Empire 2.0: A Modest Proposal for a United States of the West (Terra Nova Series)

Rating:
Summary: A modestly Swift proposal
Review: By adopting his alter ego of Xavier De C*** for objectivity's sake, veteran journalist Regis Debray becomes a kid in a candy-store in skewering the shortcomings of modern European culture and statesmanship, particularly in his native France. His late fictional friend and colleague has written to Debray in English (so Debray tells us) to diagnose all that is wrong with modern Europe - way too much to detail here - and to prescribe a most unusual cure.

His prescription for massive cultural reform takes the form of calling for a modern-day Edict of Caracalla, citing how the Roman Emperor of that name declared all residents of the Roman Empire not otherwise enslaved or proscribed to be Roman citizens, and thereby expanding the tax base and buying the empire couple of extra centuries. De C***, having recently becoming a U.S. citizen after years in the French secret service, says that the modern Roman emperor lives in the White House. He prescribes that the countries of Europe join in a "United States of the West," as he would deem it, and that France be the first to take this step toward Washington, lest Britain or Germany steal yet another diplomatic march.

Not that it should be a one-way affair. M. De C***, or M. Debray, calls for a more Atlantocentric outlook on Washington's part. But he declares that Europe should provide the incentive by, as it were, going West - a notion guaranteed to cause conniptions in news columns and government chambers all over Europe.

A giveaway, though, to this American reader at any rate, is what the erstwhile new citizen De C***/old European Debray leaves out; namely, the actual legal means of executing this Europe Annexation. No where does he mention that any new Edict of Caracalla would take the form of a European government ratifying the U.S. Constitution. It reflects the European Constitution debate where the few comparisons to the U.S. debate in 1788 were denied and dismissed with a casual wave of the hand - a case of waving the light out of the smoke if ever there was one; the very disease of De C***/Debray's jeremiad.

For the irony-challenged - not all of whom are Yanks - bear in mind that Debray doesn't dream of an actual Europe Annexation into a Greater U.S. He himself has cited this book as a call against the rise of renewed empire for the 21st-century. Still, it's difficult to imagine a more plausible step away from that vision - unless it's for a United States of Earth. We can always leave the United States of the Solar System for the 22nd century.