The Great (and Strange) Experiment

From the fall of Rome until 1945—roughly 1,500 years—the European states were more or less constantly at war with each other. Because the Europeans quickly became the most powerful peoples on earth, there wasn't much anyone could do about this. The devastation gradually increased in savagery, reaching its cataclysm in the twentieth century when Europe launched two world wars in the span of 25 years.

But at the end of World War II, two countries—the upstart USSR and the upstart United States—emerged as vastly more powerful than the traditional European states. Determined that no more wars would come out of Europe, the USSR and the United States essentially colonized the Continent. In the east, the Soviet Union created fairly traditional colonies across Eastern Europe, establishing puppet regimes that reported to Moscow, stationing troops on Eastern European soil, demilitarizing the area, and, when the colonies got out of line, invading them (Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968).

In the west, the United States took a softer line, but still imposed (democratic) regimes on countries that didn't have them, stationed troops on Western European soil (where they remain to this day¹²), and demilitarized the area. America didn't invade Europe, but that's because it didn't have to, as the Europeans remained loyal allies of the Unites States. But suppose some Western European country—let's say, Italy—had elected a Communist government and that government had seized total power, begun to build up its military might, and announced that it was leaving NATO and joining the Warsaw Pact. American troops would have been in Rome faster than you can say “lasagna.”

Still, the “colonization” worked. After suffering two world wars in a quarter century, Europe has been at peace for almost 70 years. And during this long and remarkable concordance, the softer American approach allowed Western Europe to experiment with various methods of organizing itself politically and economically. (This sort of experimentation was severely restricted in Eastern Europe until the fall of the Soviet Union.)

Note, however, that this experimentation occurred in a strange petri dish of a world in which some of the wealthiest countries on the planet had no need to see to their own defense. In the history of the race, nothing like this had ever happened. Throughout history any country, wealthy or not, which failed to defend itself was soon enslaved, and this went doubly for a wealthy country. The best example, of course, was Rome, which allowed its security apparatus to decay and was promptly conquered by a bunch of naked tribes from Northern Europe.

But in Western Europe more than a dozen hyperwealthy countries have existed for seven decades without giving a thought (or a euro) to their own security, which was instead guaranteed by the U.S. nuclear umbrella. It didn't have to be this way, of course, as shortly after World War II a common European army was proposed.¹³ The idea was to enable Europe to see to its own defense and, not incidentally, to keep Germany from rearming on its own. However, the proposal was defeated in France in 1954 and was never seriously reexamined.

As a result of this extraordinarily extended adolescence, none of the European countries (with the slight exception of Britain) had to develop any serious military capability. Instead of spending huge sums on defense, as the United States has done for many decades, they could spend virtually their entire annual budgets on civilian needs. And these needs grew and grew and grew.

I mention this issue because it is often overlooked. The rest of the world can take many lessons from Western Europe's 70 years of socioeconomic and political experimentation, but few countries anywhere can ever expect to be so fortunate as to emulate the European experience.

But let's set aside the fortunate circumstances of Western Europe and focus on one aspect of the Great Experiment: how to capture and redistribute the extraordinary wealth of that part of the world.¹⁴