The European project is approaching a tipping point. Macron: “the EU could die.”
A combination of political paralysis, external threats and economic malaise is threatening to end the European Union’s ambitions to become a global force in its own right — pushing member states toward defending their own interests instead.
France’s europhile president has surrendered veto power over his government to the far right; Germany’s biggest carmaker is talking about shuttering factories at home for the first time ever; US tech giants are turning their backs on the European market because of its new restrictions on artificial intelligence.
Macron argues that the loss of cheap Russian fossil fuels since the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and the advent of US President Joe Biden’s aggressive subsidy-intense industrial policy, mark a rupture with the old model that allowed Europe’s export-based economies to flourish.
It’s not just euroskeptics like Hungary’s Viktor Orban, a perennial thorn in the bloc’s side.
Officials in core European countries are starting to view the EU as an obstacle they need to get around — rather than the source of prosperity and protection it has represented until now.
Bloomberg 13 October 2024
Macron like many Europeans acknowledges the issues but is unwilling to take action to address them
Macron recently issued another of his trademark cris de coeur about Europe’s future, warning that the European Union has about two years to fix itself or else get creamed economically and geostrategically by the U.S. and China.
Who knows, maybe one of these days he’ll act like he really means it.
“We are overregulating and underinvesting,” Mr. Macron said last week in Berlin. “In the two or three years to come, if we follow our classical agenda, we will be out of the market.”
Not to put too fine a point on it, but he added that “the EU could die.”
Europe’s curse is that too many of its leaders fail to do what they know they must. Why this should be so is the great political-economy mystery of the age, harder to answer than you might think.
Joseph C. Sternberg Wall Street Journal 10 October 2024
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