American Enterprise Institute

October 9, 2007

[Edited transcript from audio tapes]

1:45 p.m.	Registration
2:00	Speaker:	Nicholas Eberstadt, AEI
	Discussants:	Tod Lindberg, Policy Review
		Barbara Boyle Torrey, Population Reference Bureau
	Moderator:	Megan Davy, AEI
3:30	Adjournment

Proceedings:

Megan Davy:  All right, I think we are going to go ahead and get started.  I just want to briefly introduce -- my name is Megan Davy.  I’m a research assistant here at the American Enterprise Institute and I want to thank you all as well as our panel for coming for our event, Demographic Divergence between America and Europe:  Another Strain for the Transatlantic Relationship.  Also, I want to thank the German Marshall Fund for funding and supporting us in this event but also as part of a larger project looking at the demographics in Europe and what that means for their future.

I just want to start out by starting actually with Article 5 of the NATO Treaty which says that the parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all.  Consequently, they agree that if such an armed attack occurs, each of them in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defense, recognized by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the party or parties so attacked by taking, forthwith, individually and in concert with the other parties, such actions it deems necessary, including the use of armed force to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.

I want to start with this to make the point that even though in the aftermath of 9/11 the United States has had this opportunity to test the transatlantic relationship under a new set of security terms, we are not working in this vacuum; there is not a precedent set.  However, I do want to point out that, I think, in the aftermath of 9/11, we are working with a new set of security concerns which have tested the alliance in new a way that we really have not seen. 
We are both looking at one of the geographic limits of our transatlantic alliances -- NATO in Afghanistan was the first time that NATO ever worked outside of Europe.  It was also a test of what were we willing to do as partners logistically in that this was also the first time that we saw an offensive military operation.  There were certain instances where the United States has taken offensive military operations, the Vietnam War, perhaps, being one of them, but that was never something that we asked for European support with. 

So it has been a new test in that we have asked our European partners to embark on a really different operation and cooperation.  It should not necessarily come as a surprise that we see that there has been both hesitation as well as some push back on behalf of Europeans.  I want to point out that even in the case where you have the political elites in the governments supporting the United States, either as a part of NATO or with their own operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, popular public opinion does not necessarily mirror that political elite, the sense that this is important and that we need to move forward on this.  So a little later we will get to the idea of European perceptions of US foreign policy and how does that affect how they feel about Americans in the transatlantic relationship more broadly. 

But I do want to point out some of the results of a recent GMF study, Transatlantic Trends, which looked at public opinion and started looking at how do Europeans and people in the United States feel about current events.  For me, one of the more interesting parts was that, in fact, Europeans and Americans perceived threats and security threats in a very similar way.  So if you ask questions about -- let me see and make sure I get the question correct here:  “In the next 10 years, how likely are you to be personally affected by the following threats?” 

In fact, Americans and Europeans felt very similarly about international terrorism and very similarly about Islamic fundamentalism, that is, that these were important threats that they would face in the next 10 years.  It is also worth pointing out that in fact Europeans are looking increasingly or perceiving threats increasingly similarly to America, mostly because Germans are finally catching up with the rest of Europe in saying that this is a threat that we really need to think about in the next 10 years.  But the point being that this is not a matter of the United States was attacked and we perceive a threat, but rather that this is something that we share in common, that there are new security concerns. 

So the point of today’s presentation is looking at, well, if this is not why we are seeing this divergence in opinion, what might be some of those reasons?  But in this case we are specifically looking at the concept of demography as destiny.  If you have an increasingly aging Europe and a comparatively youthful United States, what does this portend for the transatlantic alliance?  Is it possible that a growing demographic divergence is what is causing, in a sense, different values about how we feel in confronting security concerns?

So with that, I’m going to briefly introduce our panelists.  We are going to start with Nicholas Eberstadt; he is our Henry Wendt Chair in Political Economy at AEI.  He studies many things, including demography, economic development, and East Asia security studies.  But today he will be wearing his demographer hat to present to you all.   He has been working a lot on this issue recently.  He and co-author Hans Groth of Pfizer, Switzerland have an upcoming monograph to be published by AEI Press, called Europe’s Coming Demographic Challenge.  So again, looking at similar issues.

Next, we will have Barbara Boyle Torrey, who is a visiting fellow with the Population Reference Bureau, also focusing on international population and income trends.  Then we have Tod Lindberg, who is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, as well as editor of Policy Review, their D.C.-based bimonthly journal.  She also studies the transatlantic relationship, including a forthcoming book, Bridging the Foreign Policy Divide.  They have their full bios available in your folders if you would like to take a look, but I’m going to go ahead and let Nick get started.

Nicholas Eberstadt:  Meg, thank you very much.  Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for sacrificing a beautiful afternoon outside to invest your time in here.  Barbara and Tod, thank you, likewise.  I have a great big Power Point for you, which is also in your packets, which presents some homework that Meg and I have been working on over the past year.  Be not afraid by the 63 slides; I promise we will not suffer death by Power Point.  I will make sure that I’m finished within half an hour or a few minutes thereafter.

You can read faster than I can talk so let me show you what the outline of the presentation is going to be.  I for one am not a “demography is destiny” boy; at least, not in the time span that we are going to be looking at in the next half-hour timeframe.  I would say that demographic trends can alter the realm of the possible, and is not actually clear to me whether they will alter the realm of the possible in this particular case.  They might, but it is a storyline that has not been written yet.  Meg and I would like to present to you evidence that you can weigh and see how you interpret this because it seems to me that there is at least a certain amount of ambiguity in this question.

For background, as Meg said, it is not clear that transatlantic relations have been worse or more strained at any time since the Marshall Plan, or since the creation of NATO, than they are today.  There are plenty of public opinion polls that could document this; this comes from the German Marshall Fund’s own study, but there are many other data that we could adduce here.  There are many people on both sides of the Atlantic who would ascribe the souring of current relations to particular sets of leadership and particular countries. 

Obviously, the Bush administration and the United States are very unpopular in Europe; it seems to be unpopular in the United States as well at the moment.  There were particular strains that seemed to have been relieved with leadership transition in France and in Germany.  Some people think that with a new administration in the United States, there may be considerable room for improvement in the transatlantic partnership cooperation and that may be so. 

What Meg and I would like to present to you is some of the data about demographic divergence between U.S.A. and Western Europe.  Western Europe is not the same as the E.U.  Western Europe, I think, we would define as being the “never Communist” portions of Europe.  Arbitrarily, but not unreasonably, you could define it that way.  In much of the following work, we used the U.S. Census Bureau’s own definition of Western Europe, which is unofficial, but demarcates this region and facilitates comparisons demographically between the U.S. and this part of Europe.

What is important, I think, to bear in mind in looking at the prospect for this fairly significant structural divergence between our two populations is that this is not happening by fiat; it is not happening as a result of some particular policy.  It is an almost spontaneous divergence that is an accumulation of tens or, maybe, more than tens of millions of decisions by couples and by people who are migrating.  So it has very grassroots sort of bases. 

Let me show you what this looks like, the demographic divergence that we are talking about.  In the spirit of “a picture is worth a thousand words,” the red is the U.S. population’s pyramid, the blue is Europe in 1980.  This is what it looks like now and, by Census Bureau projections, that is what it looks like in another 25 years.  So 25 years ago; now, 25 years from now. 
Let’s look at the percentage structure rather than the absolute numbers.  This is what the percentage structure of U.S.A. and Western Europe would be like more or less 25 years ago in 1980, more or less now, more or less 25 years from now.  You can use some of the squares or any other statistical measure that you care to, but the coming divergence is about three times as big in quantitative terms as the divergence over the previous generation. 

So what is happening?  The assumption, the projection is that the U.S. is going to continue to have moderate but robust population growth, and that Western Europe is going to be heading to population stability and then population decline.  A few years before population decline commences, Europe would move into a position where it becomes a net mortality region where deaths exceed births, more or less, as far as the eye can see.  That might happen in four or five years from now, something like that. 

Just to show what this means in terms of the divergence in structure, the United States is set to age a lot less than Western Europe over the next generation.  In fact, the median age for the United States in 2030 by Census Bureau projections would be slightly lower than the current median age for Western Europe.  The U.S. would be a society with a higher proportion of children, a smaller proportion of older people and a higher and somewhat more stable proportion of two groups that we think may also be interesting to follow - the 15-to-24s and the 30-to-44s.  The 15 to 24s are obviously the group that the armed forces are drawn from, but not just armed forces.  In traditional educational systems, the people with the highest attainment coming into the workforce are those coming out of the 15-to-24 group.  If your 15-to-24 group is small in relation to the working age population, it makes it a more difficult prospect to increase attainment for the population. 

Similarly, the 30-to-44 group may be important for innovation and creative change in workforce as in societies.  There is some neat work that has been done by an economist at Northwestern University, named Benjamin Jones, who tracks the age patterns at which work that eventually wins the Nobel Prize in -- the real Nobel prizes:  medicine, chemistry, physics, economics -- the age profile for that.  Also, the age profile for work that leads to significant patents - those that he identifies as significant - two thirds of that is concentrated in the age group of 30-to-44 over the past century.  In a virtual world that may not matter as much as it did in the past, but there may be something short of winning the Nobel Prize that younger people may bring to workforce or to societies. 

You will see the United States population will be growing in almost every age group whereas the only real population growth for Western Europe over the next generation is for people over the age of 65; almost every other group is shrinking or set to shrink rather substantially.  And we can imagine ways in which this might in and of itself affect the tenor of relations between the two parts of the world, if only because an older population may be a population in which the social burdens and the social obligations of government leave less scope for defense or other sorts of activities which government might have to finance. 

We are going to go once over lightly immigration right now; we will get back to that.  I want to talk about some of the things that are driving this divergence which I showed you. 
Fertility is clearly an important driver in this growing divergence.  You can see what has happened to fertility levels over the past couple of decades in Europe; no matter whether you talk about the EU 15 or the EU 25, the trends are fairly similar.  Total fertility rate, you will recall, are births per woman per lifetime. 

Keep your eye on that trend because I’m going to show you the trend in the United States now.  The United States is this peculiar exception where, instead of moving on to indefinite sub-replacement fertility period, rates have increased.  For almost 20 years now, the U.S. total fertility rate has hovered around two, perilously close to replacement fertility; it is a very different pattern.  Now, why?  In proximate terms, in just arithmetic terms, two of the most obvious explanations would be America’s very high level of teen childbearing and America’s patterns of immigration.  Both of those are partial explanations but not nearly so complete as many presume.  Divergence with Canada as well [indiscernible].  

Let’s get on to here just in the interest of time.  The U.S. has got an astonishingly high tempo of teen childbearing compared to most other OECD countries.  But that difference between European OECD and the United States only accounts for a small fraction of the fertility difference between our two societies.  As I recall, it accounts for somewhere between a tenth and a fifth.  The teens do not do it; the teens do not explain the difference between our societies.  Similarly, the ethnic differentiation in the United States does not explain nearly as much of the difference between Europe and the U.S. as many presume.

What we have seen, to over-simplify a little bit, in the United States is a convergence of fertility between the non-Hispanic whites and practically everybody but Mexican-Americans, according to the numbers.  One of the remarkable untold stories - not for this session - is the convergence of fertility in the U.S. between African-Americans and Anglos; I think there is about nine percentage point spread at this point - historically remarkable, but not for this session. 

Non-Hispanic whites have a fertility level in the United States that has bounced around between 1.8 and 1.9 births per woman per lifetime over the last decade or so.  That is below replacement but it is, as you will see, very substantially higher than the fertility levels for Europe - which includes immigrant fertility, by the way - or for Japan.  To dwell on this point, most of the difference in fertility between the U.S. and our European partners is due in purely arithmetic terms to the difference between Anglos and Europeans, rather than between other ethnic groups, some of which overlaps with the teen fertility thing. 

I just want to show you this because this makes the point.  The EU countries are in yellow.  Some other European countries are in blue, way over above two births per woman per lifetime; I think that is Albania and Iceland.  But you see that if we look at the United States by state, there is an overlap with Europe.  But even by state the Anglos tend to have much higher fertility levels than the Europeans, including immigrants.  Even if we leave out everybody but the Anglos in the United States, there is a noticeable difference in this pattern here.  So demographers ask Barbara, “Why?  How come?” 

Let’s start by saying what it is not.  Like doctors, we try eliminate possibilities.  It is not because the U.S. has an obviously more friendly set of workplace arrangements or social supports for children.  The people in the United States work, it appears, a lot more than people in Europe do today.  The United States, especially if one listens to friends in Europe, is famously stingy about child support and making work arrangements child-friendly or having government programs for child support or child-friendly things.  We cannot ascribe it to either of those.

It is not because there has been a real dramatic difference in the pace of economic growth in our regions.  The United States has outpaced Western Europe, OECD Europe, somewhat in recent decades but the patterns are not terribly different.  It is not because of housing problems in Europe.  Throughout Europe, people have more rooms per person now than they ever had in history.  The direction is going up.  More and more people can afford autos; more people say they can afford autos.  They can afford more vacations.  They can afford more of everything, it seems, except for one thing and that is babies.  Just to show you that the big countries in Europe are not exceptional from small countries, it is the same pattern for the smaller countries in Europe. 

Well, we could go into much more detail here but I think the point stands that the traditional economic material explanations for this fertility divergence do not work terribly well.  So what does that leave us with?  It leaves us with an amorphous realm of attitudes, outlooks, values, and beliefs.  And here, the United States does look very different from European countries. 
Just to pick one thing:  Which is more important for government?  To provide freedom?  To pursue goals?  The United States looks way different from European countries with our response to that.  Are you proud to be an American, a Brit, French, Italian, or German?  There is a very big difference in attitudes here.  I’m going to dwell on this for a moment or two, but not more than a moment or two. 

Religion -- look at this difference in this poll on, “Religion plays a very important role in my life.”  There is any number of public opinion surveys or other surveys which we could adduce which would show that there is almost a schism between the U.S.A and Western Europe today when it comes to self-assessed religiosity. 

Here is some of the work that Inglehart and Norris have done.  Guess who the outlier is in belief in God and life after death?  I’ll give you a clue; it is the United States.  From the European values study and from the world value survey, work that Meg and I have done, guess which country is the outlier on, “Religion is very important in our life?”  I’ll give you a clue; it is the United States.  The United States is the country that is modernizing while not following the secularization trend one sees almost everywhere else to the same degree.  And this matters demographically. 

I think this is an important chart.  What Megan and I wished to show here is that if you control for religiosity, Europe and the United States do not look very different.  If you take a look at the number of reported births to women who attend religious service once a week or more, it is actually a little higher in Europe than it is in the United States.  With less than once a week, it is about the same -- a little bit higher in Western Europe than in the United States. 
If you take a look at the fertility for women who never attend service, it is about the same, maybe a little bit higher in Europe than in the United States.  It is just that there are a whole lot more of these in the United States than these whereas there are a whole lot more of these in Europe than these.  And this is driving, or at least, is associated with the driving of the demographic divergence we see between these two societies, this religiosity cleavage.  So where does that get us? 

Let me show this; again, another sign of this.  Along with this religiosity cleavage is a whole sub-cluster of associated beliefs, outlooks and attitudes which may also be changing the tenor or the disposition of the two societies in ways that we may consider to be significant - or some may consider it not significant - for cooperation across the Atlantic. “Life is meaningful only because God exists.”  Look at that one: “How much confidence do you have in churches?”  Guess which are the Americans and which are the Europeans? 

Whatever else religiosity may or may not do, in the Judeo-Christian tradition it typically instructs people that there is a right; there is an absolute and a universal right and there is a wrong, an absolute and universal wrong.  Does this bear upon the conduct of foreign policy?  This is a question worth considering.  I can see a number of different ways in which it could.  If it does, I do not see any of those ways which augur for easier cooperation between the two transatlantic partners.

But people in the United States also have quite a bit more confidence in something besides the churches, that is, the armed forces.  It tracks with religiosity, although it also tracks with a big difference across the Atlantic.  “Which aim of this country for the next 10 years would you consider important?”  A minority of respondents says that, “Strong defense is the most important thing.”  But there is a big difference about the size of that minority in Europe and the United States, and it also breaks down by religiosity. 

We are aggregating a lot of things in Europe here.  Within Europe there are big differences in the response to this rather old question: “If there were another war, I would be willing to fight for my country.”  Interestingly enough, all of the Scandinavians give higher affirmatives than the U.S..  Almost all of the other European countries give lower responses, a particularly low response coming from the headquarters of NATO, Belgium.  Most people in both countries believe that political assassination is never justified but there are big differences in the degrees of reservation about that. 

Also, there is a significant difference in the disposition towards the answer to the question that “hard work is what brings success as opposed to luck.”  The people who are most likely to believe that success comes from hard work are religious Americans; the people who are most likely to believe it comes from luck are secular Europeans.  This is significant for the alliance, for cooperation.

Here is a different cut on the same surveys, looking at the differences in recorded birth.  This is for the 18-to-44 group -- Meg, is that right?  It is not for the entire [cross-talking] it is the 18-to-44s, so it is not completed fertility.  And it may be affected by timing; people may not have completed their childbearing and all the rest.  Keep those caveats in mind.  There are big differences in fertility that are already apparent, however, depending upon what one’s answer is to the question, “Life is meaningful because God exists.”  Again, notable differences with respect to fertility, how one answers the questions:  “Which is more important, freedom or equality?”  “Why do people live in need?  Are they unlucky or is it laziness or lack of willpower?”  Again, differences that cut in opposite sorts of ways.

The reason I’m showing you all of these things is that fertility differentials may reinforce differences in disposition or outlook among these populations.  Of course, not everybody who is born into a religious home becomes religious themselves; not everybody who is born into a secular home become secular themselves.  People do not always adhere to their parents’ viewpoints or outlooks.  So there is more flexibility than a completely deterministic interpretation of this might suggest, but it is evocative of differences. 

Women’s movement - big differences in fertility, depending upon how you look at the women’s movement.  A disproportionate number of kids are going to be growing up in the United States in homes where mothers strongly disapprove; slightly opposite pattern in Europe.  Similar with disarmament, similar with United Nations, somewhat similar with confidence in NATO.  And different priorities - people with different priorities have different fertility levels.  This comes along with the demographic divergence and may possibly reinforce it to some degree in the years to come.  People generally ascribe with their parents’ beliefs and attitudes and outlooks; it is not a chip, but it may have some bearing where we are going.  Likewise, national pride. So in just a minute or two I’ve tried to show you reasons that we might be able to write a storyline suggesting that this divergence will also be reinforced by differences in attitudes and outlooks that we see emerging at the moment. 

But I think that there is an important counter-example.  There is a real life counter-example that I can show to you where demographic divergence has been occurring between the United States and a treaty ally, but where cooperation with the treaty ally has been growing closer over the past two decades.  And that is the case of Japan.  Japan and the U.S. in 1990, Japan and the U.S. today - this is a significant demographic divergence in just 17 years.  But during the same time that this demographic divergence has been underway, U.S.-Japanese security cooperation has been getting progressively closer.  The SOFA agreement, closer cooperation on North Korean nuclear questions, peacekeeping operations, the out-of-theater operations for Japan; even unthinkable in the First Gulf War, actually having Japanese medical units in some of the Global War on Terror areas. 

There has been a notable -- not dramatic but a notable and progressive deepening of security cooperation between the U.S. and Japan during this period of increasing demographic divergence.  Why is this?  I would suggest this is because of regional realities around Japan.  Japan is in a neighborhood which, from Tokyo’s standpoint, is not always terribly attractive.  There is a rising North Korean nuclear problem not so far from the home islands. 
A little bit more distant, there is still the uncertain question of a rising China and what this may mean for Japan’s own security.  To be charitable, we could say that the jury is still out about developments in Russia; the Russian Far East is not so far from Japanese shores.  And the alliance, or the friendship and alliance, with South Korea still has a certain amount of room for improvement.  Taking all of those realities into account, it may be that geo-strategic exigence encourages if not pushes closer cooperation between Japanese state and society and the U.S. despite these divergences.  That seems to me to be a perfectly plausible story.

Can we imagine similar challenges or common perceived threats that would help to overcome any growing lack of affinity that we see through demographic divergence for the transatlantic partnership?  I can certainly think of a couple of different issues - Meg mentioned some of them earlier - that might bring Europe and the U.S. to common security purposes in the decades ahead.  The uncertain future of Russia is one that comes to mind.  Of course, another has to do with a Global War on Terror or whatever that will be called 10 or 20 years from now. 
Both of those, I think, might be a little bit less persuasive as common bonds than the bonds that Japan and the United States have seen.  With respect to Russia, I do not think that even the deepest pessimists at the moment would foresee a return to the bad old Cold War days, which brought the U.S.-European alliance into such deep partnership in the ‘40s and ‘50s and thereafter. 

With respect to the Global War on Terrorism, Europe’s population is changing, and may be changing in ways that will complicate more than facilitate cooperation in dealing with what is called Islamic extremism or other things.  The patterns of immigration are different in the United States and in Europe and what this has meant already is that over the past generation, a non-trivial population of Muslim heritage, whatever actual religiosity may be -- the Muslim heritage has accrued in Western Europe.  We use here, I think, just the 18 countries of Western Europe and, according to number of estimates which can be quite fussy, somewhere in the range of 13, 14 million people of Muslim descent were members of these Western European countries as of the year 2000.  The prospect is for a substantially higher proportion of population of Muslim heritage for the year 2030 and for today. 

Will most of those people be loyal and productive citizens of the future Europe?  I think absolutely.  Are there possible problem groups, irredentist groups and other resistors within that growing share of Europe’s population that could make it more difficult for Europe to cooperate with the United States in commonly perceived security threats internationally?  I can imagine that as well. 

But as I say, I do not actually have an answer to the question that we posed at the beginning of this session.  I can see the history being written 50 years from now in either direction.  “Yes, this did prove to be a growing tension for the transatlantic partnership.”  “No, it proved not to be the growing tension that it might have resulted as for the following reasons.”  Maybe you all can help us parse this through, see which way the unwritten history may unfold.  Thank you very much.

 Barbara Boyle Torrey:  Nick is ruthlessly rational and I always love reading his things.  And just in case his rationality has not convinced you, he hits you with this tsunami of slides.  Let me tell you how I begin to approach this problem.  As I have been getting older, I have realized that I have to become much better about selecting what I worry about; I call it “worrying efficiently,” and  I have to think through whether a subject is really worth worrying about or not.  So let me go through some of Nick’s points and show you - Nick and Megan’s points - how I ask myself this question.

Now, let’s talk about age structure for a minute.  The problem with age structure is that nobody in Europe or in the United States is acting their age.  So the question is how important is age structure?  A good example is in Italy; two-thirds of men between the ages of 25 and 30 are living with their mothers.  It does drop; over 30, it is -- I think it is -- is it 30 percent?  I think it drops.  But they are still living with their mothers.  That to me means that 30 is not a meaningful number between the two. 

But I must say, also, in the United States, when retirees -- all these interviews with retirees, the retirees always describe themselves as middle- class and middle-aged.  So we have big differences in age and divergences, but because people are not behaving the way we would assume they should be behaving.  I do not know how important those are. 

Another one is Megan and Nick talk about in the rest of their slides - they did not show you - an age dependency ratio, which really does look frightening for Europe because, of course, they are very old and they have a labor force that is shrinking.  But in my mind, if demography is going to have a major effect, it is going to be through economics.  If that is true, then we should probably be looking at this total dependency ratio. 

When I went back to do the numbers - and that includes children and the elderly - that is mixing public and private burden, so it is not -- but it is the right policy space.  If you look at that, it is exactly the same -- out to 20/30 between Europe and the U.S.  So then, the question is the aged clearly going to be a bigger burden, but it is not exactly in terms of the total burden -- I am not sure.  That chart in your handout on the Nobel Prize winners and the innovations and the inventors and the age is just striking, especially since we are beyond the peak, Nick, on this. And --

 Nick:  Yes.  [Indiscernible]

Barbara Boyle Torrey:  Right, right.  My hill’s not so gentle.  And what it makes me think is maybe we should not be looking at the median age of the population; maybe we should be looking at the median age of the labor force because that is the critical in terms of innovation and productivity.  Those productivity curves look exactly the same as those innovation curves.  Which then, also, leads me to another issue, which is -- and I thought I would be doing it with my own slides but I have not done it yet, so I can recommend it to you -- is that all of our slides with projections on it should be caveated; we should have an asterisk and it should be BC, for behavioral changes. 

What is going to happen?  As soon as we start to get some of these population divergences, there will be behavioral changes and they will almost certainly -- most of the behavioral changes we can think of, both private and policy, are likely to shrink this divergence.  Let me say that Europeans, since they have not really begun to deal with this problem, have a larger policy space to deal with than we do.  I mean we are increasing our retirement age; they have not.  Only one or two countries have even begun to do that.  They could do that and shrink the impact of their aging.  They have almost the same labor force participation rates we do but a disproportionate number of European workers are working part-time and we are working mostly full-time; they could simply move from part-time to full-time and increase their productivity based on this. 

The other thing - one of your slides, which is so striking - is we are working our tails off and the Europeans are getting four weeks more of vacation than we are.  It is quite striking the group that was actually -- the group that the slide did show -- if they had the same number of vacation days we did, it would dramatically increase their productivity.  I think we need to realize that there is a whole series of policy - certainly, policy changes as well as behavior - that could shrink this divergence even though the numbers may be increasing. 

Let’s talk about the population growth because I am, in my own mind -- and I asked Megan and Nick beforehand:  Is the Western Europe the right measurement of analysis on this?  In my mind, because if I think it is going to be an economic effect, I would then use the European Union 25 versus NAFTA.  These numbers would begin to look different then because NAFTA gives us a more demographically dynamic country in Mexico. 

If you then think about Turkey eventually joining the EU, Turkey in 2050 -- the Turkish population would increase the EU-25 population by 12 percent; that is a big number in 2050, and it would cut in half the divergence in 2050 in terms of the population sizes.  So I think that we need to think about what is the right unit of measurement, and I really would use NAFTA and the EU-25 on that.

I think immigration is a wild card on all of this and it is for all demographers; it is the bane of every demographer’s existence.  I have always assumed that there are very few rational adults who would actually want to learn a foreign language as an adult and then have to make their livelihood using that language.  So that, if in fact, the sending countries in both the U.S., which is primarily Mexico, and the EU actually get moving economically, that is going to decrease this immigration and is going to change some of these numbers; it would be interesting to run these numbers, assuming that these economies finally start to take off. 

Let me just briefly talk about the religion because I do not actually understand what is going on, and I spent some time looking at this this weekend; I cannot quite figure it out.  But the reason -- Baylor University’s Survey of Religion actually has similar numbers in the U.S. - atheists have 1.3 children and non-atheists have 2, so they are confirming the World Value Survey. 

But in both cases, both Baylor and the World Value Survey -- this is incomplete fertility which Nick mentioned.  But I am betting that atheists begin having children later than non-atheists; I do not have anything to -- but I am just betting that that is true.  And if that is true, this may even out at the end.  I mean, by the time they are 45 -- or the divergence may be a little bit smaller on it. 

What is most interesting - and it is something that you showed but did not pick up on, Nick - is that when Nick was showing all of those slides of how the number of children significantly changes people’s attitudes towards things, it was actually only in the U.S. that that was true.  In the Europeans there was almost no difference in the number of children from the people who hated NATO to the people who loved it and whatever.  Just another one that I just picked up -- so religion is not having the same effect in Europe as it is having in -- it has a much more powerful effect on our attitudes in the U.S. than it does in Europe. 

And Nick did point out that the very religious in Europe have more children than we do in the U.S. but their attitudes are not that much different from the people who are having very few children.  The one thing that I did see there is that in the one slide that says, “Would you defend your country in case of another war,” the U.S. was not the lowest.  Did you notice what was the lowest?  It was Italy.  It is all those men living with their mothers who are not going to leave. And they are -- I do not think I will say -- 

Okay, it is in my long-term interest to find a compelling story about how demography is going to change this.  I could earn more money and -- but I cannot tell this story in a way that convinces myself.  As Nick says, demography is not destiny.  Demography can constantly be overridden by things that move much faster; demography moves quite slowly.  Financial markets swamp anything that demography is doing in the short term, and it is certainly the medium term on this.  But so does weather.  A very bad weather -- not day, but a weather year.  And you get a swamping of what you might consider demographic effects on this thing. 
I also was struck by the German Marshall Funds slide that showed that 81 percent of Europeans and 79 percent of Americans think that in the future things will either stay the same or get better with our alliance.  That is a pretty powerful number.  When you aggregate those, that looks to me like we are on track and that we are not as different as we should be. 

But let me tell you the one thing that I really was interested.  I mean a completely new idea and something that I have to decide whether I would worry about is -- I was fascinated by the slide that showed - and I knew it before but I just had not thought about it - that the Mexican-Americans in the United States have a fertility rate of 3; they are the ones that are holding up our fertility rate to replacement level.  Do you know what the fertility rate in Mexico is?  It is 2.4.  And there is some reason that we have to explain to ourselves why the fertility rate of Mexican-Americans is so much higher than it is in Mexico. 

Nick has said that it may be a measurement problem; it also could be that the immigrants to the U.S. are coming from rural areas where fertility is higher than the national average.  But in my mind that means that number could change on us.  That it may be there for a little while but that our fertility rates may actually start to come down in a way that I had settled in.  I thought we would stay at replacement forever and I am actually not absolutely sure now.  Anyway, my conclusion is that I find this fascinating but I’m not going to worry about it.

 Tod Lindberg:  Well, now that we have so many facts other than the evidence, we can make of them what we wish.  And I think Barbara has already -- I am not pessimistic about what this shows.  Now, there are a couple of reasons I am not pessimistic that have actually very little to do with the data, and so we probably ought to clear those up in the first place. 

In the first place, pessimism is not really socially useful.  If you are here in Washington, I presume it is -- I edit the journal called Policy Review, which is probably, at least, in principle, about improving policy for the purpose of improving people’s lives, et cetera.  You have to begin from a baseline point of view that says that that might be possible. 

The problem with the pessimistic case is that, really, nothing comes of it, which is to say that what you really ought to do if you are pessimistic.  Rather than being in Washington, I think probably you should go to a university and you will be able there to develop a more fully critical appreciation of the downward slide of the society around you.  I think that is a perfectly reasonable pursuit but, again, one that I did not choose.  So I do think that there is an optimistic bias built into this system. 

What I would like to provoke Nick with, and Meg, is the proposition that we are not looking at enough of the story here.  We are looking at the story of the United States and Europe.  To a certain degree we have added, obviously, Canada into the mix as well, also Japan.  But I would be also very interested -- and I am not a demographer as this book quickly becomes apparent, if this is not indeed already entirely obvious.  What I would like to see is comparisons that are not within what you might call the Western world or the modern world, but also the cross-comparisons.  I think - and it is just an intuition of mine - that what you will see that dividing -- as a really stark division between -- within the Western world, between the United States and Europe, will look like a smaller division, possibly, on certain kinds of questions compared to a comparison of that Western or modern world with certain other parts of the world. 

I think it is important to remember that we have already staked a lot on the premise that we are looking at a part, and that part in relation to whole is a very different and important question.  I will give you a more pointed, I think, way of putting this:  We have heard it said and affirmed that demography is not destiny.  Well, I certainly think that that is true in relation to this modern Western world. 

However, if, say, the United States and Europe went to war with each other and had an exchange of nuclear weapons between the United States and France, then I think you might very well end up with a different sense of whether demography was destiny.  Now that is absurd, of course, but it is interesting that it is absurd, and it is telling that it is absurd because I think the least likely thing on earth would be such a war at this point.  By the way, that is not a conclusion you could readily have reached until rather recently in the course of history.  And I think that is a very, very big difference that eliminates the two. 

So when I look at, for example -- Nick, could you put up that -- it is the Total Fertility Rate: Europe versus Anglo U.S.A.  Obviously, there is a leading edge and a trailing edge but I am interested in all that overlapping section, too, because I am not so sure that you are getting a portrait of a radical difference between the United States and Europe, so much as you are getting a continuum of areas of disagreement -- of areas of different behavior that is consistent with -- for example, you will tell me - I do not know - but it strikes me that Red State America might be on a higher end of the fertility rate than Blue State America.  And that, for example, fertility patterns in Manhattan might be rather closer to those of London or Paris or even France as a whole, than, for example, those of Georgia.  And so I think it is important to understand that as a continuum. 

Again, if we insist on inserting or asserting that the Atlantic Ocean is a barrier of fundamental importance in considering these kinds of questions, then I think we get to a different set of answers than we do if we were, again, to make that comparison more globally.  Also, Nick, if you could put it up - we had this up just a minute ago - but, again, the prospects of transatlantic relations after the 2008 U.S. elections.  That is not bad from the point of view of the cooperation between the United States and Europe because if you look at “will stay the same,” you have got to remember that there is an awful lot embedded in “will stay the same” that we do not usually talk about. 

When we consider this matter, we usually look at the liabilities side of the ledger.  We look at the ways in which our presidents and prime ministers get into heated arguments over foreign policy questions.  We look at the inability to arrive at a common position on such issues as agricultural subsidies and so forth.  We do not necessarily look at, for example, foreign direct investment between United States and Europe.  If you look at that number, you do not, I assure you, find a picture of divergence.  There is still very much a sense that if “each unto the other” is where the action is, economically, and China will be a very, very huge economy at some point in the future, I hope, because -- by the way, there is no good pessimistic scenario that does not have bad consequences for all the rest of us if that is not true. 

In the mean time, I think you have got to take the status quo as a whole and not just look at the op-ed pages in order to find out what that really is; go read business pages as well and I think you get a much broader sense.  Also, if we really do not like each other as much as we like to think that we do not like each other, then I am hard-pressed to explain the fascination with tourism going both ways now.  I am hard-pressed to explain the --- you can read ads in the Paris Metro for learning business English now.  This is not a state of divergence, I do not think, or certainly not a declaration of independence.  It is something much richer, much more interconnected, much more consequential. 

The “will improve” -- I do think it is slightly interesting that the United States is a little higher on the “will improve” than the European side.  Again, I think “will stay the same” is not an affirmation of an entirely negative case but the “will improve” -- because it seems to me that that -- to go back to my initial point about pessimism versus optimism, embedded in there is the wish of not inconsequential number of Americans for improvement and possibly even willingness to undertake activities that would lead to improvement in that regard.  So I think that is pretty good news as well. 

The religion issue is completely fascinating and I think it is a door that has only just begun to be opened in terms of what we are seeing.  These are kinds of questions I think that if they have been asked before, I have not really been aware of their having been asked, and these associations are fascinating.  I am not entirely sure that there is much -- that it is yet time to offer kind of grand theories as to what is actually going on with these kinds of questions. 
I have written a book called The Political Teachings of Jesus, which, among other things, makes the observation that if Europe is not especially Christian anymore, it is nonetheless, in essence, Jesusian in my neologism in its outlook; it accepts the basic political principles set out in the Sermon on the Mount that used to be Christian principles in Europe but now have evolved in a secular direction and into something else.  But they are still in an operational level very much the same.  Nevertheless, even if that is true, these data are interesting for what they do indicate, which is that there is obviously something missing or different or mysterious about that difference and that is certainly something that we ought to very much be mindful of.

I took a family to Notre Dame for a mass one time when we were in Paris years ago, and one thing that was not surprising to me was that Europeans who are religious are showing up, that the higher end even of religious Americans, in this cases because if you go to church in Europe, you are probably doing it because you seriously believe in the religion of that church and take it seriously. 

There is no social benefit in Europe now from being a believer and from showing up; in fact, you could say that maybe things run quite the contrary.  So the interesting question, then is, is the secularization of Europe a permanent phenomenon, or is it, too, subject to change over time?  And with that I will leave it and I guess turn it back over to Meg for --

Megan Davy:  All right.  Well, I am going to abuse my post as both moderator and as data cruncher to throw a new problem into the system.  And this, actually, I think, will go to both of you.  But in my overzealous examination of the data, I started getting into what was the effect of religion on people’s decision about how they feel about family, about how they feel about fertility, about how they feel about the role of the women, and came across two rather interesting findings.  I do not want to get too caught up in the numbers but if you look at the question, “Do you agree that a woman must have children to be fulfilled,” 38 percent of Europeans responded yes; only 15 percent of Americans said yes, which surprised me, a surprisingly sort of feminist view of women’s role in society.   This is women and men group together; this is not just women, it is all together. 

Also interestingly, I found that Americans were more likely than European respondents to say that being a housewife is just as fulfilling as another job but, at the same time, also found that Americans were much more likely -- excuse me, much less likely than Europeans to say that marriage is an outdated institution, which probably is not a surprise. 

So, again, I was a little surprised by those results but the really interesting thing is that in many cases for many questions with regard to the role of the family, the role of women - Do you want to have children? - religion did not matter in the United States where it did in Europe.  Just to throw out examples, if you look at questions “What is the ideal number of children a woman must have a child to feel fulfilled,” and “Being a housewife is just as fulfilling,” there was not a statistically significant difference between those who self-identified as religious in the United States versus those who did not.  That was not the case for Europe as a whole.  There were some countries where that did not matter, but Europe as a whole -- religion impacted your response to that question.  And so which actually is different to what we saw there. 

And so I want to put out and juggle around the idea of does fertility look different.  And these questions look different because people in the United States are much more likely to self-identify as religious.  Or I would actually argue that there is this secular but religious -- as far as values, United States, at least, with looking at the children issue because even people who were not religious were far more likely than Europeans to say that marriage was important, things like that. 

My take actually was that, by and large, even secular people in the United States were much more religious.  And that at least for these questions, it did not matter how you self-identify.  There was this feeling of, I think, what you could argue was a religious set of values with regard to the home, you know, desire to have children, the importance of marriage.  So I just want to lob that to everyone.

 Nicholas Eberstadt:  Meg, you know, there was a book written some years ago called Mongrel Manhattan about New York City in the 1920s; I think it was Ann Gordon -- Ann Gordon, Ann Douglas wrote it.  She makes this distinction between being secular and post-secular, and her argument is that secular people are people who do not believe in the texts any more but still know the texts and post-seculars do not know the texts.  I do not know; we may be entering on a distinction like that here.

 Barbara Boyle Torrey:  I think that we have not done the hard lifting yet on these religion questions.  We do not know what we are measuring, what we are not measuring in it.  And I think that may be why we are getting such curious results on it.

 Megan Davy:  All right, we are going to take it to the floor.  If I could just ask that you raise your hand and Sasha will come around with the mike.  Please be sure to identify your name and your affiliation and please make your statements in the form of a question.  Thanks.

Garrett Mitchell:  Thanks.  Garrett Mitchell from the Mitchell Report.  I want to begin with the question that, arguably, it ought to be clear to me but I hope with a purpose in mind.  And that is, this has all been very interesting but my question is, what is the larger question that drives this enormous amount of time and energy that has been put in here.  I do not mean that facetiously; I am just saying one of the things I would love to see is, come away from today, if nothing else, is sort of a sharper perspective about no matter how the data turns out, what is it we are really driving at.  What is the important issue? 

Now let me move from that to an observation based just on listening today and purposefully not looking at the charts and paying very little attention.  And that is, I was struck by the fact that, in fact, demography does not seem to be where the interesting stuff is as much as - and I will use the term psychography - psychographics, the lifestyle, the attitude and all the values, the related stuff. 

Third, I was very intrigued with Barbara’s point about it is what we are doing with our own demographies -- 25 to 30-year-old Italians living with their mothers.  And by the way, do they live with their fathers, too? Or is it just --?  And I was also struck by -- you may have seen the piece that David Brooks did in The New York Times today where he talks about that odyssey element which he sees as a new way that we are using our time.  So having said all of that, the question that I really have is what, ideally, would this help us, from a policy and political standpoint, understand.  And given the fact that you both have said you do not know what the answer is, what do you suspect it is?

 Nicholas Eberstadt:  I will try to take a quick crack at that and Meg may have a separate sort of reaction.  If you agree with Barbara, as I do, that demographic change comes slowly enough that prepared society as prepared policy makers can either compensate for difficulties or capitalize upon opportunities or both at the same time.  This gives us a rather long horizon to look at up to 2030. 

If it is the case that demographic divergence for various reasons might complicate cooperation - not prevent it - and I think that Barbara is quite right that for all sorts of -- that what we were talking about here had much more to do with political or security cooperation than economic.  I mean, I do not think the -- I think NAFTA and EU are the natural units to look at, and Tod is right about this is not a business page assessment at all.  The choice of U.S.A. and Western Europe is looking at capital-to-capital interactions rather than economic or people interactions.  If there are factors which might lead to diminishing rather than growing affinity, it would be best to know it in advance and to be able to deal with this so that our mutual interest could be preserved and promoted.  That is all.  I mean Meg, was that --?

 Megan Davy:  Yeah [audio glitch].

 Mark Miceli:  I’m Mark Miceli, Ambassador of Malta.  With regards to the question raised by Mrs. Boyle Torrey about the Italians living with their mothers, we happen to be neighbors of the Italians.  I would suspect the reason why they would not go to war is because they do not trust their governments.  You will find that, most probably, they have the least participation in elections.  And, perhaps, they do get some protection from their mothers, I am sure, but they certainly do not get initiative [sounds like] to run to their governments.  That is one. 

Number two, with regard to the demographic divergence, I am myself not pessimistic.  I believe what Europe stands to gain, especially from its alliance with its North American partners, is precisely what can we benefit -- how can we benefit from immigration.  In fact, as you obviously are aware, we are looking towards North Africa as a source for immigrant workers. 
We are obviously concerned about the cultural dimension but that is a reality for us.  We have to look at the source of labor and how we are going to pay for the increasing number of senior citizens that we have in our country.  Though, no, we are not -- there is no reason for being pessimistic.  We could learn by working together.  Thank you.

Bob Lerman:  Yeah, Bob Lerman, Urban Institute and American U.  A couple of questions.  One question is that there seems to be a dynamic issue here that maybe is not fully taken into account in projections, depending on whether the children of these religious parents stay religious.  Because if they do, then, of course, there is a dynamic dimension that is going to change the European situation and, maybe, actually make for a convergence as opposed to a divergence. 

Now, of course, then there is the second point which I am surprised you did not make a bit more of, which is the Islamic immigrant issue and what their birth rates might be and how that difference over time in potential divergence of thinking about foreign policy and how that would that be affected. 

Then the third question is, the issue of religion itself and whether sometimes people think about secular that there is a kind of almost secular religion, the whole environmental thing and the global warming and the anti-genetic crops and all of this coalescence of views around that.  And whether, maybe, I do not know whether these World Values studies can pick that up but that would be interesting to see whether what the overlap is with the standard religious --

Nicholas Eberstadt:  Let me just respond to one part of your tripartite remarks and I am sure that everybody else has other things they want to say.  With respect to the Muslim or population of Muslim heritage in Western Europe, I did not go into that in an awful lot of detail this afternoon; I have written about this elsewhere.  I have argued elsewhere that it seemed to me that the assimilation of the populations of Muslim heritage might turn out to be the bigger demographic challenge for Western Europe; bigger than low fertility, bigger than population aging or some of the other factors that we have discussed. 

I did not touch on this in detail because it is a very, very mixed bag and we see signs of demographic assimilation in certain Muslim populations.  For example, Indonesians into the Netherlands have a lower birth rate than native-borne Hollanders.  I mean, that is a certain sign of assimilation, we could argue.  Turks who go to Germany have a lower birth rate than Anglos in Kansas.  We would say that is a sign of assimilation.  But if you do not have any babies at all, it looks like a very high birth rate, and so Germans continue to have some angst about that. 
But the pattern is very mixed and there are certain sending countries whose immigrants seem to be less assimilated in different receiving parts of Europe than in other parts of Europe.  There are also Muslim populations in certain countries like U.K. where you see big differences.  Bengalis have a lower birth rate than Pakistanis, both coming from parts of the old Raj.  Bengalis do not seem to be very active in the rankings of the al Qaeda memberships than Briton-Pakistanis do.  It is very hard for me to generalize about this but it seems to me that it is a very mixed tableau and exactly what it means to be somebody who comes from a society where your heritage or background is Muslim can be ambiguous by itself until you parse it a little closer.

Tod Lindberg:  Well, I actually did want to comment on this for a second because there is, I think, a lot of attention focused on this question.  And I think you need to look very carefully at the number in the lower right hand corner.  Tocqueville was warning about a coming race war in America, which, so far as I can tell, we are still waiting for.  On the basis of shall we say lower right hand corner number that was significantly higher than that number. 

And so I think the opportunity -- look, obviously, the integration of these 14 million people, their families, their future course is a crucially important question; it is especially important for these countries themselves.  But I would caution about reading too much into that question and seeing that question as somehow the question of the future of all of Europe.  I do not know, for example, what the, maybe Nick or Meg could tell me, what percentage of religious believers who are not followers of Islam in Europe is.  But, yeah, just as a guess, I am going to say that it is higher than 14 million --

Male Voice:  Yeah, sure.

Tod Lindberg:  Because that would be three percent.  And their having babies at the rates at which Nick reports in his study, then the notion that somehow Europe is imminently going to be overwhelmed by a population explosion of children of Muslims, again, I mean, there is a lot of, I think, hysteria on the subject that a cool assessment of these issues really can help to dispel if people are inclined to that.  I mean, some people actually have a preference for hysteria and I understand that.  In some cases, it is very good for business but it certainly does not help with understanding the actual issues involved.

 Robert Schadler:  Hi.  Robert Schadler with International Investor.  I have appreciated this talk very much today; I think you have given us a lot to think about.  But I would be a bit wary about trying to draw some of these connections and I will just give you a couple of thoughts that I had.  One was Ms. Davy began by suggesting that there might be a link between some of these data and the fact that the Europeans were a bit more reluctant to join us, perhaps, in our efforts in Iraq.  But think about all the other variables there.  You have got 100 years of history of the war Europe had; we did not, totally, at least.  Education is different among Europeans than it is here, their sense of worldliness, their ability to travel across borders much more so than the average American, their trade and cultural differences for that reason, and their proximity to Iraq and what was going on there versus ours. 

More than that, if we really did take some of this logic to its conclusion, suggesting that, perhaps, Europe will be less willing to enter a war because it is getting older, that might suggest that younger nations would be more willing.  And I am not -- of course, we have to exclude China and Japan here, that have their own aging problems -- but some countries in Southeast Asia, some Latin American nations and others, we would have to conclude they might be more willing to, at least they have a population that would be more part of the armed forces if they so believed. 

Finally my last point is what Europe is facing, is it really so bad right now as we speak?  I think the EU-15 now has a better GDP growth rate than the United States.  Their productivity is now starting to outpace ours.  So as we look toward the future we have to ask ourselves is it really so bad what Europe is facing.

Nicholas Eberstadt:  A quick comment -- others will have other things to say.  Another component of this German Marshall Fund project we are undertaking at AEI is looking at some of the possible demographic opportunities that Western Europe may have.  With a European co-author, we make the argument in this little monograph that Europe stands to -- it could potentially capitalize quite substantially upon the opportunities from healthy aging.  And that healthy aging is a true blessing that

Western Europe enjoys today, will enjoy in the future.  It can be translated into further economic growth if everybody decides not to retire at age 49.s

Megan Davy:  I think, if I can briefly respond -- I think my point in pointing out what is going on currently is that it is a totally new task for Europe.  That is to say, that it -- at least with regards to the alliance, we have not -- it is not a part of NATO, certainly, to do missions outside of Europe and this is the first time they are doing that.  And especially to be doing an offensive rather than a defensive military operation is certainly new.  So I guess part of my point in pointing it out is this is something that I -- we will see what happens in the United States but that perhaps United States sees as part of what the alliance should be or certainly part of our mission.  And if Europe is not on that same path which -- and demographics may play into that in this -- in your ability to fund -- but as well as the values.  So if you think that there is a divergence in that, it is not that the alliance in general -- certainly, there will be the economic component but that if the United States has set on this trajectory towards more offensive, you know, going into different regions that are outside, that maybe this will be some conflict in this area because -- if you put it --

 Male Voice:  Well, first, thank you very much for those very stimulating thoughts.  I’m an economist and work at the Swiss Embassy here.  I was 20 years ago here for two years and had the opportunity to come back.  One of the reasons to come back was this very negative situation in Europe where they are always bashing the U.S., why you had to come twice last century to come bring to some order into Europe because we could not manage ourselves.  So we said, “Why do we not go back to the U.S. just to be in a different environment that is more positive and more looking into the future?” 

I have two points and I think what -- one is a religious one and the other is just how to ask questions.  What I observed here after 20 years is not the religious right with Jerry Falwell; that just started about 20 years ago when I was here.  That has not only -- you do not only see Jerry Falwell or James Dobson where we read some books how to raise kids.  While today it is a political power, a kind of a political influence.  It is not only that that has changed, but we were in different churches and were very active and looking around as kind of a thing that interested us very much. 

Then we figured out that 20 years later, preaching here not only in a specific church we attend but in different churches are in movements that have influence into churches.  We see that there are values that are very important for them, that are preached like, you have your own -- your only value comes out of being created by God or things like that.  And that brings people to a point where being married or having children is no longer as important as it was before.  So without children, for a woman, it is no problem.  I mean, you have a value in yourself.  Then some of those questions and the answers we get can be very different. 

The second point is the question of improvement of the questions themselves.  If you ask the question, “If there were another war, I would be willing to fight for my country,” I have two brothers-in-law and a sister-in-law who are Germans.  I mean, if you had the situation of having a leader who brings you to Moscow or Stalingrad, at the end you have all the cities down in ashes and you discover you had these concentration camps, or in Switzerland, all these people standing around at the border for years being bored but being there, it is different from what you experience here.  You were not misused twice last century with your military and with all your might. 

I think those questions come very different.  I mean, it is just a different thing if you ask the question to me or if you ask it to an American.  I think we are more different in those values and deep in our hearts, we are much more different than we think.  I remember 20 years ago when I was first year. After six months, my wife and I were sitting at the kitchen table and our kids were fully Americanized, no accent like us or so.  And we said, “Well, they will become Americans but we ourselves, we will never belong to here.  We will never fully understand the Americans.”  And I think there is an improvement possible with the questions themselves. 

Megan Davy:  I want to thank you all for coming.  If you have any more questions, we’ll be here after the event.

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