Talk about upending accepted certainties! While Europe is now firmly in the hand of parties from right-of-center (France, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Denmark and David Cameron pacing restlessly in the wings), America has gone socialist. Nationalizing the financial sector by the back door, contemplating massive subsidy of production industries, increasing government spending on health care and education, promising deep-pocket investment in all manner of greenery, and drastically limiting executive salaries: is Obama beating the Europeans at their own game? “We are all Socialists Now,” trumpets Newsweek. General Jack D. Ripper, Doctor Strangelove’s nemesis, who fulminated about fluoridation as another of Communism’s nefarious advances, must be rotating in his Valhalla.

How quickly things change. It seems just a few months ago that the toxic Texan presidency of the younger Bush – unilaterally going to war, refusing to submit to international treaties, disparaging the seriousness of global ecological catastrophe – convinced bien pensant opinion on both sides of the Atlantic that the gulf between the US and Europe was stark and growing ever wider. And indeed, old and well-worn mental ruts are hard to steer out of. It remains a staple of political discourse on both sides of the Atlantic that Europe and America are worlds apart. Everyone knows this.

It was mainly foreign policy disagreements, sparked by the Bush administration’s big-stick approach, over Iraq, Iran, Israel, and North Korea that helped fuelled this idea over the past eight years. But what may have been aggravated by diplomacy and war has also rested on a wider foundation. The “wide Atlantic” thesis claims that there are fundamental differences between Europe and America. These are among the contrasts: America believes in the untrammeled market, Europe accepts capitalism but curbs its excesses. Social policies either do not exist in America or are more miserly than in Europe. Education is socially stratified and largely privatized, while in Europe it is universally accessible and state-financed. America’s lack of universal health insurance means that people die young and live miserably. Because the market dominates, America’s environment is less cared for. Since social contrasts are greater in America, crime is much more of a problem than in Europe. Meanwhile Europeans are secular; Americans are much more likely to believe in God and accept a role for religion in public life. The two societies are thus thought to differ radically: competition vs cooperation, individualism vs solidarity, autonomy vs cohesion.

This is all very familiar. But is it true? With the Obama administration charting new directions, European leftists many welcome Americans back to what they see as their fold. American conservatives, in the meantime, may think their country has lost its bearings. But are the contrasts really as great as both sides have commonly thought? One way of answering this question is to look at the quantifiable evidence. Not all differences can be captured by numbers. But at least statistics allow us a first pass over the terrain, and give us the opportunity to compare reliably. Blinkered but demonstrable, quantification releases us from the clutches of anecdote and impression into the realm of fact and verifiability.

Let us compare four areas: the economy, social policy, the environment, and finally the hardest of all to quantify: religion and cultural attitudes. The evidence in each case allows two conclusions: First, Europe is not a coherent or unified continent. The spectrum of difference within even Western Europe (which is what we will be looking at here; to include also the new arrivals would be to win the argument by default) is much broader than normally appreciated. Second, with a few exceptions, the US fits into the span of most quantifiable measures. We may therefore conclude either that there is no coherent European identity, or – if there is one – that the US is as much a European country as the usual candidates. We might rephrase this more cogently by saying that both Europe and the US are, in fact, parts of a common, big-tent grouping – call it the West, the Atlantic community, or the developed world.

It is universally observed that America is an economically more unequal society than Europe, with greater stratification between rich and poor. Much of this is true. Income is more disproportionately distributed in the US than in western Europe. In 1998, for example, the richest one per cent of Americans took home 14 per cent of total income, while in Britain the figure was 12.5 per cent and in Sweden only about 6 per cent. Wealth concentration is another matter, however. The richest one per cent of Americans owned about 21 per cent of all wealth in 2000. Some European nations have higher concentrations than that. In Switzerland in 1997, the richest percent owned 35% per cent, and in Sweden—despite that nation’s egalitarian reputation – the figure is 21 per cent, exactly the same as for the Americans. And if we take account of the massive moving of wealth offshore and off-book permitted by Sweden’s tax authorities, the richest one percent of Swedes are proportionately twice as well off as their American peers.

True, income and wealth disparities are high in the US. Inequality and poverty are not, however, the same thing. Does a broad distribution of income mean that many Americans are poor? If we measure absolute poverty as the actual cash sum equivalent to half of median income for the original six nations of the EU in 2000, we see that many western European countries have a higher percentage of poor citizens than the US – not only the Mediterranean countries, but also the UK and Ireland, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Finland and Sweden.

The same is true when one is out of work. Unemployment benefits in the US, often portrayed as little more than derisory in European media, are actually higher than in many European nations. Greece, the UK, Italy and Iceland spend less than the US on unemployment, measured per capita. The amount of salary that is replaced by initial rates of unemployment benefit puts the US at the low end of the European range, at the same level as Greece and the UK and above Ireland and Italy. If measured as the percentage of an average industrial wage for married couples, the American benefit rates fall at the center of the European scale. (Part of the explanation is that for many years now, proportionately fewer American workers than Europeans have been unemployed. Whether this remains the case is yet to be seen).

If we turn to social policy, the American welfare state is often portrayed as miserly and undeveloped compared to Europe. And so it is, if the standard is taken to be Sweden or Germany. But if we look at the span of social policy within Europe, the US fits comfortably by most measures into the lower half of what is a quite broad European spectrum.

Of course, the US has no universal system of health insurance. Michael Moore will insure that no one forgets that. As a result fifteen per cent of its population is not covered. There is no question that being uninsured is unfair and brutal, nor that the lack of universal health coverage is the most pressing problem of American domestic politics. President Obama seems determined not to let the financial crisis sidetrack his campaign promise of improving access to health insurance. The true disgrace of American healthcare is that infant mortality is higher than anywhere in Europe.

Yet despite the too-large fraction of those who are not insured, to judge by the quantifiable outcomes of surviving disease, Americans are relatively healthy and well-serviced by their healthcare system. For many diseases the incidence rates and the number of years lost to sickness are firmly in the middle of the European spectrum: diabetes, heart and circulatory disease and strokes. For many cancers, incidence rates are high in the US. This could, of course, indicate noxious lifestyles, but equally it may suggest more vigilant diagnosis. Whatever the reason, cancer mortality rates are surprisingly low, falling toward the bottom of the European scale. The US has a higher incidence than any western European nation of breast cancer, for example, but the percentage of women who actually die of the disease is in the lower half of the European spectrum. And for the four major cancer killers (colorectal, lung, breast and prostate cancer) all European nations have worse survival rates than the US. Either those Americans diagnosed with cancer are dying of other unrelated causes, or the care they receive must be beneficial.

Looking also at other forms of social policy, we see that the US fits broadly into the lower half of the European spectrum. As with its unemployment assistance, American spending on disability benefits is higher than in Greece and Portugal per capita, and is practically at the same level as France, Italy, Ireland and Germany. (All figures used for comparison are expressed in comparable terms, usually in Purchasing Power Parity currency, which is to say that they account for differences in costs of living). The US spends more per head on survivor’s benefits (for the spouse and children of employees who die) than all European countries other than Italy, France, Belgium and Luxembourg. State pensions in the US fall into the lower half of the European spectrum. But look instead at the total disposable income of the retired in America as a percentage of what the still active receive. Only in Austria, Germany and France do the elderly fare better.

It is commonly known that the American state does not help out much in terms of family provision. Parental leave is not statutory and there are no guarantees that women can reclaim their jobs after pregnancy. Family allowances as such do not exist. On the other hand, if one counts resources channeled via the tax system as well as outright cash grants and services, and if one measures them as a percentage of GDP, for family benefits the US ranks higher than Spain, Greece and Italy, and only marginally below Switzerland. Public spending on child care (daycare and pre-primary education) puts the US into the middle of the European spectrum. Total spending on pre-primary care per child is higher in the US than anywhere but Norway.

Public social spending in America—that is, monies channeled through the state—is undeniably on the low end of the European spectrum. But other avenues of redistribution are equally important: voluntary efforts, private but legally mandated benefits, and taxes. If we take all these together, the American welfare state is more extensive than is often realized: the total social policy effort made in the US falls precisely at the center of the European spectrum.

As a fraction of the total economy, American public social expenditure narrowly makes it into the European norm, sneaking in above Ireland. But because the American GDP is greater than in most European nations, the per capita spend figures are higher than this rank suggests. In terms of how much money is paid out, on average, for each person, the US ranks in the lower middle of the European spectrum, above most of the Mediterranean and Iceland and in the same league as the UK, the Netherlands and Finland. The Swedes allot almost twice the American fraction of their GDP to social policy. But the actual spending per citizen in the US is only about 30% less than in Sweden. A larger fraction of less is not as much as it seems.

If we shift our focus to education, the contrasts across the Atlantic are, if anything, reversed. A higher percentage of Americans have graduated from university and from secondary school than in any European nation. America’s adults are, in this sense, better educated than Europe’s. And in terms of total spending, the US lavishes more money per child at all levels of education than any West European nation. Europeans often believe that good US schools are private and serve only an elite. Yet American education is, if anything, less privatized than most European systems. Public education was among the first social programs to receive massive public funding in the US and this has remained the case ever since. The percentage of American students attending private institutions at all levels is at the centre of the European scale.

Americans do not need to read, Simone de Beauvoir was convinced, because they do not think. Thinking is hard to quantify, reading less so. And read the Americans do. The percentage of illiterate Americans is average by European standards. There are more newspapers per head in the US than anywhere in Europe outside Scandinavia, Switzerland and Luxembourg. The long tradition of well-funded public libraries in the US means that the average American reader is better supplied with library books than his peers in Germany, Britain, France, Holland, Austria and all the Mediterranean nations. They also make better use of these public library books than most Europeans. The average American borrowed more library books in 2001 than their peers in Germany, Austria, Norway, Ireland, Luxembourg, France and throughout the Mediterranean. Not content with borrowing, Americans also buy more books per head than any Europeans for whom we have numbers. And they write more books per capita than most Europeans.

American popular culture is fascinating by violence, much as Japanese is by suicide. Whether the Godfather or the Wire, the image America broadcasts about itself is that it is crime-ridden and violent. Most foreigners have been content to accept that analysis at face value. Not that it is entirely untrue. A horrendous number of murders are committed in the US, almost twice the per capita rate of the nearest European competitors, Switzerland, Finland and Sweden. That is without question. Nor is there any doubt that the US locks into prison a far higher percentage of its population than any of its peers. But in most other respects, America is a peaceful and quiet place by European standards. American burglary rates are highish, but below the Danish and British. The incidence of theft is better than in six Western European countries, and pickpocketing above only the levels in Sweden, Scotland, Finland and Portugal. Assault is in the middle, on par with the rates in Sweden and Belgium. Rape levels are high, but sexual assault rates are moderate. Only Denmark, Belgium and Portugal are lower; Austria suffers three times the American rate.

American drug use is highish, but – excepting cannabis where the figures are a smidgen above the UK’s – within the European spectrum. The American white collar crime rate is at the middle to the low end of the European spectrum. The French suffer over six times the American rate of bribery. Corrupt public officials are as likely to solicit bribes in Switzerland and Belgium as in the US and more so in Germany, Austria, Denmark, Portugal, France and Greece. The total American crime figures are in the low middle of the pack. Indeed, only relatively small countries – Finland, Austria, Switzerland and Portugal – are less crime-ridden than the US.

In ecological terms, America is commonly thought to be a wastrel. Big cars, big houses, long commutes, cold winters, hot summers, profligate habits: such common perceptions of the country have combined with the Bush administrations cozy relationship with the oil industry and its refusal to sign the Kyoto Protocol to paint the nation as an environmental black hole. Once again, the numbers tell a different story.

Although oil use per capita is high in America, measured as a function of economic production (in other words, putting the input in relation to the output), it remains within European norms, and indeed lower than Portugal, Greece, Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Iceland. Between 1990 and 2002, America’s carbon dioxide output rose, but per unit of GDP it fell by 17 per cent—a greater reduction than in nine western European countries. In its output of renewable energy, the US is middle of the European spectrum on all counts, whether biogas, solid biomass energy, geothermal, or wind. American spending (public and private) on pollution abatement and control as a percentage of GDP is bested only in Austria, Denmark, Italy and the Netherlands.

Despite the myths of a hyper-motorized nation, Americans own fewer passenger cars per head than the French, Austrians, Swiss, Germans, Luxembourgois and Italians. Even if one takes the figures for all road motor vehicles, the US figures are lower than the Portuguese and in the same league as the Luxembourgeois, Icelanders and Italians. Per capita, Americans rely on their cars much more than Europeans. But adjusting for the size of the country, automobile usage is lower only in Finland, Sweden and Greece. Similarly, Americans produce a lot of waste per head, though the Norwegians are worse, and the Irish and Danes are close competitors. But they recycle as well as the Finns and the French, and better than the British, the Greeks and the Portuguese. Since 1990, Americans’ production of waste has scarcely gone up per capita, while in all European nations for which figures are available, there have been dramatic increases – over 70% in Spain, almost 60% in Italy, for example, over 40% in Norway, almost that much in Denmark and Austria, and well over 30% in Sweden.

“The old world developed on the basis of a coalition – uneasy but understood – between humanity and its surroundings,” the Guardian reassures its recycling readership. “The settlement of the US was based on conquest, not just of the indigenous peoples, but also of the terrain.” Yet, despite such common European conceptions, American conservation efforts are strong by European standards. Jeremy Rifkin insists that Europeans, unlike Americans, have “a love for the intrinsic value of nature. One can see it in Europeans’ regard for the rural countryside and their determination to maintain natural landscapes…” Actually, the percentage of national territory protected in the US is about double that of France, the UK or even Sweden, despite its vast Arctic parks. Eleven European nations (out of sixteen) spare a smaller percent of their land than the US. A higher percentage of US waters – marine territory – is set aside as nature reserves than in any European nation other than Denmark.

Agricultural land devoted to organic farming in the US, as a percentage of total cropland, is lower than anywhere in Europe. But Americans’ consumption of organic food is comparable to European levels, and higher than in the Netherlands, Sweden, Italy, France and Belgium. And conventional American farmers are far less chemicalized than their European colleagues. Thanks partly to their use of GM crops, they use pesticides sparingly. Only Finnish, Swedish and Irish farmers spray less per square kilometer of agricultural land. The Italians use over seven times as much, the Belgians even more.

But despite perceived differences over distribution of its economy, the generosity of its welfare state, or its stewardship of the environment, perhaps the most fundamental assumed difference between the US and Europe comes over values. Americans, the conventional wisdom goes, are nationalistic and religious, while Europeans are post-nationalist and secular. But even here there is reason to doubt the simple and binary stereotypes.

Yes, Americans are patriotic and nationalist, but according to the World Values Survey, not more than some Europeans. Unsurprisingly, Germans are least proud of their nation, and rather unexpectedly and cheerily, the Portuguese—not the Americans—are most, with the Irish tied for second place. Granted, Americans are more likely than any Europeans to think that their country is better than most others. But more Portuguese, Danes and Spaniards feel that the world would be improved if other people were like them, and a larger fraction of Americans admit that there are aspects of their country that shame them than do the Germans, the Austrians, the Spanish, French, Danes and Finns. Surveys reveal that the Finns, Danes, Norwegians and Swedes are all more willing to fight for their country than the Americans.

Even on religion, there is reason to question the usual stereotypes of an absolute polarity between the US and Europe. “Religion is palpable in US schools, places of work and public institutions,” writes a typical editorial in the Guardian. “God is invoked by soldiers and politicians in a way that would seem inappropriate in Britain.” Many Americans might find this hard to take in a country where the head of state is known as the “Defender of the Faith,” and the established church has twenty-four seats in the upper legislature. Indeed, the American observer of Europe is often puzzled at European claims to secularism since expressions of religion here are so frequent, so palpable and so public, and yet—apparently—so taken for granted as to pass unnoticed. A tenth-century depiction of the crucifixion, for example, is part of every Danish passport, regardless of whether its bearer is, as many nowadays are, a pious Muslim. But putting that to one side, American church attendance and religious belief is not off the European scale if one compares with its Catholic regions.

In 1999, a smaller percentage of Americans (1.4%) described themselves as atheists than did Europeans – by a small margin, with the Irish and the Austrians almost indistinguishably close to the Americans. A smaller percent of Americans consider themselves religious than the Portuguese and Italians. Proportionately fewer Americans say they believe in God and always have than the Irish and Portuguese, and only a few more than the Italians. A higher percentage of Americans firmly believe in God than northern Europeans, but the numbers are broadly comparable with the Catholic countries. If the qualifier “firm” is removed, the American figures become much the same as the Mediterranean nations and, of course, Ireland. Proportionately more Americans than any Europeans pray several times a day, but fewer Americans do so daily than the Portuguese, and fewer do so weekly than the British, the Italians, the Irish, the Spanish, the Portuguese and the Swiss. The percentage of Americans who never pray is over twice that of Ireland.

Moreover, sociologists of comparative religious behavior tend to explain high American church attendance as the outcome of market forces, not spiritual ones. Greater competition has led to a richer variety and higher quality of offerings, while Europe’s state-monopoly religions struggle to provide for their citizens’ spiritual needs. European churches, in other words, suffer from much the same problems as restaurants did in the eastern bloc. If the issue is thus one of supply and less of demand, the contrast between Europe and America may not be between religious and secular mindsets, but between how—if at all—largely equivalent spiritual needs are fulfilled.

That is certainly a conclusions suggested by a look at attitudes to science across the Atlantic. Without question, Americans are more likely to believe in creationism than Europeans. The modern creationist – interestingly enough – no longer takes scripture as sufficient reason to believe in the Biblical account of the origins of the world. The debate is conducted wholly on the turf of science, with creationists attempting to argue the fine points of the age of the fossil record, suggesting that orthodox evolution has gaps as a seamless explanation, and otherwise indicating their acceptance that the modern world speaks the language of science. The realm of scientific quackery in Europe, on the other hand, is much wider than in the US. Consider the sway of self-evidently daft positions like anti-vaccinationism among the Hampstead Bildungsbürgertum, or the equally irrational rejection of the fruits of scientific reasoning, like the anti-GM movement. Astrology is more widely believed in several European nations for which we have figures than in the US. And homeopathy, which arguably is the most unscientific of opinions in its outright rejection of the single most fundamental assumption of the scientific method – that we can identify and harness causality empirically – is relied on much more often in Europe than the US: five times as much in the UK, ten in France.

If Americans are, on the whole, more religious than most Europeans, it does not follow that they have less overall faith in science. The choice between rationality and religion does not seem to be zero-sum. The world-wide evidence suggests that societies with a strong faith in science also have strong religious beliefs, and the trans-Atlantic evidence confirms that. True, proportionately fewer Americans firmly agree with the Darwinian theory of evolution than any Europeans other than in Northern Ireland. But in other respects Americans believe in the Enlightenment project of human reason’s ability to understand and master nature. They fall in the European middle ground in approving animal testing to save human lives. They understand better than all Europeans (other than the Norwegians) the falsity of the proposition that all manmade chemicals cause cancer if you ingest enough of them, and better than anyone (other than the Norwegians and Swiss) that it is not true that anyone exposed to any degree of radioactivity will certainly die. Proportionately fewer Americans agree with the proposition that science does more harm than good than any Europeans but the Dutch, Norwegians, Swedes and French. More American pupils agree with the statement that science helps them understand the world than in any European nation other than Italy and Portugal.

But if they are scientific, Americans are also thought of as die-hard individualists who live in a society of sharp elbows and an ethos of live and let live. Americans are often thought to be unusually anti-governmental in their political ideology, practically anarchists by European standards of communitarianism and solidarity. Surveys of attitudes do not, however, uniformly bear out such polarities. Proportionately more Americans than anyone but the Spaniards claim to obey the law without exception. A higher percentage of Americans trust their government than all Europeans, excepting only the Swiss and the Norwegians – although no people, truth be told, seems to have much faith in their elected representatives. A Pew Foundation survey in 2007 found that proportionately fewer Americans worried that the government had too much control than did Germans and Italians, with the French at the same level and the British just a percentage point lower. A higher percentage of Americans have a great deal of confidence in their civil service than any Europeans other than the Irish.

But talk is cheap and such findings may indicate desire as much as reality. The trust of Americans in their state apparatus can be measured more concretely by their willingness to pay taxes. Unlike many Europeans, Americans pay the taxes required of them. Only in Austria and Switzerland are the underground economies as small. In the Mediterranean, the rate of tax avoidance is much higher – over three times the American level in Greece and Italy. The Montana survivalist – so beloved of the European media – holed up in his shack, provisioned for a siege and determined to resist the government’s impositions, is as uncharacteristic of the average American as the Basque or Corsican separatist, ready to kill and maim for his localist aspirations, is of the average European.

Robert Putnam and other social scientists have lamented the decline of civic cooperation and a cohesive civil society that they see as once having defined America. Perhaps America has become more anomic in the age of TV and the internet. But it still remains a society that, by European standards, is exceptionally based on trust, cooperation and voluntary compliance with associational norms. Americans trust each other more than people in almost all European societies outside of Scandinavia. They reject antisocial behavior more than all Europeans other than the Scandinavians, except the Danes, the Italians, the Austrians and the Swiss. They belong to civic associations more often than all Europeans except the 300,000 Icelanders. Only in the Netherlands, Belgium and Ireland is the percent of the workforce that is active in civil society organizations, whether paid or volunteer, higher than in America. The Italian level is only slightly more than one-third the US rate, the Austrian is half.

These are just a few examples of the way in which the presumed contrast across the Atlantic is not, in fact, nearly as stark as opinion among the chattering classes and their mouthpieces believes. Why does this notion of an Atlantic chasm persist even though a sober look at its empirical basis suggests that it is an inverted pyramid: a lot of conclusions perched on flimsy premises? For one thing, the European press does not go to America in order to report, Pravda-like, on the over-fulfillment of five year plans. It wants the juicy, titillating low-down. And America certainly dishes that up. This is not a culture accustomed to putting its best foot forward. Is there another nation that washes its dirty laundry so publicly? Is there one where the seamy underbelly is more readily proffered for inspection? Hence that genre of such fascination to the European chattering classes: the tedious travelogue by the sophisticated European, whether BHL, Baudrillard or Borat, observing American yokels and reporting back with the smug assurance of superiority to other sophisticated Europeans.

Moreover, Europe’s various cultures are ones still steeped in the lore of national stereotypes and quite happy to wring whatever elixir can be had from them. Who can forget Edith Cresson, Mitterand’s Prime Minister, convinced that no Frenchman was gay, while the English were all limp-wristed poofers? Or consider the extent to which no Europeans, however otherwise politically correct, can be shaken in their convictions that the Roma really are shifty and thieving. Having a trans-Atlantic whipping boy is convenient and serves politically useful purposes, especially if there is little else that you can agree on. The purveyors of anti-Americanism in Europe appear to have rediscovered the truism that nothing unites like a common enemy. And the Bush administration played into their hands by all-too easily serving up caricatures by the spadeful. It will be interesting to see how the European pundits deal with Obama once he does something they do not like. While Bush could be portrayed as an ignorant cowboy, which of the available stereotypes will they dare lambast Obama with?

And then, finally, there is the grain of truth to the Atlantic divide. If there is anything that most separates American society from Europe, it is the continuing presence of an ethnically distinct underclass. Even as other outsiders have successfully assimilated, the tragic resonances of slavery in the black urban ghettos in America continue to prevail in the form of a racially identifiable underclass. If we were to consider all but this disadvantaged group, America would be virtually indistinguishable from Europe. Take out the black underclass from the crime statistics, and American murder rates fall to European levels, below those in Switzerland and Finland, and even squeaking in under Sweden.

Child poverty rates, which are scandalously high in the US, fall to below British, Italian and Spanish levels if we look at the figures for whites only. PISA scores for American whites (ranking secondary school proficiency, in this case for combined science literacy, 2006) rank above every European nation other than Finland and the Netherlands. This is not in to excuse the atrocious negligence with which the problems of racism have been dealt in the US. But it does suggest that, far more than any grand opposition of worldviews or ideologies, it is the still unresolved legacy of slavery and its tragic modern consequence of a ghettoized and racially identifiable underclass that distinguishes—to the extent anything does—America from Europe. Whether Obama’s election will mark a turning point in this respect remains to be seen.

To the extent that it is a distinct urban underclass that distinguishes the US from much of Europe, Europeans should pay notice. Their societies are rapidly becoming more like America’s in this respect. Europe’s birthrates have plummeted and immigration continues unabated. It is a demographic certainty that an ethnically and religiously distinct lower class in Europe will grow in the decades to come. Perhaps Europe will turn out to have been lucky. Having instituted universalist social policy, highly-regulated labor markets and redistributive fiscal policy when such choices could be made in the belief that it was all, so to speak, being kept in the family, Europe may weather the expansion of its social community to include distinct outsiders. On the other hand, it may be that the social fabric will fray in Europe as it grows more ethnically and religiously plural.

No one is arguing that America is Sweden. But nor is Italy Sweden, nor even is France, and certainly not the UK. And since when is Sweden Europe – at least anymore than Vermont is America? Europe is not the continent alone, and certainly not just its northern regions. Europe is larger and more multifarious than that. And, of course, it has just become a great deal more so, with the entrance of all the new EU nations. To the extent these new nations come to color the nature of Europe, it will change. The new entrants are not just poorer than old Europe. These new arrivals, as indeed Europe’s many recent immigrants from Asia and Africa, are religious, skeptical of a strong state, unenthusiastic about voting and allergic to high taxes. In other words, from the vantage of old Europe, they are more like Americans. As Europe expands, the argument made here for Western Europe –that the differences across the Atlantic have been exaggerated – will become irrefutable.