With the Bush administration and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson pushing to pass the $700 billion bailout through congress this week, the rest of the world sat seemingly unwilling to help in any way.

Roger Cohen, a respected US commentator on foreign affairs with the International Herald Tribune writes, “The world has changed in the past decade. There has been a steady transfer of wealth away from the United States in a shift most Americans have not yet grasped. But there has been no accompanying transfer of responsibility. New powers are free-riding as if it were still the American century.”

Why isn’t the US getting the help they think they deserve from the European Central Bank and other nations? Well, for one, Mr. Paulson and Mr. Bernanke are too macho to ask. Representative Barney Frank, Democrat from Massachusetts and chairman of the House Financial Services Committee was asked about the situation by Mr. Cohen and had this to say: “I think it’s a perverse pride thing. We don’t ask for help. We’re the big strong father figure. But let’s be realistic: We’re no longer the dominant superpower.”

Whatever the reason there is no real excuse for the European Central Bank to not even hint at some responsibility, or other countries for that matter. But this is truly an “American mess” as Cohen writes, “The responsibility for undoing the mess is chiefly American too.” However no one believes that any nation is going to voluntarily offer aid to the US, definitely not with this administration.

But Mr. Cohen continues to inquire in his article why the European Central Bank is not coming forward, when they did have plenty of their own subprime mortgage mess. “With this shift of wealth there needs to be a shift of responsibility”, writes Cohen. The G-7 held a conference call earlier today to discuss global financial markets and to reaffirm their commitment to protect the integrity of international finance system, according to the European Central Bank website. Their continued monitoring of the situation will undoubtedly lead to further discussion between EU finance ministers and US leaders.

ESA (European Space Agency) faces the threat of having no way to get its cargo and astronauts to the international space station (ISS) because NASA has decided to cut off the U.S. space shuttle early - in 2010 - five years before a new generation of space craft take over the transport duties.

A planned temporary arrangement for Europeans and Americans to use Russia’s Soyuz shuttles in the interim now seems in jeopardy because of tensions in the wake of Russian actions in Georgia.

NASA and ESA had collaborated on designing a station crew-return vehicle based on an earlier experimental craft, the X-38, but the project has been dropped on the U.S. side even though the European parts were being delivered.

As reported by the BBC, ESA was caught short by NASA’s action. “The decision to cancel the order was delivered by the U.S. government after the components were ready, according to Mario Caporicci, head of ESA’s future space transport infrastructure division, the BBC said on September 12, 2008.

Already, there were question marks about the continuing U.S. role in the ISS after the current shuttle program is discontinued in 2010. The U.S. “constellation” space program has slowed its development pace because of technical and funding problems, and the NASA announcement left a 5-year gap (at least) of no U.S. transportation to and from the station.

An embarrassing aspect of this decision is that the U.S. had promised transportation services to its European, Japanese, and Canadian partners, who all provided their own laboratory materials and equipment to the station.

So what can the grounded Europeans do? A proposal is currently underway to evolve their existing cargo vessel (ATV) into having the capability to transport astronauts, which is considered a necessary second step by Mr. Caporicci and ESA. “To achieve this second step, it will be necessary to analyze in detail the implications of adapting the Arianne 5 launcher and its ground segment to human spaceflight,” Caporicci said.

The longstanding alternative had involved leasing Russian space-craft to ferry freight and people, but that appears unacceptable in Washington under the current circumstances. “The Russians are not going to back out of Georgia anytime soon, certainly not prior to the U.S. presidential election,” NASA chief Michael Griffin told the BBC.

In practice, he predicted, the next U.S. administration will have no choice but to extend the life of the U.S. shuttle. So Europeans will have to wait until the November election and January inauguration before having a clue about the fate of the international program centered on the space station.

As President Dmitri Medvedev formally recognized the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia in a televised announcement, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn must have been rolling over in his grave and thinking, “I told you so.” Solzhenitsyn, who passed away earlier this year, had always argued that Russia had a strong soul that needed to be tamed or it would cause trouble.

The Kremlin seems to have decided to go with trouble, at least for the moment. The recognition decision comes a day after U.S. President George Bush and German Chancellor Angela Merkel explicitly warned Russia not to extend formal recognition to the republics, according to Stratfor, a U.S. company offering on-line intelligence. Furthermore, the Kremlin is hammering home the point - to Western governments - that it disdains their condemnations as insignificant. Meanwhile Russia is consolidating its footholds in Georgia and conceivably its spheres of influence in its “near-abroad” of countries formerly in Moscow’s orbit.

The west promptly denounced the Russian decision. German Chancellor Angela Merkel called the decision “totally unacceptable” and UK foreign minister David Milliband stated that “Georgia’s independence and territorial integrity cannot be changed by decree from Moscow.” In this situation, such strong rhetoric will need to be backed up by effective support for Georgia as well as with a new stance toward Moscow. Otherwise western bravado can backfire in the face of determined Russian action.

Russia will continue to use parallels to the Kosovo ‘precedent’ to contradict immediate or delayed reactions from Western leaders. The West will continue to say Kosovo was a ‘unique’ case and all other avenues had been exhausted. The rest of the states in the Caucasus will be watching closely-in the next few weeks for further developments in this conflict. Russia has made an audacious move, and the west is on the defensive. But Moscow must be wary of unleashing a backlash with secessionist regions, such as Chechnya, already on edge.

Georgia will desperately need the help of its Western allies if it is to assert its independence, but it may find the pressure from a muscle-flexing Russia and an indecisive West so unbearable that the nation loses its viability. In the longer run, Russia may have gone too far by using its military force when the lack of real dialogue frustrated Moscow. The danger is less that the attack will goad the west into countervailing action and more that the Russians may have edged themselves closer toward one of their chronic weaknesses: isolation.

The Russian Duma’s resolution calling for recognition of the Georgian breakaway regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia is non-binding, so President Dmitri Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin have the option of ignoring it. Indeed, they may not wish to stop short of a step liable to stir up secessionist fever in Chechnya and other restive regions within Russia’s own borders.

But Russia will certainly play the “recognition card” in negotiations about the outcome and future shape of Georgia. For one thing, Russia wants to pay back the West in its own coin for recognizing Kosovo’s independence in defiance of Moscow.

Each of the two regions has also expressed the wish to join Russia officially if they gain independence. This would expand Russian territory deep into Georgia. In practice, South Ossetia and Abkhazia are already independent, but Georgia depends on each region for key transportation infrastructure — such as the port of Sukhumi in Abkhazia for imports.

Europe is highly concerned that Russia could recognize secessionist regions in Georgia and in other nearby countries, according to Stratfor, a U.S. company offering on-line intelligence analysis. When Europe recognized Kosovo, it had control of the security situation there. In contrast, “there are countless other secessionist regions - Transdniestria in Moldova, for example - that were already stirring because of Kosovo’s independence and could really light up if they see Russia as a new guarantor of independence,” Stratfor reported.

In Russia itself, formal recognition of the breakaway republics on the ground of self-determination could create a dangerous domino effect within Russian borders. Russia has more than a dozen secessionist regions, many of which are powerful and organized. Moreover, some of these regions could attract strong foreign support - a situation the West could use to destabilize Russia or get Moscow involved in another set of wars within its own territory.

The Kremlin has worked very hard in the past few years to clamp down on the most volatile places, like Chechnya, Ingushetia and Dagestan, but there is always the possibility that these regions could flare up again very quickly.

In Georgia, reports indicate that organized cyber-warfare attacks continue against key government websites - attacks that appear to be coming from organized groups in Russia.

Suspicions that these attacks - like an even larger cyber-assault last year on Estonia - are offensive tactics orchestrated and used by the Russian government and have triggered fresh thinking in the U.S. and European capitals about what strategy might help deter such cyber-aggression in the future.

“Cyber-attack by a nation is very different from cyber-attack by a hacker,” says Admiral Bill Owens, a specialist about the threat. He told the Financial Times that the risks for major nations are rising to the point where it may be time to consider a defensive doctrine similar to “mutually assured destruction.” That was the name for a balance of nuclear weapons between the superpowers during the cold war that convinced both sides that it would be self-destructive to launch a nuclear attack.

Similarly, Owens said, diplomats might take another page from cold war arms-control and urge countries to pledge “no first use” of cyber-war - along the lines of the “no first use” pledges about nuclear weapons.

Although Georgia does not have enough web infrastructures to be very vulnerable in this area, the organized hacking it sustained comes against a background of reported attacks on government facilities in the U.S., France, Britain and Germany that were apparently probes of Western defenses or espionage to glean secret information. Both Russia and China have specialized military units that specialize in cyber-warfare, according to Western specialists. NATO is developing similar expertise.

Evoking the possibility of Western retaliation against attacks masterminded by another government, Owens said “I think that the U.S. and China have an ability to shut down each other’s societies on the internet today.”

This latest cyber-attack has spurred Europe and the U.S. to seek policy clarifications, new technical ripostes and closer cooperation, including via NATO. Michael Chertoff, U.S. Homeland Security Secretary, outlining plans for a “Manhattan project” for IT-security, warned recently that “a big and successful attack would have cascading effects across the country and across the world”.

Though there are similarities in both attacks there are also key differences between Estonia and Georgia specialists say. This time the hackers are targeting specific government websites such as the president’s, the parliament’s and the foreign ministry’s. In fact, web traffic is being redirected to sites in Russia and Turkey that could be the first step towards controlling Georgia’s incoming and outgoing high-level communications. That is the kind of control Russia would need to help oust President Mikheil Saakasvili.

Moscow’s use of military force against neighboring Georgia is bound to be a major setback for the West in its “pipeline war” with Russia in which the US and the EU are trying to devise ways of getting oil and gas directly to European markets without going through Russia.

Much of these Western hopes center on the territory of Georgia as a passageway from Central Asia to Turkey and its European neighbors.

Now it will be much harder to convince investors that these new pipelines are safe long-term bets for their money, according to Georgia Falls Victim to Pipeline Politics by a Platt’s specialist writing for the BBC.

This U.S. plan was described in European Affairs by its top US architect, Assistant Secretary of State Matthew Bryza in a recent issue.

The escalation of Russian pressure on Georgia, since the West supported Kosovo’s declaration of independence, has been charted in our European Affairs blog.

In textbooks, globalization may have its good sides and less-good sides, but there are no redeeming features to the dark side of globalization - organized crime with global reach.

To get a ripe taste of this dark underbelly of globalization and its spread in Europe, dip into the latest book by Misha Glenny, a journalist who gained international attention with his reporting on the horrors of wars and bloodshed in the collapse of the former Yugoslavia. In McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld, Glenny makes the case, all too convincingly, that Eastern Europe, with its new and fragile democratic systems, has become the gateway for criminal syndicates that match the best multinationals in their professional skills in exploiting the new potential for illicit goods and services to pass borders with the freedom enjoyed by normal trade.

According to Glenny, the “global shadow economy” now accounts for 15-20% of the world’s economic transactions and its epicenter resides in new EU states where governments are still trying to organize their defenses against the criminal spillover from the collapse of the Soviet empire.

Glenny’s book of reportage and analysis is reviewed by Michael Mosettig, a foreign affairs producer at the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, in the forthcoming issue of European Affairs. He starts by admiring Glenny’s title - “McMafia” - as a way of evoking “[their] global reach as criminal ‘corporations’ aspire to penetrate markets the world over - mirroring the global goals of legal entities such as McDonald’s.”

In this global overview, Glenny implicates Europe in McMafia’s success because it provides the market for illegal labor, drugs and illicit goods. This traffic uses the Balkan states as a highway, but other Eastern and Central European states play their roles, too, as gateways for criminal activity to enter the EU. Glenny makes it clear that, so far, EU crime-fighting strategies have failed to curb McMafia’s activities. Just last week, Enlargement Commissioner Olli Rehn confirmed that the EU may freeze millions of euros in aid to Bulgaria because of its government’s inadequate efforts to fight the organized crime and corruption which has flooded the country.

Preview Mosettig’s review of McMafia on the European Institute’s website.

The twenty-first century has proved to be a rude awakening for European higher education. Despite the EU’s pledge to make Europe “the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-driven economy by 2010,” only two European universities (Cambridge and Oxford) managed to crack the top 20 in a list of the world’s top universities that the University of Shanghai published in 2007 (the U.S. landed seventeen).

In light of the rankings, European officials, at both the national and EU levels, are being forced to reevaluate the structure, financing and objectives of post-secondary education. As recently reported in Le Monde, President Sarkozy has charged his Minister of Education, Valérie Pecresse, with the goal of placing two French universities into the top 20 of the Shanghai list and twenty into the top 1,000. France also hopes to use its EU presidency to establish a “European Shanghai” system of rankings that would be more relevant to European universities.

In the latest edition of European Affairs, news editor Pascal Riché sat down with Richard Descoings, head of Sciences Po in Paris and an active proponent of educational reform, to discuss the rankings and the problems facing higher education in Europe (and France in particular). In the piece, Descoings states that the poor European showing in the world rankings stems from three failures:

“First, the lack of decent funding in continental Europe makes it very difficult to attract very good researchers and to produce sound scientific or technological research; second, the lack of autonomy [for individual universities], which means freedom to set your own strategy; third, late awareness of the intensity of the international competition.”

Evidence for Descoings’ statement about underfunding lies in a recent spotlight by the EU Observer on education. Philippa Runner points out that Europe invests far less money per capita in higher education than America does - in the EU, an average of €8,700 is spent per student, compared to €36,500 per student in the U.S. The difference between America and Europe is even more prominent in France where every high school graduate is guaranteed a spot at a university and the state pays the vast majority (if not all) of the tuition. As Descoings explains, it is due to this public stake in education that the French government has had the power to set the salaries of professors, (mis)allocate research funds and dictate the schools’ directions.

Another critique of European higher education has been that its structure and qualifications vary too greatly between countries, making it difficult for students and teachers to move between them; Critics complain that this should not happen within a supposedly “integrated” EU. And beyond their bureaucratic flaws, some European universities have been faulted for preaching an anti-market bias in their classrooms (in France and Germany in particular) and for not making the employability of their students a sufficiently high priority. EU Education Commissioner Jan Figel recently complained that Europe’s problem is that it has a “200-year-long tradition of Humboldt system where the academic world is quite isolated from the outside world.”

The good news for Europe is that efforts to reform higher education are now underway. In 1999, nearly all of the Member States voluntarily agreed to the Bologna Process, an initiative with three goals:

• Develop a common system of academic credit,
• Design a common degree structure,
• Gradually converge toward a European Area of Higher Education.

Signatory states - which now include many outside of the EU - have already made substantial progress on the first two goals, creating the European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System (ECTS) and agreeing to adopt the 3-cycle (BA, MA, PhD) Anglo-American system of degrees by 2012.

And in order to diversify and internationalize its universities, the EU increased its efforts to encourage students to study under the ERASMUS program (European Region Action Scheme for the Mobility of University Students) and established an international counterpart - Erasmus Mundus - that creates the opportunity for joint post-graduate degrees at linked universities.

But problems and criticism remain. Some complain that efforts to internationalize schools will merely result in “scholarship tourism” - that is, students attending a foreign university, using its educational resources and then returning to his/her home, thus not “giving back” to the host country. And students at the Helsinki University of Technology claim that the Bologna Process turns universities into nothing more than “diploma factories” that encourage students to value credits over academic discussion and experience.

Commissioner Figel points out that educational reform will remain difficult because education lies firmly under national - not EU - sovereignty. He plans to work to persuade both governments and students to make university studies more “relevant” and to establish better links between campuses and science and business. With these initiatives, he hopes that European universities will be better able to prepare EU citizens for an increasingly global and competitive society.

The Irish “no” to the European Union’s modernization blueprint has fueled a new round of skeptical American commentary about Europeans’ real ambitions. “In Europe, a Slide Toward Irrelevance” was the title of an opinion piece in the Washington Post by Robert Kagan, a foreign-policy adviser to Republican presidential candidate John McCain. “The danger of this latest blow to European confidence is that our allies, including Britain, could gradually sink into global irrelevance,” Kagan wrote.

This view dwells on an alleged pattern in which European voters seem to shun opportunities to gain unity for EU action. Further, it appears as if Europe’s governments have been unable to put together the political clout necessary to match the EU’s economic weight. This new negative view among some analysts about the EU’s lack of ambition is the opposite of the prevailing concern in recent years in Washington about the risks of seeing the EU seek to become a counter-balancing power to the United States in international affairs.

Nowadays, according to Kagan, Europeans seem hesitant to gird themselves to face a growing array of challenges. The outcome of the Irish ballot has left the EU less equipped to deal with Western economic slowdown, the increasingly competitive Asian sector, mounting European dependence on imports of monopolized Russian energy, and immigration and assimilation issues. The Treaty of Lisbon – now in limbo – was intended to address a number of these problems, notably by restructuring the EU’s leadership institutions to provide a stronger voice on the international level.

Now the proposed treaty is threatened with unraveling. Ireland was the only country where it was put to a popular vote, and European leaders say privately that it would have been rejected in some other EU nations that chose to avoid putting it to vote by sticking to the formula of parliamentary ratification.

Such questions about Europeans’ deepest – and perhaps unconscious – attitudes are not confined to Washington. Gideon Rachman, a leading commentator of the Financial Times in London, seems to concur in Kagan’s skepticism about Europeans’ political will, writing recently that Europeans may actually prefer a kind of “nirvana” based on weakness rather than having to shoulder the burdensome responsibilities of a global political and economic power. Europeans, Rachman said, may ultimately want nothing more than to become a kind of super-safe Switzerland, with no real voice in world power politics.

Hubert Vedrine, the former French foreign minister, expressed similar questions about Europeans’ collective political will in an interview with European Affairs to be published next week.

“Of all the foreseeable poles in the multi-polar world, it is the European pole whose future is the most uncertain; I question whether Europe truly has the will and motivation to become a full player. Maybe Europeans will prefer becoming a huge Switzerland – a well-protected zone with a very high standard of living and great liberty, but without the responsibility of power. European public opinion seems to suggest a desire for this condition of being detached from responsibility.”

Kagan famously created the figurative comparison that “Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus” in his book Of Paradise and Power, which argued that Americans are more inclined than Europeans nowadays to see force as a solution to international crises. His subsequent book, Dangerous Nation, described America’s historical readiness since independence in the 18the century to undertake international intervention. (It was reviewed in European Affairs by James Steinberg, who has been named to Obama’s panel of foreign-policy advisers. Kagan has spent the last four years in Europe, and his return to Washington was marked by the publication of his new treatise, The Return of History and the End of Dreams. This book warns about possible new threats to global stability from autocratic powers, notably Russia and China: it will be noted in the forthcoming issue of European Affairs.

The European Parliament approved new EU-wide regulations with tougher measures against illegal immigrants – a population thought to number eight million (compared to an estimated 12 million in the US). The EU law, a “return directive,’ is intended to harmonize laws and policies on the politically explosive issue in all 27 member states by providing a common framework for each country’s national laws. A central point in the directive is a provision in which illegals that refuse to go home can be detained for up to 18 months and then deported – with a ban on them from reentering the EU for five years.

Parliamentary assent marked the final step in instituting the new set of regulations.

The rules in the return directive exempt asylum-seekers. But they apply to foreigners who have overstayed their visas.

Critics of the new measure brand it as an abuse of migrants’ human rights, arguing that the length of detention is disproportionate and unwarranted. But proponents retort that the directive will actually improve immigrants’ protection in EU countries where the laws currently allow indefinite detention of illegal immigrants. In a statement issued, the European Parliament said that “member states will be banned from applying harsher rules to illegal immigrants, but allowed to keep or adopt more generous rules.” It adopted the legislation as a step forward in EU integration that will help governments cope with the threat of a rising tide of illegal immigrants, notably from Africa. Human-rights activists warned that the new law will be exploited by some EU countries alarmed by inter-ethnic tensions as Europe’s demographic make-up shifts as Muslims arrive from the Middle East and Africa, and Eastern Europeans move west.

Flak has also come from Latin America about the new directive. Venezuela’s president, Hugo Chavez, threatened to disrupt oil exports to Europe over the issue. Some Latin American countries apparently are afraid they might lose remittances from their emigrants to Europe. The EU Observer notes, “last year immigrants in Europe, the US and Japan sent money back to their families in Latin America and the Caribbean amounting to just under €43 billion, more than the region receives from foreign direct investment or development assistance combined.”

The US is wrestling with similar problems of immigration without yet finding a national consensus. Many American business sectors depend heavily on immigrants, some of them illegal.

Analysts predict that immigrant labor will be increasingly important to Europe given the pejorative economic effect of its aging indigenous populations. Additionally, it has become increasingly evident that the EU lacks the skilled migrant labor it needs in order to stay competitive in the global economy. Europe needs help filling the void left by the highly educated workforce that has emigrated – primarily to the US. Using Census data on education and income, French economist Gilles Saint-Paul of Toulouse University explained to The Wall Street Journal that “a disproportionate number of European immigrants in the US were among the brightest prospects in their fields…the people who are most important for innovation and entrepreneurship.”