Introduction

In London for a short visit in early 2006, on a grey and rainy day like any other, I was strolling somewhere in the Regent Street area when I found myself glancing at a bookshop window. Among the many volumes displayed one caught my attention. It was a tiny, brightly coloured book entitled Why Europe Will Run the 21 st Century, by Mark Leonard. Convinced that it was a prank scrapbook filled with blank pages I entered the store armed with a wry smile, intent on purchasing and couriering it as a surprise to a good friend in Hong Kong. To my astonishment the pages were not blank. It was a ‘real’ book after all. Its back cover attested to the author being a very serious gentleman, the Director of Foreign Policy at the Centre for European Reform in the UK. Little had I suspected that think tank directors could double as writers of humorous books. The implication that Europe would ‘run the 21st century’, even figuratively, when everything around me was screaming that it could not even run itself, seemed preposterous at best. Intrigued, I bought and devoured the book. In fairness to Mr Leonard, his argument was not that Europe would dominate in the classical way we expect power to be wielded, but rather that it would lead by example. Another surprise awaited me when I found that in the previous year American reporter T.R. Reid had published The United States of Europe: The New Superpower and the End of American Supremacy and trends expert Jeremy Rifkin had written The European Dream: How Europe’s Vision of the Future is Quietly Eclipsing the American Dream.