Majority opinion in Europe holds that Europe has all it takes to
become an economic and political power comparable to, and consequently
independent of, the United States. The simple addition of its component
populations with its GDPs makes that seem obvious. As for me, I believe
that Europe suffers from three major handicaps that rule out such a
comparison.
First of all, the northern part of the American continent (the United
States and—what I call its external state—Canada) is endowed with
natural resources incomparably greater than the part of Europe to the
west of Russia, as is shown by Europe’s dependence on imported energy.
Secondly, Europe is made up of a good number of historically distinct
nations whose diversity of political cultures, even though this
diversity is not necessarily marked by national chauvinism, has
sufficient weight to exclude recognition of a “European people” on the
model of the United States’s “American people.” We will return later to
this important matter.
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