Hey, Living isn’t Everything when it Comes to, um, Living...

Economic power is not the only criterion for global power. What matters is how political systems respond to new crises. And from this perspective, the EU is still in with a chance, writes Dutch historian Dirk-Jan van Baar. Excerpts.

Writes Dirk-Jan van Baar in de Volkskrant, ignoring THE LAST TWO YEARS OF EUROPEAN FISCAL CHAOS AND LACK OF LEADERSHIP.

Add to this rthe oft-used argument that political power is not the only criterion for global power and that military power is not the only criterion for global power, and you get the perfect rationalization for 500 million of the world’s richest people free-riding on the backs of the rest of humanity.

Again.

Taking passivity and inaction to a higher, more noble and superior plane, he goes on with a predictable related theme of somehow comparing Europe to the US, for which there is no rational basis to do so in this context:

The American president is behaving accordingly : he thinks America must get its own economic house in order before embarking on further foreign interventions. If even the most powerful man in the world thinks that Washington has taken on too much, then one can tend to agree with historian Paul Kennedy (who wrote on the theme in his 1987 work The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers) that America is suffering from imperial overstretch.

The search for analogues and examples, I suppose, must go on.