Partners in Prosperity: The Changing Geography of the Transatlantic Economy

Dan Hamilton, who used to help run European policy at the U.S. State Department, now directs the Center for Transatlantic Relations in Washington DC, and this book should revolutionize the way Americans think about Europe. Put aside the jokes about the French and the gloom in Germany about the lackluster European economy and the market wobbles about the future of the euro and read this book. The relationship between Europe and the U.S. is not about Iraq or NATO or Russia or the UN or working together for debt relief for the Third World, it is about the way they are becoming a single Transtalantic economy. Daimler takes over Chrysler; British Aerospace and British Petroleum now have more American than British shareholders; Airbus is the second biggest aerospace employer in the US. The key to Hamilton's book, which builds on a report published by his thinktank and written by Joseph Quinlan, is that we have been looking in the wrong place when we try to analyse the Transatlantic economic relationship. It is not to be measured in trade figures, because there is so much more mutual investment that we don't ship goods back and forth - we ship money that builds factories that employ people and make goods. So Transtalantic trade is some $600 billion a year; but add together the sales of US-owned companies in Europe, and European-owned companies in the US, and the real economic relationship is over $3,000 billion a year, and 12 million Europeans and Americans work for one another's companies. This is one interwoven and interdependent economy; Europe and the US are joined at hip, whatever Jacques Chirac of Geioge W Bush may say.