Word: globalizing
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That argument begins to break down when you have aspirations to help fix the world. Over the past decade or so, many Europeans have liked to think of the E.U. as a counterweight to Washington and now Beijing: a big, rich, but more benign global power. Ask Catherine Ashton to define Europe's ideals, and her aspirations are far from modest: "Democracy. Human rights," she says. "Wanting to see stable, secure nations, with whom we enjoy political dialogue and economic relationships...
...State for European and Eurasian Affairs Philip H. Gordon said to the House Foreign Affairs Committee after the ratification of the Lisbon Treaty last year: "We hope E.U. member states will invest the post-Lisbon institutions with the authority and capacity to make concrete contributions to the pressing global challenges we face together." In Africa, India, Latin America, leaders would fall over themselves to engage more closely with a power that's neither the U.S. nor China - both nations that can come across as too powerful, too proselytizing of their own values, too prone to see their interaction with others...
Next, Europeans need to appreciate that ideals alone don't bring you respect. You have to win others to your side. The reality of that hit home - or should have done - at Copenhagen. Europe had done much of the running on global climate-change policy, setting carbon-reduction targets, introducing the first markets in which carbon could be traded, leading the way on exploiting greener energy sources. European leaders arrived in the Danish capital giving the impression that setting an example would be enough to persuade others into making concessions. But the conference took a different turn. A group...
...that requires political leadership, which in much of Europe is lacking. Yes, Britain still sees itself as having a global role; so does France, whose President, Nicolas Sarkozy, has been active on issues from the Georgia war of 2008 to the consequences of a nuclear Iran. But the E.U.'s largest state is absent from most such debates. For the last half of the 20th century, Germany was at the heart of the European experiment. But since the end of the Cold War, it has stepped back from the E.U., regularly taking a different path when Europe attempted a unified...
...pictures of the effects of global warming...