Europe vs. America's Operating System: Microsoft and the Superpower

Last week, exactly a year after the United States began an unpopular war against Iraq, European Union regulators announced that talks with Microsoft had broken down. On Wednesday the regulators issued an antitrust ruling and fined the company E497.2 million, or $613 million. While the timing was surely coincidental, the antitrust news offers an instructive analogy for how Europeans think about American power.

The diplomatic fight over the war in Iraq became a virtual boxing match between President Jacques Chirac of France and President George W. Bush. Today, it is as if that battle is being fought through proxies: Steven Ballmer, Microsoft's chief executive, and Mario Monti, the EU's self-described "competition minister."

None of this is explicit. Ballmer, previously under fire from America's own antitrust authorities, is an unlikely representative of the U.S. government. Nor is there reason to believe Monti came to his decision on the basis of anything but reasoned antitrust analysis.

But it is easy to see why Europeans might view Microsoft - a powerful behemoth led by a brash, imperious chief executive - as a metaphor for America under Bush.

Consider the two basic principles underlying antitrust - a skepticism of concentrated power and a belief in the virtue of competition. Both of these principles apply as much to European thinking about international politics as economics.

Europeans view America's concentration of power like that of a huge corporation with bottomless pockets and an army of lawyers. Much as Microsoft settles lawsuits with large sums of cash only to resume its aggressive business practices, America buys off its allies and opponents alike and then charges forward ruthlessly with its own agenda.

The economic analogy also explains Chirac's passion for multipolarity. The Bush administration's National Security Strategy openly parades its intention to "dissuade future military competition" by spending more on defense than all other great powers combined. But like a good antitrust lawyer, Chirac essentially argues that decreased competition limits choice. The United States, a nearly monopolistic military power, imposes its beliefs on the world. When Bush says, "You are either with us or against us," it is like Microsoft saying, "It's either Windows or nothing at all."

This view of America as a corporation that needs to be cut down to size is only confirmed by the Bush administration's position on antitrust. Antitrust has fared poorly in Bush's Washington. While it remains orthodoxy - it is still taught in economics and law classes, and the Justice Department has yet to close its antitrust division - it has been attacked by the antiregulation crowd, most obviously in the Federal Communication Commission's aggressive campaign for media deregulation.

In the context of the fractious debate about American unipolarity, Europeans must see the administration's laxity toward growing media consolidation as its own personal referendum on American power. So what if AOL-TimeWarner-CNN-HBO-etc. acquires another local television station in Boston or in Boise, Idaho? Who cares if America sets up another military base in South Korea or Central Asia?

Of course, true monopolies rarely exist in real life. Only in perfectly monopolistic market structures, where one company is an industry's sole player, is it Microsoft or the highway. Microsoft is not yet a true monopoly. It is the job of antitrust regulators to prevent it from becoming one.

And there are alternatives to Bush's "with us or against us" ultimatum for the war on terrorism. Plenty of countries, including America's key Muslim ally Turkey, were neither with nor against the United States in the war against Iraq, choosing instead to align with Chirac's Franco-German grouping that led the opposition to the war.

This is what Chirac has in mind when he speaks of a multipolar world - a political alternative to Washington's dominating product, not a military competition designed to counterbalance the Pentagon. Europeans recall better than anyone that true multipolar military competition led to an aggressive imperialism that ultimately claimed millions of lives in two world wars. Paris and Berlin have neither the resources nor the bad judgment to return to such a framework.

Economic disputes, particularly in the era of globalization, often carry political overtones. Like a divorced couple that squabbles over finances when they are actually thinking about the affair that ruined their marriage, Europeans and Americans talk trade or antitrust when the real issue is the legitimacy of American power.

So it is hard to believe that Europe's trustbusters did not take some vicarious satisfaction this week in poking Microsoft in the eye. If political multipolarity is a long shot, the economic version might be the next best thing.

Grant Mainland is a research specialist focusing on terrorism and trans-Atlantic relations at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government.