I interviewed author and scholar Jeremy Rifkin on May 9th when he came as the keynote speaker of the prestigious Schuman Lecture, centerpiece of Forum Maastricht, Maastricht University's annual conference on European affairs. This year the lecture and forum marked both the 50th anniversary of the Treaty of Rome, which formed the foundation for the European Union, and the 15th anniversary of the Maastricht Treaty, which is credited with creation of the current European Union and establishment of the Euro currency.
In these two short segments, Rifkin describes how the EU functions as a flat highly interconnected network: “What is the EU about? … it’s like Henry Kissinger’s famous quip, ‘If I call up Europe who answers the phone?’ The fact is if you live in Europe long enough you know that everyone answers the phone – it’s a party line, and they all have their own agenda and they have to listen to each other. So in Europe no one can dominate the game. It’s a network. In other words the Brits, the French, the Germans can’t dominate the game, the Norwegians can’t, the civil society groups, and even the companies can’t. So each constituency, each group has to find a way to optimize the interests of the broader agenda in order to get their interests included. It’s terribly slow, completely distributive and there’s no plaque that says, ‘The buck stops here’. But as excruciating as it is, the network governance fits the sensibilities of a distributive world.”
In the second shorter clip Rifkin maintains that there are only two superpowers today, not five, the US and the EU. "The EU is a politcal unit and think that Americans need to understand that."
