Europe Under Siege

The European Union is the world’s second largest economic organization with GDP in 2017 of $17 trillion, but it faces many challenges that ultimately will determine its fate. It is under siege from several directions – its continuing struggle to assist Greece in returning to a status of a normal member; a prolonged economic slump from which it is just emerging that has weakened confidence in the EU’s institution; challenges to the EU’s governing principles of open borders for the transfer of people, capital, goods and services; and the complex problems of breached external borders by refugees. There is also a growing threat to political institutions from the far right and anti-EU factions, and the threat that the UK’s Brexit referendum results may be passed on to other member states. All this as the EUs relations with Russia, on which Europe depends for about a third of its energy requirements, sour and become hostile again. The next ten years will be vitally important in determining whether the EU will survive as a viable, growing economic system, or whether it will begin to unravel into the collection of independent states it was before the EU came into being in the early 1990s. On the surface the threat is political – will the member countries retain the support of their populations – but the need for faster growth in the private sector may be the most important factor affecting the EU’s future.