OP-ED: "'Re-Arming' Europe: The Old World needs an intellectual revolution to meet the challenges ahead," by Pascal Bruckner, Wall Street Journal, 30 May 2007, p. A19.

Nice piece. Don't disagree that revitalization urgently needed. All Europe seems to produce now are doomsayers (Walter Laqueur joins that very long list with his new book).

But first the Euros need to catch up with history: they are not the first multinational state or economic union. They did not invent the first unified currency. They were not the first continent to experience insane civil war and thereupon reason their way to a Kantian peace of transparency, free markets, free trade and collective security.

America made that journey in the latter half of the 19th century, thanks to our Civil War and the bloody build-out of the American West (actually, most of the blood spilled long earlier). We got to our emergent point (much like China's today, but along a very different path) around 1890, following a 25-year healing period after the Civil War (China reaches its emergent point around 2000, 25 years of healing after the Cultural Revolution).

Europe had a far longer healing point, reflecting the depths to which it sank in its massive civil wars of 1914-1945. It's main problem is that its healing occurred in a very artificial sort of civilizational separateness, which is no longer tenable due to demographics.

What Europe did to the world (export surplus population) across the 19th century, the world now does in return.

Europe, unaccustomed to anything but always being on top, finds its current and future positions rather . . . uncomfortable.

Let the hand-wringing continue, but it goes nowhere without self-awareness.

America faces a similar growth spurt in self-awareness: We are no longer the up-and-comer of the 20th century, but the subtly-eclipsed developed power of the 21st, who increasingly takes cues from rising Asia as to what comes next.

And what comes next will be cheaper, more robust, necessarily less pollutive and simpler. We will face this adjustment on climate change and so many other things. It will be humbling, but ultimately a very good thing.

I do not expect Europe to do anything but come along for the ride, in this regard. Its days of leadership are gone. All its bets are internally placed. There are no great incentives to "fix" or reshape the world around it. It is settling into its old age, and it will have to get used to the in-laws eventually.