The economic basket case called the European Union
Why it cannot hope to challenge American supremacy

Glenn Reynolds calls attention to an essay by respected historian Paul Johnson, "Europe's Utopian Hangover." Prof. Johnson points out that the EU’s main members, France and Germany, don’t really have the economic power to match their political or military aspirations:

The EU is a French concept and is still largely run according to French ideas. And France is the archetypal EU country. If you have a regular job in France, your life is, in theory, lyrical. You work 35 hours a week. You generally get four weeks of holiday in August, plus a further three weeks throughout the year, in addition to 11 state holidays. Full medical care is provided, even in retirement. Retirement age varies, but it is now typically 55. Pensions may be two-thirds to three-quarters of a person's salary at the time of retirement. ...

But Johnson observes that the welfare society there can’t be sustained by shrinking national economies. Hence,

The EU has discovered, since the autumn of 2001, that it has little ability to determine events because its armed forces are small, underfunded, obsolete and ill-trained. Apart from making trouble at the UN, France and Germany--those two former military giants that once made the world tremble--have been mere spectators.

I would add that the European welfare states are having to confront some demographic realities:

One study by William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution in Washington, predicts that the median age in the United States in 2050 will be 35.4, only a very slight increase from what it is now. In Europe, by contrast, it is expected to rise to 52.3 from 37.7.

The likely meaning of this "stunning difference," as the British weekly The Economist called the growing demographic disparity between Europe and the United States, is that American power — economic and military — will continue to grow relative to Europe's, which will also decline in comparison with other parts of the world like China, India and Latin America.

In case you haven't read WOC's post on 12 under-rated global trends, do so. One of the 12 is Europe's looming pension crisis, where we find the following tidbit from the UK Independent:

The implications of ageing on the European social welfare model, where the current generation of working people pay the benefits of the current generation of retirees, have been so widely recognised that there is a danger of "pension fatigue" overtaking electorates. The core problem is that welfare systems that were developed at a time when there were more than four workers for every pensioner cannot function when there are fewer than two. (In the case of Spain and Italy, there will actually be fewer workers than pensioners when the present 20-somethings retire.)

But that's not all. Not only is Europe's population aging, it is growing smaller. Either Europeans need to increase their own birth rate (perhaps, as it has increased in France recently) or they will need to increase immigration. But anti-immigrant sentiment is rising there.

Governments' suggestions to raise the pension-eligibility age are strongly resisted.

"In reality, a legal retirement age of 80 is what we should aim at," Erich Streissler, an Austrian economist, wrote in a newspaper article.

Fat chance. In fact, more than half of men across Europe stop working between age 55-65.

These facts are worth remembering when discussing whether the United States should woo Old Europe into providing substantial assistance to nation building in Iraq. Plainly put, Germany and France have neither the economic nor military power to back up their diplomatic desires.

Remember that last Spring France, Germany, Belgium and Luxembourg announced that they will form a new combined armed forces with its own command structure and headquarters.

France, Germany, Belgium and Luxembourg . . . vowed to press ahead with a full-fledged defence union, brushing aside warnings that the move would entrench the European Union's bitter divisions over Iraq and could lead to the break-up of Nato.

Increasingly, we are seeing that American security interests are more and more divergent from those of France and Germany. Luxembourg and Belgium are militarily irrelevant.) Meantime, the US and UK find that their common security interests are as strong as ever, and maybe stronger than anytime since World War II.

France and Germany cannot hope to mount a credibly serious competitive challenge to the US alone, much less the US and UK together. In fact, the formation of this new combined army is almost a purely political act, not really a truly defense-oriented one (assuming that the force is ever actually formed at all).

There is no common enemy facing France and Germany that makes such an arrangement useful. In fact, France and Germany really face no military threat at all. The USSR is gone and the only other significant land power in Europe in Britain, which is certainly no military threat to the continent.

The announcement of the new combined armed force was really a propaganda ploy against the United States. Of course we have no military designs against the continent, but the point is that Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schroder want to form a power pole in opposition to the US. They want to be perceived as major players, not aligned with the US, on the world-power scene.

But knowledgeable people aren’t fooled. All four countries of the new alliance together cannot hope to match American military spending or manning; they have neither the will to do so nor, as Prof. Johnson shows, the economic capacity. Together they have exactly one aircraft carrier, very little airlift (none of it strategic quality), no heavy bombers and land forces much less resourced and poorly trained compared to the US. Technologically their militaries are at least a generation behind the United States with no hope of catching up.

The entire defense picture in Europe is very confused, though. NATO is politically stressed as never before. It entire raison d'etre, the USSR and Warsaw Pact, is gone, leaving NATO a defense alliance with no meaningful enemy. Besides, NATO almost was fractured earlier this year when France, Belgium and Germany vetoed delivery of Patriot missiles to Turkey, a NATO member that requested the assistance as a defense against potential Iraqi missile attack when the Iraq war started.

The European Union has set up a military command structure that basically duplicates NATO’s except that America, Canada and European non-EU states are not included. Last February, England and France announced they would form a combined aircraft carrier battle group to be permanently available for offensive military action worldwide. However, England’s Tory politicos accused Prime Minister Tony Blair of using the scheme as a deal maker to convince French President Jacques Chirac to back upcoming offensive action against Iraq. France opposed the Iraq war anyway and since then nothing more has been heard of the combined carrier group idea.

My analysis: The United States will continue to prop up NATO with words and money, while in deed disentangling itself from it. A review of American basing in Europe is already underway, but will become quite serious before long. Philip Carter wrote that not only will the location of US bases in Europe change, so will the nature of the bases themselves.

Moving bases from one part of Europe to another is small potatoes. Instead, I think we're going to see a transformation of the nature of these bases -- from permanent garrisons to "lily pads" from which the American military can leapfrog abroad. Instead of maintaining large units in Europe like we do today, I think we're moving towards a model where we keep all these units in the United States, with their equipment pre-positioned in places like Diego Garcia and Eastern Europe, ready to deploy with them as a package to anyplace in the world. This would substantially lower operating costs, and increase the quality of life for soldiers who would choose to live in the United States (there will still be plenty of overseas opportunities for those who want to go). Moving out of Western Europe, with its gargantuan Cold War-era bases, is one step towards this new vision.

Quite so. At the same time, look for defense ties between the UK and the US to grow even stronger, with probably a lot more combined exercises in the years ahead. I'll even predict that the Iraq war was Britain's doorway to returning to true Great Power status. (But we won't know for a few years.)

by Donald Sensing, 9/26/2003 12:54:49 PM. Permalink |