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'America has a negro problem', the Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal stated in the introduction to his modern classic An American Dilemma first published in 1944 Half a century later the so called immigrant problem is moving to the top of the political agenda of EU Europe. To speak about a European dilemma in this context means to relate established European values of social solidarity and social responsibility to an increasingly ethnicised and racialised social inequality in European cities How can the dilemma be made transparent? How can we transcend the disjunctures between 'creed' and reality? Along these lines the paper debates potentialities for transethnic alignment in the US and EU Europe exposed to a common condition of globalisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent years (pre-Obama) of transatlantic rifts should not deceive us into ignoring the great attraction that the United States has exerted, and continues to exert, on Europeans. This article, first, seeks to uncover the normative assumptions that underpin the US as an exemplar or polity model for the EU, as seen from a European perspective. Second, it briefly considers whether the traits that Europeans find attractive about the US as a polity model have much real bearing on the EU, not in terms of how Europeans would want the EU to be but in terms of how the EU presently is. The point is to get a sense of the empirical distance that Europeans would have to travel if they were to transpose what they find attractive about the US to the EU. Are the features Europeans hold up as attractive about the US also available in Europe? These two undertakings set the stage for the third and most original, endeavour, which is to consider whether there are entities that are more compatible with what we currently find in Europe. The case singled out here is another American state, namely Canada. A clarification and critical assessment of what is referred to here as 'Europe's American Dream' are intended to serve as a kind of mirror for Europeans to consider whether the European project is: (a) one of emulating the US; (b) a unique experiment; or (c) an EU that is closer to Canada than the US. If the reality of Canada is more proximate to the reality of the EU, should then Canada instead serve as Europe's American Dream? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Forecasts change and conflict in the relationship between the United States and Western Europe. Possible sources of conflict; Rivalry between European and American industry; Impact of a successful euro on the American dollar.