On Tuesday, March 8, the German Marshall Fund's Transatlantic Center in Brussels hosted the book release for Why Europe Will Run the 21st Century by Mark Leonard. Mr. Leonard, director of foreign policy for the Centre for European Reform, wrote the book in part as an answer to Robert Kagan's Of Paradise and Power while serving as a transatlantic fellow with GMF in Washington, DC.

The event, attended by a packed audience of more than 150 participants, included a panel discussion moderated by Dr. Ronald D. Asmus, executive director of the Transatlantic Center, and including Mr. Leonard, Robert Cooper, a senior advisor to Javier Solana at the European Council; Tod Lindberg, editor of Policy Review; and Stefan Kornelius, foreign editor of Süddeutsche Zeitung.

Leonard began the discussion by summarizing the book's argument about Europe's "transformative power" by setting out the key points: 1) that the European Union needs to be thought of not as a state but as a network with multiple centers of power; 2) that the EU's power operates as a kind of silent guiding hand rooted in its ability to attract other countries; 3) that the unique nature of the EU's power means that it is non-threatening and that countries do not seek to balance but to join it; 4) that the driving force of European integration and its "secret weapon" is the rule of law and the EU's ability to exercise its power peacefully and in a more durable manner than U.S. military power; and 5) that the success of the EU is leading to a paradigm shift in global power as other regions of the world increasingly seek to emulate the EU's success by creating their own neighborhood clubs.

In short, all the recent discussion about European weakness catalyzed by Robert Kagan actually masks a far more important set of European strengths, Leonard argued. Many people misread the EU's power precisely because it is a) not based on a "European dream" of a European supra-state. The EU doesn't change countries by threatening to invade, but instead by inspiring them to change to become more like the EU. The EU is not a state; rather, it's a network with many centers of power, and those that want to join want to be a part of the club. "The worst thing the EU can do is nothing," Leonard said, indicating that ignoring a neighbor was punishment far worse than asking it to change significantly to meet the terms for membership.

Panelist Robert Cooper praised Leonard's book as the best book yet written on the EU, but added that the EU was only successful because it has historically been backed up by the United States and its military power, which had created the shell in which the EU could integrate. While endorsing Leonard's central points on the EU's approach to power, he also noted that the EU was often an incompetent and poorly organized foreign policy actor. Tod Lindberg, praised the book's "polemical zest" and the author's courage for making the positive case for the EU but also noted that such zest at times was likely to make American readers pause over what is at times a one-sided description of the United States. America and Europe, he argued, were two poles within the same community of democracies looking for ways to combine their different approaches to change the world for the better. Stefan Kornelius, took issue with the idea of law being Europe's best weapon. Europe's true weapon is prosperity, wealth, and money, Kornelius proposed, and as the EU gets larger, wealth goes down. Kornelius also said that the difference between America and Europe is that America accumulates power while Europe dissolves it.