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.After acquiringBankers Trust, Deutsche Bank is also an American bank.And when General Motors bought German carmaker AdamOpel AG, it also became a German company.6.Americans and Europeans have formed a shared popular cultureon a level that has never existed between two continents before.We discuss the same issues, listen to the same music, andwatch the same films, from the East German Stasi dramaThe Lives of Others to the latest Hollywood blockbuster.There is also a great deal of cross-fertilization when itcomes to high culture.Writers like Philip Roth, JonathanFranzen, and Susan Sontag are part of our joint culturalheritage.Briton Sir Simon Rattle directs the BerlinPhilharmonic, and German Kurt Masur was with the NewYork Philharmonic.Intellectuals like Ralf Dahrendorf,André Glucksmann, Herbert Marcuse, and SamuelHuntington are part of a Western intellectual culture thatcannot possibly be divided along national boundaries.Westill have uniquely American, Italian, French, and Polishcultures, but a common Western culture is developingalongside them.Indeed, it seems that it is this part of theculture that is growing in leaps and bounds. 256 GABOR STEINGART7.Americans and Europeans are approaching the same future.Thisis the most important commonality.They will eithersucceed together in dealing with new challenges fromclimate change to terrorism or not at all.There is nothreat confronting America today that does not confrontEurope at the same time.Conversely, there is no Europeanchallenge that is not an American challenge as well.Neitherof the two would be well advised to seek its fortune at theexpense of the other.Europeans and Americans will eithermarch together or be defeated separately.Henry Kissinger s fear that the new Europe could beyearning for an identity through confrontation withAmerica has proven to be unfounded.Nowadays (almost)everyone in Europe knows that a future worth fighting forcan only be achieved together with America.Today morethan ever, Europe and America form a community of destiny,even if the threat no longer emanates from Russian tanks.The United States of the West would have to be a confedera-tion of independent nations, an alliance based on common valuesand interests.Anyone who looks hard enough can already recog-nize this new, supranational entity taking shape on the horizon.And if we look even more closely, we can even see it approaching.We would be wise to start taking a few steps in its direction.The values of this confederation are those of the Enlighten-ment notwithstanding the many differences among the partnernations.The system of government in the United States and Ger-many is more federal than that of the French and the British.Indi-vidualism is more pronounced in America than in Scandinavia.The Americans believe in God, and the Europeans in the socialwelfare state.But these differences become trivial in the face ofan outside world that considers virtually everything that is impor-tant to us to be unimportant or even harmless; a world thatignores, ridicules, or fights our values.The separation of church and state is by no means a matter ofcourse in Asia and in the Arab world.In many parts of the world, THE WAR FOR WEALTH 257democracy is ostracized, while those who support it populate theprisons and not the parliaments.Free trade unions are almostnonexistent, and the freedom of speech is only valued as long asit doesn t get in the way of the business dealings of the powerful.They perceive as offensive our Western system of checks and bal-ances, power and countervailing power, speech and contradiction,as well as our system of government, which only grants authorityfor a limited period of time and in which those granting theauthority are not kings, generals, rebels, or religious leaders, butthe masses of ordinary people, regardless of education, gender,religion, or race.Indeed, it is probably as sinister in their eyes asthe one-party state or the caliphate is in ours.This brings us to the second pillar of an American-Europeanidentity: interests.There is a massive, and increasingly urgent,common Western interest to colonize this intermediate space intowhich the global economy is expanding its radius of activity, thegoal being to establish Western values in this still largely apoliti-cal sphere because others establish theirs.The West s advance would be worth the effort
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