I came to the US in 1991, shortly after Francis Fukuyama penned his famous “End of History and the Last Man” essay. Though much contested at the time, Fukuyama’s contention that there was only one option on the menu after the end of the Cold War – capitalism über alles – seemed, from my European social democratic perspective, worryingly prescient. After all, Europe’s immediate policy response was the Maastricht Treaty. Yet a moments reflection should have shown me that there was nothing inevitable about this victory of capitalism. As Karl Polanyi demonstrated, the establishment of capitalism was a political act, not a result of impersonal economic forces. And just as Lenin thought historical materialism needed his helping hand, it was reasonable to suppose that Fukuyama and those following him didn’t want to leave capitalism’s final triumph in Europe to the mere logic of (Hegelian) history. Post Cold War capitalism needed a helping hand in the form of reinforcing a new message: that while some kind of social democratic ‘Third Way’ between capitalism and socialism, the European Welfare State (EWS), was tolerable during the Cold War, now it was over, such projects were no longer desirable, or even possible.

As a consequence, following the Japan-bashing that was so popular in the US in the 1980s, Euro-bashing came to prominence in the 1990s. A slew of research was produced by US authors claiming that in this new world of ‘globalization’, time was up for the ‘bloated welfare states’ of Europe. Unable to tax and spend without provoking capital flight, EWS’s faced the choice of fundamental reform, (become just like the US) or wither and die. Fundamental reform was, of course, some combination of privatization, inflation control, a tight monetary policy, fiscal probity, more flexible labor markets, and of course, tax cuts. Some EWS’s embraced these measures during the 1990s, some did not, but interestingly, none of them died. In contrast to the dire predictions of the Euro-bashers, the ‘bloated old welfare states of Europe’ continued on their way. Such claims for the ‘end of the EWS’ were made consistently, in fact, almost endlessly, from 1991 until today, with apparently no ill effects.

Imagine then the sheer joy of the Euro-bashers upon finding the French (the bête noir of all things American and efficient) rioting the streets to protect their right not to be fired, and in the face of unemployment rates of almost 20 percent for those under 25. Was this not proof that the EWS has finally gone off the rails? John Tierney in the New York Times obviously thought so, arguing that “when French young adults were asked what globalization meant to them, half replied, “Fear.” Likewise Washington Post columnist Robert Samuelson opined, “Europe is history’s has-been. …Unwilling to address their genuine problems, Europeans become more reflexively critical of America. This gives the impression that they’re active on the world stage, even as they’re quietly acquiescing in their own decline.” Strong claims, but how the French employment law debacle was reported in the US was enlightening as the fact that it was given such coverage; not as the final proof of the EWS’s impending collapse, but as evidence of the strange myths, falsehoods, and half-assed reporting about Europe that is consistently passed off as fact in US commentary.

Consider the article by Richard Bernstein in the New York Times entitled “Political Paralysis: Europe Stalls on the Road to Economic Change”. In this piece Bernstein argues that Scandinavian states have managed to cut back social protections and thereby step-up growth, and that Germany under Schroeder managed to push through “a sharp reduction of unemployment benefits” that “have now made a difference.” Note the causal logic in both statements, if you cut benefits you get growth and employment. The problem is that both statements are flatly incorrect. Scandinavian countries have in many cases increased, rather than decreased, employment protections in recent years, and the German labor market reforms have indeed “made a difference.” German unemployment is now higher than ever, and the German government can cut benefits to zero and it probably will not make much of a difference to the unemployment rate. Unfortunately reporting things in this way wouldn’t signal the impending death of Europe. It wouldn’t fit the script. In fact, an awful of a lot of things about European economies are mis-reported in the US. The following are my particular favorites.

• Europe is drowning in joblessness
• Europe has much lower growth than the US
• European productivity is much lower than that of the US

Let’s take each of these in turn:

Unemployment: It is certainly true that some European states currently have higher unemployment that the US; Germany, France and Italy being the prime examples, and it is commonly held that this is the result of inflexible labor markets. The story is however a bit more complex than this. First of all, European unemployment, if you think about it, is an empty category. When seen across a twenty year period, US unemployment is sometimes lower, sometimes higher than averaged-out European unemployment, and varies most with overall macroeconomic conditions. Consider that modern Europe contains oil rich Norwegians, poor Italian peasants, and unemployable post-communist Poles. The UK was deregulating its financial sector at the same time as Spain and Ireland were shedding agricultural labor. As such, not only is the category of ‘Europe’ empty, to speak of European unemployment is misleading at best.

Moreover, contrary to what Euro-bashers argue, the relationship between labor market flexibility and employment performance appears to run in exactly the opposite direction to that maintained. As David Howell notes, historically, “lower skilled workers in the United States have had…far higher unemployment rates relative to skilled workers than has been the case in…Northern European nations.” If so, one can hardly blame European unemployment on labor market rigidities since no such rigidities applied to these unemployed low-skilled Americans.

Indeed, why the US has a superior unemployment performance may have less to do with ‘flexibility’ and efficiency of labor markets than the US itself admits. Bruce Western and Katherine Beckett argue that “criminal justice policy [in the US] provides a significant state intervention with profound effects on employment trends.” Specifically, with $91 billion dollars spent on courts, police and prisons in contrast to $41 billion on unemployment benefits since the early 1990’s, the United States government distorts the labor market as much as any European state.

Western and Beckett used Bureau of Justice Statistics data to recalculate US adult male employment performance by including the incarcerated in the total labor pool. Taking 1995 as a typical year, the official unemployment rate was 7.1 percent for Germany and 5.6 percent for the US. However, once recalculated to include inmates in both countries, German unemployment rises to 7.4 percent while US unemployment rises to 7.5 percent. If one adds in to this equation the effect, post 9-11, the effects of a half a trillion dollar defense budget per annum, and 1.6 million people (of working age) under arms, then it may well be the case the US’s own labor markets are hardly as free and flexible as its often imagined, or that the causes of low unemployment lie therein.

Growth: Germany and France in particular do have very real problems with unemployment, but it has very little to do with flexibility of labor markets and a lot to do with the lack of growth. Take the case of Germany, the unemployment showcase of Euroland. From the mid 1990s until today its unemployment performance was certainly worse than the US, but it had also just bought, at a hopelessly inflated price, a redundant country of 17 million people (East Germany). It then integrated these folks into the West German economy, mortgaging the costs of doing so all over the rest of Europe via super-high interest rates that flattened Continental growth. Add into this the further contractions caused by adherence by Germany to the sado-monetarist EMU convergence criteria, and follow this up with the establishment of a central bank for all of Europe determined to fight an inflation that died 15 years previously, and yes, you will have low growth and this will impact employment. And yes, it is a self inflicted wound. And no, it has nothing to do with labor markets and welfare states. Germany is not Europe however, and should not be confused with it. The Scandinavian countries have all posted solid growth performances over the past several years, as have many of the new accession states.

Productivity: It is worth noting that a high employment participation rate and long working hours are seen in the US as being a good thing. This is strange however when one considers that according to economic theory, the richer a country gets, the less it is supposed to work. This is called the labor-leisure trade off, which the US seems determined to ignore. That Americans work much more hours than Europeans is pretty much all that explains the US’s superior productivity. As Brian Burgoon and Phineas Baxandall note, “in 1960 employed Americans worked 35 hours a year less than their counterparts in the Netherlands, but by 2000 were on the job 342 hours more.” By the year 2000, liberal regime hours [the US and the UK] were 13 percent more than the social democratic countries [Denmark, Sweden and Norway], and 30 percent more than the Christian Democratic countries [Germany, France, Italy].” Indeed, thirteen percent of American firms no longer give their employees any vacation time apart from statutory holidays. The conclusion? Europe trades off time against income. The US get more plasma TV’s and Europeans get to pick up their kids from school before 7pm. But the US is still more productive – right? Not quite.

Taking 1992 as a baseline year (index 100) and comparing the classic productivity measure – output per employed person in manufacturing – the US posts impressive productivity figures, from an index of 100 to 185.6 in 2004. Countries that beat this include Sweden, the ‘bloated welfare state’ par excellence, with an index value of 242.6. France’s figure of 150.1 is 20 percent less then the US, but considering that the average Frenchman works 30 percent less than the average American, the bad news is that France is arguably just as productive, it just trades-off productivity against time.

Equality and Efficiency: Most importantly, such comparatively decent economic performance has been achieved without the rise in inequality seen in the US. To use a summary measure of inequality, the GINI coefficient, which gauges between 0 (perfect equality) and 1 (perfect inequality), the US went from a GINI of 0.301 in 1979 to a GINI of 0.372 in 1997, a nineteen percent increase. Among developed states, only the UK beats the US in achieving a greater growth in inequality over the same period. While the US and the UK have seen large increases in income inequality, much of Europe has not. France, for example, actually reduced inequality from a GINI of 0.293 to 0.298 from 1979 to 1994. Germany likewise reduced its GINI from 0.271 to 0.264 between 1973 and 2000, as did the Netherlands, which went from 0.260 to 0.248 between 1983 and 1999. Moreover, despite an enormous increase in wealth inequality in the US, redistribution has not been as dramatic in Europe. While wealth inequality has increased in some countries such as Sweden, it has done so from such a low baseline that such states are still far more equalitarian today than the US was at the end of the 1970s. Today, the concentration of wealth in the US looks like pre-war Europe, while contemporary Europe looks more like the post-war United States.

Given all this, why then is Europe given such a bad press? Given space constraints I can only hazard some guesses. The intellectual laziness and lack of curiosity of the US media plays a part, as does the sheer fun of saying “we’re number one!” over and over again, I guess. What is also important is what John R. MacArthur of Harper’s Magazine noted in his response to the Tierney column discussed above; “As Tierney’s ideological predecessor (and former Republican press agent) William Safire well understood, when things get rough for your side, it’s useful to change the subject.”

Given this analysis, Euro-bashing, like Japan-bashing before it, contains within it two lessons. The first that that the desire to engage in such practices probably signals more about the state of the US economy than it does about the economy being bashed. Second, that while Europe does indeed have some serious economic problems, the usual suspects accused of causing these problems are really quite removed from the scene of the crime.

Rape is unique among crimes because its investigation so often turns on the question of whether a crime actually happened. Was there or was there not a rape, did she or did she not consent, was she or was she not even able to consent? These sorts of questions are rarely asked about burglary or murder. And rarely do those accused of burglary or murder respond that such crimes didn’t happen (OJ didn’t say Nicole wasn’t killed, just that he didn’t do it). Most criminal investigations accordingly turn up a culprit who then defends him or herself by saying that he or she did not commit the crime. In contrast, most widely publicized rape cases involve culprits denying that a crime took place. She was not raped; we had consensual sex. Or, she was not raped; we didn’t have sex at all.  And so therefore despite the best intentions of state legislatures and women’s advocacy groups, the prosecution of rape cases still often turns its attention to the subjective state of the victim. She consented at the time and now has changed her mind. She has made the entire story up out of malice or revenge or insanity.

The ongoing story at Duke University exacerbates these basic features of rape law in several respects. Most obviously, it places the ordinary uncertainty of the case in the whirlwind of publicity. As is often so in rape cases, the story is at root about whether or not a crime happened. Every detail of the incessant reporting has circulated around and over a core piece unknown data: not whether the woman consented to have sex, but whether anyone actually had sex at all. All of the attention paid to the DNA testing in the early stages of the investigation was in the hope that this question might be answered. Human testimony is fallible. Science is not. Or so we told by shows like CSI, with their virtuoso forensic detectives. And so we are led to believe by the well-publicized use of DNA testing in recent years to exonerate and incriminate defendants past and present. As it turns out, however, the DNA testing in this case only adds to the uncertainty. According to the District Attorney most rape cases involve no DNA at all. We thus await the evidence of her body itself, the sort of specific damage wrought by forcible sex. Her body will tell us the truth, and so get us out of the back and forth of merely verbal accusations and denials.

Even this highly pitched sense of mystery and uncertainty is ultimately the ordinary stuff of well-publicized rape cases. Were the story only about crime or no-crime, the American desire for closure and distaste for the open-ended or the unsure would eventually kill off interest. What is distinctive about the Duke story is the particularly delicate politics of race and the specific context of college athletics. About the former, little more need be said than the obvious. The story is about a twenty-seven year old African American mother working her way through a historically black college who has accused three white students from the nearby elite university of rape. On this accusation rest several hundred years of history. Were this not so highly charged an accusation, the defendants’ strategy would surely be more corrosive than it has thus far been. Rape law places unusual and often unpleasant (and unfair) burden on the subjective position of the victim, on her sense of her own consent or her reliability as a witness. Thus Kobe Bryant was exonerated because the accuser was traduced in public. We have (thankfully) seen little of this so far in the Duke case, even though the accuser is an exotic dancer with a criminal record who worked for an escort service. The predictable course of events would be for the defendants to claim the accuser is deranged and unreliable and, as far as possible under state law, to bring in the shadier aspects of the woman’s employment and criminal history to do so. That this hasn’t happened, or hasn’t happened yet, is revealing about the way in which race works in public discourse.

Of course the story drew the kind of attention that it did at first not because the accuser was black but because the accused were lacrosse players at a major university. What has emerged is something like the dirty secret of athletics at an elite institution. Like Stanford or Michigan, Duke has always maintained a double image as at once an extremely selective, prestigious institution of higher-learning and a powerhouse in several key sports (especially basketball). Unlike the Ivy League, Duke and Stanford actively recruit and provide full athletic scholarships for athletes. They also maintain a vigorous booster culture of fans and alumni. The result is a separate culture for “student” athletes, who don’t really have to take the same classes as everyone else, and who are apparently coddled in lifestyles of abuse and debauchery.

The agreed-upon facts of the case ought to be seen in this light. The lacrosse team threw a party for themselves and hired two exotic dancers from a local escort service. The dancers arrived and performed their routine surrounded by a ring of taunting and beer-drinking men. Alone and without security, they complained of their treatment and left. They were coaxed back inside. One claims to be have been raped. Whatever sexual assault may or may not have taken place, the facts of the case are set against the backdrop of an aggressive Neanderthalism that is precisely the sort of thing a university should be designed to counter.

As with most accusations of rape, the legal case is certain to revolve around the question of whether a crime happened. The coverage will most likely turn to a predictable discussion of credibility combined with new revelations about the accuser and defendants’ relative truthfulness. One shouldn’t forget what this case has already revealed.

I was invited by Dr. Luis Rodriguez-Pineiro to give a lecture at his class on the History of Law at the Universidad de Sevilla. Dr. Pineiro works on indigenous rights and has just published a book, “Indigenous Peoples, Postcolonialism and International Law”. He asked me to speak on issues related to national identity and political democracy. I have, like many of us, struggled with these issues, intellectually and politically. Why is it hard to avoid discussions of ethnonational identity when we talk about political democracy? Why do those who advocate nationalism, particularly a nationalism of the ethnic variety, tend to politically persist, if not out-maneuver, those who advocate a more neutral form of political community when it comes to defining the state? Or more simply, why is it that it is hard for us to avoid some allusion to national culture in our discussions of political community.

Democracy is a theory about how we ought to treat each other if we live in the same political community. It describes the rules through which we may engage with each other, i.e., the powers our rulers may have over us, and the rights we may have against them. These are well developed and argued in democratic theory. These powers are very familiar to most of us – the basic rights of expression, association and conscience. The right to vote and elect representatives of our choice who may form a government. Political thinkers have given these issues much thought. They have described and argued in great detail how we ought to regulate ourselves politically and what claims we may make against each other or the state. We may indeed differ about the nature of these powers – libertarians might think all that is required is to protect some basic liberties. Social democrats may argue that what we need is a state that taxes the rich and transfers money to the poor. Whatever their disagreements – which are indeed plenty – libertarians and social democrats do not disagree that what they are talking about is the political regulation of the relationship among citizens within a political community.

While they have well developed theories and debates about internal regulation of a political community, neither social democrats nor libertarians have anything close to a theory about the boundaries of a political community. Their theories developed over hundreds of years fail to tell us what the limits of a political community are. For example, if Sri Lanka and India are indeed democracies, why shouldn’t they be one country ruled from Colombo? This is where nationalism comes in.

Nationalism is a theory about the boundaries of the political community, i.e., who is in and who is out. Nationalism argues that the political community, if it is not to be simply an accident of history or an agglomeration of unconnected social groups, needs to be based on something more. That something more is the way of life of a group of people, defined by language, religion, region or culture. This is a way of life or culture of a political community that precedes the political community on which it is based. Of course nationalist theories differ on what ought to form the basis of the political community. The Zionists, the Wahhabis, and the Hindutvas, believe that it should be religion. The Catalans, the Tamils, and the French believe it should be language, and so on. Whatever the problems with these efforts at constructing a political community, they do have some theory about the boundaries of such a community. But nationalism has no theory about the rules and regulations that govern the interaction among members of a political community. These members could live in a dictatorship, a democracy or even a monarchy.

As social democrats who believe in combining social equality and political freedom, we have an inadequate answer to the question of whom we should share this freedom and equality with. One answer, the world, is insufficient. It is too vague and abstruse, because it allows to us to get away from the actual concrete commitments – such as taxing and redistributing – that is required by such sharing. The other answer – we should share with those who are either like or close to us seems both too concrete and too narrow. Should it be with those who speak like us, live near us and look like us? We are uncomfortable with this response because the instinct animating it seems to foster intolerance and inequality.

So whether we like it or not, nationalism finds a way to creep into our theories of political democracy because of the silence of political theory about the boundaries of a political community. As a political theorist, I am troubled by this silence intellectually and may look for answers to it. As a political activist I am sympathetic to this silence, wish to nurture it, and maybe even require it of my fellow citizens. I am wary that probing it too much may lead to the kind of answers that make it harder for me to make the case for sharing power, wealth, and space with those who happen to live together with me in the same political community as citizens, even if they do not look like me, speak the same language, and pray to the same gods.

Cicero may very well have been the first genuine asshole. He wasn’t always appreciated as such. During more noble and naïve times, people seem to have accepted his rather moralistic tracts like ‘On Duties’ and ‘On Old Age’ as untainted wisdom handed down through the eons. This, supposedly, was a gentle man doing his best in a corrupted age. It was easier to palate that kind of interpretation during Medieval and early Renaissance times because many of his letters had been lost and forgotten. But Petrarch found some of them again around 1345 and the illusion of Cicero’s detached nobility became distinctly more difficult to pass off. Reading his letters, you can’t help but feel that Cicero really was a top-notch asshole. He schemed and plotted with the best of them. His hands were never anything but soiled.

Now, I think it may be clear that I come to praise Cicero, not to bury him. Even in calling him an asshole I’m handing him a kind of laurel. Because it is the particular and specific way that he was an asshole that picks him up out of history and plunks him down as a contemporary, as someone even more accessible after over two thousand years than many figures of the much more recent past. Perhaps this is a function of the way that history warps and folds. The period of the end of the Roman Republic in the last century BC speaks to us in ways that even more recent historical periods do not. Something about its mix of corruption and verve, cosmopolitanism and rank greed, self-destructiveness and high-minded idealism causes the whole period to leap over itself. And that is Cicero to a ‘T’. He is vain and impetuous, self-serving and conniving. He lies and cheats and he puffs himself up in tedious speech after tedious speech. It’s pretty remarkable. But he loved the Republic for what he thought it represented and he dedicated his life, literally, to upholding that idea in thought and in practice.

In what may be the meanest and most self-aggrandizing public address of all time, the Second Philippic Against Antony, Cicero finds himself (as usual) utterly blameless and finds Antony (as usual) guilty of almost every crime imaginable. It’s a hell of a speech, called a ‘Philippic’ because it was modeled after Demosthenes’ speeches against King Philip of Macedon, which were themselves no negligible feat in nasty rhetoric.

One can only imagine the electric atmosphere around Rome as Cicero spilled his vitriol. Caesar had only recently been murdered. Sedition and civil war were in the air. Antony was in the process of making a bold play for dictatorial power. Cicero, true to his lifelong inclinations, opposes Antony in the name of the restoration of the Republic and a free society. In his first Philippic, Cicero aims for a mild rebuke against Antony. Antony responds with a scathing attack. This unleashes the Second Philippic. “Unscrupulousness is not what prompts these shameless statements of yours,” he writes of Antony, “you make them because you entirely fail to grasp how you are contradicting yourself. In fact, you must be an imbecile. How could a sane person first take up arms to destroy his country, and then protest because someone else had armed himself to save it?”

Cicero’s condescension is wicked. “Concentrate, please—just for a little. Try to make your brain work for a moment as if you were sober.” Then he gets nasty. Of Antony’s past: “At first you were just a public prostitute, with a fixed price—quite a high one too. But very soon Curio intervened and took you off the streets, promoting you, you might say, to wifely status, and making a sound, steady, married woman of you. No boy bought for sensual purposes was ever so completely in his master’s powers as you were in Curio’s.”

Cicero finishes the speech off with a bit of high-minded verbal self-sacrifice:

Consider, I beg you, Marcus Antonius, do some time or other consider the republic: think of the family of which you are born, not of the men with whom you are living. Be reconciled to the republic. However, do you decide on your conduct. As to mine, I myself will declare what that shall be. I defended the republic as a young man, I will not abandon it now that I am old. I scorned the sword of Catiline, I will not quail before yours. No, I will rather cheerfully expose my own person, if the liberty of the city can be restored by my death.

May the indignation of the Roman people at last bring forth what it has been so long laboring with. In truth, if twenty years ago in this very temple I asserted that death could not come prematurely upon a man of consular rank, with how much more truth must I now say the same of an old man? To me, indeed, O conscript fathers, death is now even desirable, after all the honors which I have gained, and the deeds which I have done. I only pray for these two things: one, that dying I may leave the Roman people free. No greater boon than this can be granted me by the immortal gods. The other, that every one may meet with a fate suitable to his deserts and conduct toward the republic.

If the lines are a bit much, remember that Cicero was to be decapitated by Antony’s men not long afterward, and, for good measure, to have his tongue ripped out of his severed head by Antony’s wife, so that she might get final revenge on his powers of speech. It’s not every asshole that garners such tributes.

***

Around the time that he re-discovered some of Cicero’s letters, Petrarch started writing his own letters to his erstwhile hero. In the first, Petrarch writes,

Of Dionysius I forbear to speak; of your brother and nephew, too; of Dolabella even, if you like. At one moment you praise them all to the skies; at the next fall upon them with sudden maledictions. This, however, could perhaps be pardoned. I will pass by Julius Caesar, too, whose well-approved clemency was a harbour of refuge for the very men who were warring against him. Great Pompey, likewise, I refrain from mentioning. His affection for you was such that you could do with him what you would. But what insanity led you to hurl yourself upon Antony? Love of the republic, you would probably say. But the republic had fallen before this into irretrievable ruin, as you had yourself admitted. Still, it is possible that a lofty sense of duty, and love of liberty, constrained you to do as you did, hopeless though the effort was. That we can easily believe of so great a man. But why, then, were you so friendly with Augustus? What answer can you give to Brutus? If you accept Octavius, said he, we must conclude that you are not so anxious to be rid of all tyrants as to find a tyrant who will be well-disposed toward yourself. Now, unhappy man, you were to take the last false step, the last and most deplorable. You began to speak ill of the very friend whom you had so lauded, although he was not doing any ill to you, but merely refusing to prevent others who were. I grieve, dear friend at such fickleness. These shortcomings fill me with pity and shame. Like Brutus, I feel no confidence in the arts in which you are so proficient.

Indeed, it seems that Cicero was just a fickle man looking out for Number One, and maybe he’d stumble across a little glory in the process. Still, even that isn’t entirely fair. As Petrarch admits in his disappointed letter, some concept of the Republic and human freedom was driving Cicero all along. But the Republic was always a sullied thing, even from the beginning. The concept of freedom was always mixed up with self-interest and the less-than-pure motivations of human creatures. Cicero got himself tangled up in the compromised world of political praxis precisely because he was uninterested in a concept of freedom that hovered above the actual world with practiced distaste and a permanent scowl. I like to think of him as an asshole because I like to think of him as one of us, neck-deep in a river of shit and trying his best to find a foothold, one way or another. Dum vita est, spes est (‘While there’s life, there’s hope’).