> annoyed. I talked with Daniel Singer at the Socialist Scholars Conference
> yesterday. He agreed with me that the EU is showing no signs of independent
> political life; he described the situation as Britain like a poodle on an
> American leash, with the French and Germans showing even less will of their
> own than a leashed poodle.
Ah, but poodles can sometimes morph into mighty powers indeed, as aficionados of Goethe's "Faust" will attest (Mephisto shows up as a poodle, of all things). The thing is, the EU just isn't following the rules set by the Pax Americana; it's not interested in ruling via laser-guided bombs and counterinsurgency campaigns. It prefers to trade its neighbors into coexistence instead of bombing them into submission. Its banks, industries and pools of capital are slowly colonizing the US arch-colonizers, everywhere from the US auto industry to our international credit position. Its central bank is reliquidizing the global credit system in front of our very eyes. Its development arm, the EIB, is throwing money at the Europeripheries like there's no tomorrow. These signal sweeping, epochal changes in the capitalist world-system, but they're not the sort of changes which can be narrated in the terms of our Cold War culture, with its vocabulary of warmed-over war stories, espionage tales, and pyrotechnic cultural consumptions of a multinational Other.
-- Dennis