Jeremy Rifkin in the European Dream takes off with the premise that Europe is leaving behind American supremacy and Western Ideology embracing instead universal human rights and nature thus creating a new history.
What Rifkin doesn’t realize is that this new history leads to something well beyond a Euro or American or Western or even Chinese centric world. It leads to new regional unions organized around the world eventually all coming together as one whole united in peace.
This is sort of like the physics theory that talks about not just one big bang but many, not one universe but many only in the end here on Earth there is one global world not homogenous in its nature but diverse, not separate but all together.
Rifkin when speaking of the European Dream marginalizes those who adhere to a so called “end of history” and instead speaks of a Europe filled with quality of life, sustainability, peace and harmony. Sort of like what His Holiness the Dalai Lama has been talking about in recent years.
What Rifkin doesn’t realize, but what the Dalai Lama may realize, is that this new Europe goes beyond the EU spreading to America and the whole world. It is the inevitable march not to the end of history but a new history leaving those who buck the trend in the ash heap of forgotten civilizations.
We see this European Dream rising today in the Arab world where young people using technology are breaking their autocratic chains and the bonds to non secular figures embracing not Western ideas but this new history that is described by Rifkin as not so much based on wealth but the human spirit beyond what has been spoken of even in the American Dream and even his dream of Europe.
If Europe was the foundation of this new history the Arab Spring was the birth of it and there is no turning back now. It will spread beyond the Arab world embracing the globe and we can only stand together and welcome the future for no amount of guns or butter will hinder its progress.