Rosecrance’s argument brings to mind the analysis of the phases of growth by the economist Walt Whitman Rostow: after a country’s economy takes off, its growth rate slows because it has already made its easiest productivity gains through improved education and urbanisation. In the present case, the growth rate of western economies, which reached maturity long ago, will never catch up with those of China and India. Closer union between the US and the EU is the trump card. It will allow them to continue to set the rules of the game for newcomers, who are eager but profoundly disunited. And so, as at the end of the second world war, summoning up an external threat — then the political and ideological menace of the USSR, now the capitalist menace of Asia — makes it possible to pen the sheep (who fear a new world order run from Beijing rather than Washington) under the protection of the American shepherd.

posted 3598 days ago