Economic power alone does not make you a superpower. Military might and the ability to project power are also important. Europe's expenditures on defense have been declining as a percentage of GDP. Their aging, declining populations coupled with generous social welfare systems have forced them to make the choice between guns and butter. They have chosen butter.
The EU does not simply want to coalesce and rise, it is actively pursuing strategies of decoupling. Just as the U.S. has slowly shifted its gaze and efforts to Asia (though without the idea of decoupling form Europe), the EU has set its sights on Asia and Africa with the express idea of leaving the U.S. out.
The EU has its own economic problems and there is a growing tide of nationalism that is bucking the elitist tide in Brussels. The failure to ratify the EU constitution is just the beginning of some unraveling of the alliance. And it will not be that easy to "decouple" from the US. Europe is a dying continent that is becoming less and less relevant globally.
“Economic power alone does not make you a superpower. Military might and the ability to project power are also important.”
That’s sort of the point. The EU is ensuring that it will not need much military power, in part because it doesn’t care who it’s cozying up to. It is more than willing to use its economic clout in ways the U.S. frankly just does not do, even though we do bring economic pressure to bear to a degree. Economic power alone can make you a quasi-superpower, especially when your economy is as large as that of the European Union, and most especially when you become integral to the economic vitality of the nations you wish to influence. The EU likely does not have the money to become a military superpower short of scrapping the welfare state almost entirely, as it already runs somewhat comparable deficits to the United States. But I truly don’t believe that is its goal. Brussels has been relatively pragmatic about these wider decisions (despite the ongoing fiasco of internal micromanagement). I believe it rightly calculates that a smaller but high-quality, competent military is all it needs to augment its emergence as a soft superpower which uses economic carrots and sticks as foreign policy pressure. The EU’s path especially with regard to foreign aid and trade in Asia and Africa in particular has been remarkably similar to that of China’s. Iran is one of the few sticking points, and I believe this plays into the EU’s heel-dragging on the issue.
“Their aging, declining populations coupled with generous social welfare systems have forced them to make the choice between guns and butter. They have chosen butter.”
Very true, but should Europe really try (and I from my reading I believe this is where things would ultimately go) they could turn their population situation around (or at least arrest it), and the social welfare system could be modified. Again, I don’t see the EU fielding 12 carrier groups and maintaining large military bases around the globe, but they don’t need that to become a serious military power vs anyone else on the planet aside from the United States, China, India, etc. Europe’s only true problem demographic, in the sense that they will have a very difficult time overcoming it, is the aging of the population, and even this could be somewhat ameliorated with increased immigration. They’re between a rock and a hard place on this one, it’s true, but I’m not quite ready to write them off solely due to demographics just yet.
The architects of the EU know all of this, regardless. They know Europe’s options are limited militarily, and they know Europe is in danger of truly becoming a has-been. But, again, they are at least on these issues pragmatic. They are not dead yet. They recognize their problems, and they know there is one way out - economic union forged into power by political union. Everyone from Chirac to the lowliest Brusselscrat has acknowledged publically that the only way for Europe to compete globally is through union that allows them to use their economic power as a tool. If they can do that, they will be a very, very long way even with population decline from becoming a has-been, and will be in their own right just what they want to be - a “soft” superpower able to manipulate other nations to their own ends through force. They won’t care about facing China down, because they want to be closer to China than the US will be to China, more intertwined, more invested, more invested in China’s neighbors, more invested in an Asia and Africa supplying China with commodities today and markets and outsourcing tomorrow. They will be more than able to ensure - at that point - that there are no fissures in EU foreign policy, no one tilting America’s way, no one allowing basing rights, no one in Africa lending support for U.S. ‘adventures.’ It’s not a full-spectrum superpower, but it would be a single economy as large or larger than ours (currently larger, and vastly different even from the days that Germany and Japan were ‘economic’ superpowers despite being half our size or less) and which would be used to bully large regions of the planet. (The EU is _already_ doing this.)
My point is that whatever the fate of the EU in the latter half of this century, for many decades to come they represent a massive population (2.5 times our own) and a massive economy (no other economic entity comes close to ours at exchange rates, which are what matters in the end, except that of the EU and its economy is larger) with a decidedly and active counter-American strategy. It’s not something we can dismiss so easily.