The city on the Hill?; The Latin Americanization of Europe and the lost competition with the U.S.A.

The data referred to in this study demonstrates that the epochs of globalization in the 19th Century and after 1973 shifted incomes relatively away from Western Europe, Eastern Europe and Japan, in favor of the United States and the 'dominions', while the era of regulation after 1945 clearly re-allocated relative incomes to the West Europeans, to the East Europeans and the Japanese. It is to be expected that Western and Eastern Europe, Latin America, and Japan, which all owed their relative ascent in global society to their import substitution strategies, will be the main losers in the coming decades of further globalization. In terms of combined UNDP indicators of human survival and absolute poverty, the US outperforms several EU-15 countries, like the United Kingdom, Spain and Portugal. The centerpiece of the EU's social policies are 47 regulations on health and safety at work and labor conditions. But fatal work accidents per 100.000 inhabitants are higher in Estonia, Spain, Latvia, Italy and Portugal than in the US; in those nations, one is confronted with post-Soviet proportions of labor accidents. "American conditions" are not "threatening" Europe: both continents face the same challenges, which America - in a capitalistic sense - stood up to much more productively in the 1990s. The lack of industrial policy in the tradition of Commissioner Jacques Delors is an important variable here. According to this argument, the EU-25 is characterized by very high foreign capital penetration and other indicators of dependency, with as it's net effect on development has polarization. Human capital policy also plays an important role in explaining international growth differentials. The relevance of the "Delors" factors for the explanation of economic efficiency, gender justice, employment, social cohesion and sustainable development is shown in multiple regression analyses in 130 countries. It shows that Europe corresponds to such an analysis; even worse, it is to be expected that the "Latin Americanization" of European society will go on, if Europe does not return to the Delors agenda. Arno Tausch is Adjunct Professor (Universitaetsdozent) of Political Science at Innsbruck University, Austria, and former diplomat of his country. He published 7 books in English, 5 books in German, and over 110 printed or electronic scholarly and current affairs publications in 6 languages for over 40 journals and/or publishing institutions in 18 countries.