EU is failing on growth, employment and competitiveness but still elites demand more power – Alex Story
In Blackadder Goes Forth, the 1980s sitcom set in the trenches of World War I, General Melchett tells Blackadder that Field Marshall Haig devised another “brilliant new tactical plan to ensure final victory in the field”.
Blackadder answers: “Would this brilliant plan involve us climbing out of our trenches and walking very slowly towards the enemy?”
Astounded, Melchett’s underling, Captain Darling, interjects: “How could you possibly know that, Blackadder? It’s classified information.”
Because, Blackadder reminds him, “It’s the same plan that we used last time and the seventeen times before that”.
“Exactly!” booms General Melchett enthusiastically “and that is what is so brilliant about it! It will catch the watchful Hun totally off guard! Doing precisely what we’ve done eighteen times before is exactly the last thing they’ll expect us to do this time!”
A similarly “brilliant new tactical plan” to rescue the EU from increasing global irrelevance was precisely what was on the menu at the Berlin Global Dialogue, a shindig for “leaders from business, politics, and academia” earlier this month.
The backdrop was gloomy news for the European Union and all its 27 member states.
Perhaps to gain a fleeting moment of attention, Macron, the French president, told participants that the “EU could die” with well-worn theatricality.
The organisation, he said, over-regulated and underinvested. The result: a continent a la derive.
Something needed to be done. Macron, surpassing General Melchett for asinineeagerness, told us about the rescue plan.
It would consist of more European Union and less national sovereignty.
Macron was just paraphrasing former European Central Bank president Mario Draghi’s report published in September 2024.
Indeed, as he presented his findings, Super Mario, as City dwellers like to call him, depicted the European Union as a relentless and hopeless regulation machine.
He explained, “as of 2019, the EU passed around 13 000 pieces of legislation, while the US passed 3000 and 2000 resolutions”.
“No EU company worth more than €100bn has been created from scratch – and 30 per cent of Europe’s unicorns have left the bloc since 2008 because they could not scale up on the continent”.
“That makes you think”, he added wistfully.
You think it would but, while his analysis surprised no one, his hackneyed solutions showed that no thinking at all was taking place.
Indeed, rather than proposing a plausible way out of the impasse in which he and his brothers’ in supranational faith have put the whole European continent, starting with an admission of failure, an effusive apology and a plan for a full reversal, Mario, in his Blackadder’s Lord Haig role, that month gave the world his Baldrick inspired cunning plan in a long-winded 400-page Future of European Competitiveness Report, proposing to double down on the same bet.
Blinded by certainty, his solution was more centralisation of power to Brussels aiming for bigger European Union financing, consolidated capital markets, and a further removal of national vetoes.
Macron only recited thoughtlessly from Draghi’s weary hymn sheet, bleating “more of the same” until the cows came home.
It was another version of climbing out of the corporate trenches to send Europeans to march slowly towards economic oblivion, taken out by nimbler, better supported and more focused US, Chinese and rest of the world competitors where global growth is taking place and in full swing.
The European continental failures are there for all to see.
In 1980, the European Economic Community had nine members. Its population was circa 260 million and its gross domestic product, representing around 28 per cent of global wealth, was greater than that of the United States by 12 per cent – and that a mere 35 years after the devastation of World War II.
By 2024, the European Union had 27 members. Its population nearly doubled to 449 million. Its gross domestic product at $19 trillion shrunk to two-thirds of that of the United States at $29 trillion.
As Arnaud Leparmentier wrote a year ago in Le Monde, France’s gold standard daily, the GDP gap between the European Union and the United States from 2008 to 2023 had grown to “an astounding 80 per cent”.
He wrote then that “Italy is just ahead of Mississippi, the poorest of the 50 states, while France is between Idaho and Arkansas, respectively 48th and 49th.”
Two of Europe’s biggest powers are poorer than America’s lowliest states.
Germany fares little better, and things have become worse over the last twelve months.
The European Union’s share of global GDP is shrinking by at a steady clip of between 0.25 per cent and 0.5 per cent per year. It won’t be long before the European continent represents less than 10 per cent of global wealth as mooted in a 2017 PwC report – becoming nothing other than an ossified monument to her former glory in the process.
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As early as 2012, Robert Jan Smits of the European Commission wrote in the foreword of Global Europe, that “the EU will see its share of world GDP fall by almost a half by 2050”.
The failure of the European Union to deliver on growth, competitiveness and employment are long standing and yet the EU elite is demanding ever more powers. Whatever the problems, the solution is always more Brussels.
Macron, Draghi and friends show us regularly that the European Union is unable to change course, in which nation states are stuck in transition between healthy European sovereign states and a union of humiliated and shrunken former greats.
However, the fear of dismantling the project, with the aim of creating a European superstate to rival the United States or China in geographical and market size or what Jose Barroso, former President of the European Commission, used to call an “empire”, is greater than the will to return Europe to what it was before the Single European Act and the Treaty of Maastricht: a successful, flexible, multi-currency, decentralised Europe of fully sovereign states.
Too much has been spent on this flawed project for invested parties to change course.
Their only option is to keep upping the bets until, briefs on their heads and pencils stuck in their nostrils, they jump off a cliff lemming-like in the hope that the fall into the abyss won’t be too long and the ground at the bottom not too hard.
It is we who are paying the price for their hubris, whether we, in the UK, are in the EU or not.
When Macron says the EU could die, all rational people can only add: “It probably should.”
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