhat overboard in his description of the achievements of European unions, the wonders of the welfare states, the quality of life, and so on. “In a way, Germany of today is where the New Deal went on to live,” he states (p.119). Without much reference to scholarly debate, Geoghegan identifies what is at the heart of the German success story and embraces it wholeheartedly for the U.S.: “In the end, it’s socialism that is the reason Germany is competitive. Because German workers are at the table when the big decisions are made, and elect people who still...

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