Again, I am not even the least bit hesitant to denounce the track my country (USA) has taken. (see above)
I appreciate the track that Europe has tried to take, with more progressive socialist "middle ground" sod breaking, even though pressures from the agents at work in my home nation are hard at work to cripple them, or compel them into submission via market might.
Europe just needs to not play the US's game, and keep US corporations on a tight leash, and avoid the poison of "free trade agreements". They need to safeguard their prosperity and sovereignty, and enforce restrictions on US foreign policy and corporate expansion, and not play the US's games.
If they can hold them off long enough, the inevitable conclusion of the fallacy of "endless growth" will come to fruition, and this horrible thing we americans have wrought will die of starvation or revolution. (and please, let it happen!) I would very much like to see some place left on the earth where total resource depletion has NOT happened, because of sane policy. Europe looks like a good candidate, if they can keep the UK from screwing everything up by trying to be just like the US, and if they can keep their "Council" under control of parliament.
I wouldn't be so quick to pat Europe on the back(keep in mind, I also find the current US path to a bad thing that needs to be corrected)) as there are a number of problems europe has to face in the next few years, particularly in regards to it's policies regarding immigration. The French are the biggest example of this, but Europe is not an "inviting" place to immigrants. The tide of history is too much: French people, for example, have a three millennial long history, and view the changing demographics of france(more and more non franco-phones and muslims, in particular) with alarm. There is a great deal of social tension between the natives and immigrants, and unless a change occurs, then we're going to see unrest and violence: when the conservative French and Germans start to realize that in 50 years, Germany won't be German, but Turkic, there's going to be backlash.
Actually, the thing Europe needs to do here is to learn from the mistake the US made by turning against immigration.
Let's remember firstly that for its formative years the US was a pro-immigration nation
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me:
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.
Immigration drove US prosperity throughout the century until the first world war. It's only really since then that anti-immigration rhetoric has become dominant in US political culture.
The EU needs to learn from this mistake by the US and challenge the misunderstandings related to immigration, chief among them the
Lump of Labour Fallacy.
Indeed, DF provides a perfect illustration of the fallacious nature of the Lump Of Labour theory - each new migrant that arrives at a Fortress creates more new jobs (for furniture, clothes, food and drink) than they could possibly themselves take away from the rest of the Dwarves. The problem here is the difference between the general overview ("This Immigrant is creating work within the economy") and the specific experience ("This Immigrant is doing a job I could do").
It is nonetheless a fact that immigration is economically beneficial, as it creates more work demand and more work supply while having no appreciable effect upon infrastructure in aggregate. Thus, from an economic standpoint immigration should be encouraged.
As to the cultural aspect - I just have to ask you if your think US immigration of Germans, Poles, Italians and so on has resulted in the US becoming any of those things 100+ years down the line? It's true that the US Founding Fathers probably wouldn't recognize the modern US culture as anything they were part of, and the same will be true in a century in Europe. Culture isn't overrun and replaced - it tends to merge and meld within a locality.
The fact that Curry is the most popular dish in the UK attests to that.