Is Europe at a crossroad?

“If you think of a world in which geopolitical tensions are going up and in which you have to rearm, being the slow grower is not good news. You are drifting down the economic league table,” Sander Tordoir, a senior economist at the Centre for European Reform (CER) think-tank, told Euractiv. 

Tordoir also points to the US’s continued dominance of the global financial system and the EU’s large trade surplus with America, as other examples of Europe’s “huge” reliance on the US.

“On both finance and on trade, we are definitely heavily dependent on America,” said Tordoir.

“I don’t know if I would use the phrase ‘vassal’. But there are really huge dependencies,” he added.