David Frum: Up with Europe. Down with the European Union.

“Does America really want a strong Europe?” In the week leading up to President Bush's European tour, this question was asked again and again by the continent's journalists and diplomats — and Americans answered: "Yes, yes, of course we do."

But one of the important lessons of the trans-Atlantic traumas since 9/11 is that while Europeans and Americans can easily agree that "Europe" should be "strong," they do not so easily agree on what they mean by "Europe" or by "strength."

To Europeans, "strengthening Europe" tends to mean vesting more powers in the central European Union (EU) bureaucracy in Brussels. To Americans, "strengthening Europe" tends to mean increasing the wealth and security of the countries that make up the European continent. Euro-enthusiasts may believe these two definitions can co-exist. But the evidence is accumulating that they cannot — that as the EU gets stronger, European nations fall further behind.

• Between 1970 and 1990, European labor productivity grew faster than did American productivity. By the early 1990s, the average Western European produced very nearly as much wealth per hour as did the average American.

In 1992, European governments signed the Maastricht Treaty, which created a single European market and changed the name of the old European Community to the new "European Union." At the same time, the Europeans committed themselves to a new single continental currency, the Euro, and to the free movement of labor from one European country to another.

Theoretically, European productivity growth should have accelerated after 1992. Instead, it slowed — and at the same moment that U.S. productivity growth sped up.

The Status of Non-Muslim Minorities Under Islamic Rule

Dhimmitude: the Islamic system of governing populations conquered by jihad wars, encompassing all of the demographic, ethnic, and religious aspects of the political system. The word "dhimmitude" as a historical concept, was coined by Bat Ye'or in 1983 to describe the legal and social conditions of Jews and Christians subjected to Islamic rule. The word "dhimmitude" comes from dhimmi, an Arabic word meaning "protected". Dhimmi was the name applied by the Arab-Muslim conquerors to indigenous non-Muslim populations who surrendered by a treaty (dhimma) to Muslim domination. Islamic conquests expanded over vast territories in Africa, Europe and Asia, for over a millennium (638-1683). The Muslim empire incorporated numerous varied peoples which had their own religion, culture, language and civilization. For centuries, these indigenous, pre-Islamic peoples constituted the great majority of the population of the Islamic lands. Although these populations differed, they were ruled by the same type of laws, based on the shari'a.

This similarity, which includes also regional variations, has created a uniform civilization developed throughout the centuries by all non-Muslim indigenous people, who were vanquished by a jihad-war and governed by shari'a law. It is this civilization which is called dhimmitude. It is characterized by the different strategies developed by each dhimmi group to survive as non-Muslim entity in their Islamized countries. Dhimmitude is not exclusively concerned with Muslim history and civilization. Rather it investigates the history of those non-Muslim peoples conquered and colonized by jihad.

Dhimmitude encompasses the relationship of Muslims and non-Muslims at the theological, social, political and economical levels. It also incorporates the relationship between the numerous ethno-religious dhimmi groups and the type of mentality that they have developed out of their particular historical condition which lasted for centuries, even in some Muslim countries, till today.

Dhimmitude is an entire integrated system, based on Islamic theology. It cannot be judged from the circumstantial position of any one community, at a given time and in a given place. Dhimmitude must be appraised according to its laws and customs, irrespectively of circumstances and political contingencies.

For books by Bat Ye'or, see www.dhimmi.org

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Thats not very fair. Its hard to mix in the Carter years with the Reagan years. One decade was malaise and the other was morning in America.

Comparing the US to Europe for the last 25 years though, its not even close. US has produced 20+% more.

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