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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favorite tales on this weekly publication.
The EU confronts enormous challenges. These embody accelerating innovation, deepening monetary integration, defending its safety and sustaining the values of freedom, democracy and social welfare on which its society has been constructed because the second world struggle. None of this will probably be simple given the hostile modifications the bloc now confronts, not least the political disarray in France and Germany. But, in confronting its future, it may construct on nice historic successes. The EU has, in any case, managed to enlarge and prolong its union over virtually seven many years (and longer nonetheless if one goes again to the European Coal and Metal Group, created in 1951).
EU enlargement took it from an preliminary membership of solely six (Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg and the Netherlands) to right now’s 27 (down from 28, alas, after Brexit). It isn’t simply enlargement that has been outstanding, however the extent of financial convergence amongst members. As Annette Bongardt and others famous in 2013: “One can broadly distinguish three phases in the EU convergence at the country level: 1) 1950-1973 — convergence of western Europe to US living standards; 2) 1974-1993 — convergence of northern and southern Europe to continental Europe; 3) 1994-2010 — convergence of eastern Europe towards western Europe. This convergence process has been broad-based and robust, with only Italy starting to diverge in the third period due to lower GDP growth.” Then, after 2013, the shock of the Eurozone monetary disaster occurred, which created important divergence, for some time. There has additionally been the sooner latest productiveness progress of the US within the latest previous, which I checked out final week.
Of the 9 international locations that joined the EU between 1973 and 2000, all however one (Greece, alas) had raised GDP per head (at buying energy parity) relative to the typical of the unique six by 2023. Eire was, by an enormous margin, the winner. However, given the position there of overseas direct funding, GDP was 30 per cent increased than gross nationwide earnings in 2023. Once more, all of the 13 international locations that joined between 2004 and 2013, largely from central and japanese Europe, raised their GDP per head relative to the unique EU six, a few of them by enormous proportions. Poland’s actual GDP per head, for instance, rose from 40 per cent of the EU six stage in 2004 to 73 per cent in 2023. (See charts.)
To supply a comparability with a rustic of an identical dimension, but outdoors the EU, Ukraine’s actual GDP per head rose from 28 per cent of the EU six common in 2003 to a mere 31 per cent in 2021 and down to twenty-eight per cent in 2023, after Vladimir Putin’s onslaught. Turkey, although outdoors, did effectively. But a purpose for that was the (fading) hope of membership, which drove coverage till the mid-2010s.
What has occurred to US neighbours is nothing like what occurred contained in the enlarged EU. Mexico, a very powerful by far, has gone backwards: its actual GDP per head fell from 35 to 29 per cent of US ranges between 2004 and 2023, regardless of the alternatives supposedly afforded by its free commerce agreements.
The basic distinction between EU enlargement and Mexico’s agreements with the US is that the previous is each institutional and normative: it gives a path to turning into European. The US can’t supply that. Quite the opposite, the US social pathologies I just lately mentioned pour over its border, because it exports weapons and imports medicine. This fuels gangsterism and devastates the rule of regulation. Given anxiousness over the immigrants coming throughout the border, why don’t People strive tougher to make the delicate international locations of this area extra affluent? But equally, the EU has accomplished too little for the Center East and north Africa.
EU success has been overwhelmingly inner. Even the Eurozone disaster of the 2010s has, regardless of errors made in creation and subsequent administration of the foreign money union, been efficiently overcome. Since 2020, all of the crisis-hit international locations have accomplished higher than Germany, together with Greece and Spain.
Neither the financial integration of Europe nor the convergence amongst its member states was inevitable. It was the product of clever statecraft, a few of it, mockingly, going again to Margaret Thatcher’s promotion of the only market within the Eighties. But now come new and even greater challenges. The safety supplied by the US will, at finest, develop into far dearer and, at worst, disappear altogether. Russia, backed by China, is a risk to Europe within the east. Ukraine, determined to benefit from the blessings of being throughout the EU and Nato, is at risk of being deserted by those that ought to know higher. The EU’s ageing societies are elevating fiscal burdens. Hostility to immigration is intensifying, whereas want for it’s rising. Not least, because the Draghi report demonstrates, elevating productiveness progress — by constructing the digital financial system, deregulating and deepening integration — is important.
A way may even should be discovered to type and implement a typical overseas and safety coverage. There may be additionally a must agree a considerable rise within the EU’s fiscal sources, by way of its personal taxes and borrowing capability. That, in flip, will take the EU again to the debates of the early Nineteen Nineties on political union. It is going to even be obligatory to scale back the flexibility of recalcitrant members, reminiscent of Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, to dam important widespread insurance policies. Many will say that each one that is unimaginable. However there should be some advantages to circulation from the elimination of British recalcitrance.
Europe mustn’t embrace a social mannequin that dangers delivering the US pathologies of untimely demise, mass homicide and stratospheric charges of incarceration. But radical modifications are important. The survival of a Europe entire, free and fragile is determined by whether or not Europeans have the bravery and the knowledge to rise to the challenges of right now’s period.
