As it faces fresh challenges, Europe should remember that neither economic integration nor convergence among member states was inevitable
The EU confronts huge challenges. These include accelerating innovation, deepening financial integration, protecting its security and maintaining the values of freedom, democracy and social welfare on which its society has been built since the second world war. None of this will be easy given the adverse changes the bloc now confronts, not least the political disarray in France and Germany. Yet, in confronting its future, it can build on great historic successes.
Mexico, the most important by far, has gone backwards: its real GDP per head fell from 35 to 29 per cent of US levels between 2004 and 2023, despite the opportunities supposedly afforded by its free trade agreements. The fundamental difference between EU enlargement and Mexico’s agreements with the US is that the former is both institutional and normative: it offers a route to becoming European. The US cannot offer that.
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