FRS 003 — Sec. 004 — (1
unit) — CRN 73068 — R 2:40-4:00pm — 104 Sproul
Will Europe Thrive or Fade in the 21st Century? – A Newly-United
Europe Competes with Asia and North America
Instructor: Dennis Dingemans, Department of Geography/Social Sciences
Program, College of Letters & Science
Description: This course examines the provocative assertions
of two new books that predict a revitalization of Europe in the wake of the European
Union's expansion in 2004 to 25 countries and 450 million citizens. Each student
will read and review one of these two: T. R. Reid's "The United States
of Europe: The New Superpower and the End of American Supremacy" and
"Jeremy Rifkin's "The European Dream: How Europe's Vision of the
Future is Quietly Eclipsing the American Dream". These books are boldly
optimistic about Europe's prospects for economic vitality in a fiercely competitive
("tri-polar") world. Both authors are confident that Europe's social
policies and cultural values will be emulated by the emerging great powers of
Asia (as China and India, in particular, reject the U.S.A. as their economic,
political, and social policy model).
Format: Our eight class meetings will be devoted to reviewing
the logic and the evidence presented by Reid and by Rifkind. The Euro-centric
point of view of these two books might well be an eye-opener in contrast to the
American chauvanism that predominates in our country's popular culture. Students
will be introduced to the terms and the arguments of the debate (which fills journals
such as Foreign Affairs lately) about the "big picture" prospects
for the world's three regional concentrations of economic, cultural, and military
power. As Reid and Rifkin clearly assume, human resources and political leadership
are the substrates underpinning today's geopolitical power much more than are
resources and physical environment facts. Each week the instructor will lecture
and lead discussions on topics from the two books and from the on-going debate
about the future geopolitical structure of the Post-Cold War world. These include
the following. (1) How the European Union was created and expanded? (2) What are
the prospects for the EU's further growth towards Russia and even into the Middle
East? (3) How substantial is the dramatic recent economic growth by Asia's new
great powers? And (4) how intractable are the geopolitical problems facing the
United States as it strives to remain the global economy's epicenter in the aftermath
of the world's rejection of our Iraq policies? Of particular interest will be
our effort to assess whether the data show that the EU economies are being stimulated
or retarded by having expanded in 2004 into Eastern Europe (taking in Poland,
the Baltics, Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary, and Slovenia). Also timely will be our
attention to the EU's political recovery following the now-anticipated rejection
of its proposed constitution. Finally, we will consider the very-recent prediction
by Bernard Lewis that Europe's increasingly secular society is linked to the region's
demographic collapse (a majority of Europe's 46 countries have negative natural
growth rates) and will lead to Islam replacing Christianity as Europe's most vital
religion. Grading: Course grades (pass/not-pass) will
be based on the instructor's assessment of participation in class discussions
(50%) and the end-of-term book review (5 pages) of one of the two books (by Reid
and by Rifkin, as identified above).
About the Instructor: Professor Dingemans received his undergraduate
degree (in European History) at the University of Chicago and his graduate degrees
(MA & PhD in Geography) at the University of California at Berkeley. He has
traveled widely in Europe and has taught regional geography courses at UCD since
1972. His courses are often taken by UCD's International Relations students.