The Quiet Superpower.(Europe's strength internationally)

Moravcsik is a professor of government at the Center for European Studies, Harvard University.

It has become commonplace to think of the United States as the world's sole superpower, and to regard other great powers, mostly in Europe, as second-raters. How often we hear Hubert Vedrine, the French foreign minister, invoke America as the "hyperpower." Academics fret about a new "American empire." Even such moderate critics of "unilateralism" as Joseph Nye of Harvard's Kennedy School call the United States a "new Rome."

The reason is easy to see. America spends more on defense than Russia, China, Britain, France, Germany, Japan and India combined. Only it can intervene at will and without assistance anywhere on the globe. Its ability to summon real-time, pinpoint air support, demonstrated in Kosovo and Afghanistan, threatens any potential aggressor and permits it to wage war almost without casualties. The radical disparity in military technology is likely to persist, and even grow, since the United States spends five times more on military R&D than all of Europe--indeed, more than any other country spends on its entire military establishment. Small wonder that security specialists speak of the "unipolar moment."

Of course, those same hard-bitten security types concede that, in economic matters, there are two superpowers. When U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick meets EU Trade Commissioner Pascal Lamy at the WTO, they do so as equals. With monetary integration of Europe, we are close to a world of two major currencies: the dollar and the euro. In antitrust policy, Brussels applies its law extraterritorially, recently derailing General Electric's planned $42 billion acquisition of Honeywell International--a merger between two U.S. companies. Europe enjoys an equally dominant position in banking regulation, industrial standardization, environmental policy, telecommunications and many other economic matters.

Yet to be a superpower, critics insist, the ability to influence "hard" security issues--the politics of peace and war--matters most. And in this regard Europe is commonly considered an "economic giant but a political dwarf." Or as French commentator Dominique Moisi rather dismissively puts it, "The U.S. fights, the Europeans fund and the U.N. feeds." The constant clamor among European federalists for a "European army" only strengthens Europe's image of impotence.

This is misleading. Europeans already wield effective power over peace and war as great as that of the United States, but they do so quietly, through "civilian power." That does not lie in the deployment of battalions or bombers, but rather in the quiet promotion of democracy and development through trade, foreign aid and peacekeeping. The United States isn't simply unwilling to employ these instruments; for apparently intractable domestic reasons, it seems consistently unable to do so--even when Washington is governed by administrations less disdainful of "nation-building" than the present one. Yes, America can bomb aggressors with impunity. But when the shooting stops, only the Europeans can play the superpower in keeping the peace, reconstructing the economy and promoting democracy.

The most powerful and unique instrument of European foreign policy is the promise of membership in ...