Europe's Hope

Europe's Hope

THE AMERICAN CHALLENGE by J.J. Servan-Schreiber, translated by Ronald Steel. 291 pages. Atheneum. $6.95.

This is an excellent companion piece to The French. Though it reaches beyond France to deal with the general failure of Europe's economic and industrial policies, much of that failure is clearly attributed to France, and thus at least partly to the peculiarities of the French character that Nourissier documents so well.

The American Challenge has already drawn much attention in Europe and the U.S.; it was a record-breaking 1967 bestseller in France (TIME, Nov. 24). Servan-Schreiber ably develops an argument that French readers found irritating but largely irrefutable: Europe must adopt American industrial methods if it hopes ever to achieve a vital, independent society.

Servan-Schreiber, at 44 the editor-publisher of the successful weekly newsmagazine L'Express, is more American than French in the manner of his criticism. Deadly serious, he says flatly that "our back is to the wall" and warns that France and other European countries will fall disastrously behind America if they do not learn its methods quickly.

More than Dollars. When critics say that American industrial growth in Europe is a matter of money not method, Servan-Schreiber scoffs. He points out that 90% of the capital supporting American expansion in Europe is itself European. "American superiority," he insists, "is not basically a question of dollars but of industrial structure, far-sighted vision and unified command." He vividly emphasizes this in a chapter comparing the European supersonic transport, Sud-Aviation's Concorde, with the Boeing SST. He finds the Boeing model far superior. Yet the search that created the Boeing was based on two scientific advances that were made in Europe: the swing-wing plane and development of the highly stable metal titanium.

Servan-Schreiber's work will naturally seem less revolutionary to Americans than to Europeans, from whom it demands, among other things, "a minimum of federalism." But it may come as a pleasant surprise for U.S. readers to see themselves, as at least one admiring Frenchman does, as a civili- zation whose "secret lies in the confidence of the society in its citizens." This confidence, says Servan-Schreiber. is manifested in such commonplace U.S. practices as continual reeducation of both executive and worker and in the delegation of responsibility that tries to "liberate initiative at every level." Europeans, he clearly says, must learn to do the same.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.