A “hobbled giant”: Europe Losing Clout in 2025

pete quentin, 24 November 2008

A new report by the National Intelligence Council has given a damning “estimation” of the EU in 2025, including an assertion that the “Europe will not step up to the plate and take the lead.” (P4).
In the American report, which predicts the geopolitical landscape in 2025, the EU does not feature prominently. However where it does appear (most noticeably in the section entitled ‘Europe: Losing Clout in 2025’ p.32) the report is less than favourable about the EU’s prognosis, “We believe Europe by 2025 will have made slow progress toward achieving the vision of current leaders and elites.”

The report predicts that the EU will continue to be “distracted by internal bickering”, such as that provoked by the Lisbon Treaty and similar “protracted debate about its institutional structures.” However the authors crucially acknowledge the “democracy gap dividing Brussels from European voters”.
There is also a danger of increased internal variations across the European bloc as “Italy and almost all countries in Eastern Europe are expected to see their populations decline by several Percent”. As a result, EU politicians will have to battle to “keep working-age populations from shrinking in Western Europe” and as such immigration will remain a central concern in European Politics, whilst increases in immigration “are likely to heighten tensions”.
In the most damning metaphor of the report, the EU in 2025 is depicted as a “hobbled giant” which is “less able to translate its economic clout into global influence”. But event the EU’s economic clout is in danger because the economic cost of the EU’s aging population is predicted to reach a “crisis point” before 2025. The reports speculative “only possible fixes” to this crisis include “cutbacks in health and retirement benefits”; fixes which don’t fit easily with the generousity of the European Social Model.
A specific example of how the reduced economic clout of the EU will weaken its global position is that “health coverage will squeeze out expenditures on other priorities, such as defence” (p21). This point also makes recent calls for a European army, which could duplicate NATO structures and therefore costs, all the more unrealistic. As the report puts it “the EU will not be a major military power by 2025”.
The report predicts a world-order in which “by 2025 a single ‘international community’ composed of nation-states will no longer exist” (p.iv). However, the report is not alluding to the global replication of the EU model (i.e. supranational power blocs which integrate unstable nationalistic states) but instead it predicts the “transfer of global wealth and economic power … roughly from West to East” (p.vii) such that “new powers supplant the West as the leaders on the world stage”. Robin Shepherd of the think tank Chatham House, quoted in the Times notes that “This report illustrates in very objective language how America sees the world, and the EU is not very prominent.”
Even in instances where the EU is deemed to be fighting the right battles, it is fighting them badly. For example, The EU has shown perceptiveness in attempting to lead the way in tackling global problems with new technologies, such as tackling climate change through advancing technologies for increased energy efficiency. However the report cautions that the EU has “been too ready to sacrifice growth, and without economic growth, they have not been able to generate high-paying jobs”.
Despite its laudible ambition to advance iniatives to tackle climate change, the reports analysis that the “pace of technological innovation will be key” is a major problem for the already sluggish and divided European Union which, with its current membership of 27 states set to increase, could become increasingly less able to respond to challenges of a globalised world in which (as witnessed in turbulent financial and economic events of recent months) events move far and fast. However the danger of stalled technological development is immense because “Europe will remain heavily dependent on Russia for energy in 2025”.
All in all, the report does not provide a happy prognosis for the European citizenry of 2025. The National Intelligence Council’s “estimative” report predicts future geopolitical conditions by creating “fictionalized scenarios” based on national security “drivers” – an educated guess of sorts….let’s hope they guessed wrong.