Europe Will Get It Right; The question is how can Europe's social-democratic state be made sustainable?

Byline: Andrew Moravcsik (Moravcsik directs the European Union program at Princeton University.)

Just over a year ago, author Jeremy Rifkin predicted that Europe would soon overtake the United States as a model for the world. The so-called European Dream--a coupling of the national social welfare state with multilateral cooperation in Brussels to promote free markets and common regulations--would supersede the American Dream.

For true believers in that vision, 2005 was a dispiriting year. French and Dutch voters rejected the European Union's proposed constitution. Then came the French race riots. Anglo-American conservatives, took these events as vindication of their own model, which opposes big government, social spending, multiculturalism and multilateralism. After five years of European (and, not least, French) attacks on U.S. foreign and domestic policy, they took satisfaction in concluding that Europe, in the end, is really no better than America.

Nothing proved their point so well as the recent riots. The "Muslim insurrection," as the right-wing Fox News commentator Bill O'Reilly put it, seemed the almost inevitable byproduct of mollycoddling social policies. Conservative military historian Victor Davis Hanson argued that talk of "so-called root causes" served only to "appease" law breakers and to encourage further violence. The subtext: Europeans--tired of multilateralism, yearning to get tough on Islam, deeply suspicious of "tax and spend" big government--secretly long to be more like Americans. If only their corrupt, parochial, paternalistic and, yes, socialist governments would just get out of the way!

It's a great story: Europe destroyed by the bankruptcy of its own socialist cultural ideals. Yet there is little truth in it. The real lesson of both the referendums and the riots is, in fact, precisely the opposite. Over the past year, Europeans have proven themselves to be more committed to both the social-welfare state and their EU institutions than ever. If anything must change, Europeans increasingly recognize, it has less to do with the ideal of Europe (or national social policies) than with something far more prosaic: jobs. At bottom, Europe's real challenges are economic. And they will be solved not by borrowing the American model, but by muddling through to a distinctively European solution.

Let's return to the year's first big event. Far from being a libertarian repudiation of the European Union, last spring's constitutional referendums brought forth a groundswell of support for social democracy. Subsequent polls reveal that ...