Participate Translate Blank profile picture

'Europe's painful fight against Asia' - British prime minister quoted in Polish newspaper

Published on

Asia-Europe

There's a great press service by the folks at 'eurotopics' in Berlin who aggragate European news every day of the week and translate excerpts into English.

Rarely, today there was a morsel from the Polish media in English, on Europe's relationship with Asia:

'Europe must urgently improve its competitiveness vis-á-vis the emerging Asian economies if it is not to lose its current leading global position, the former British prime minister Gordon Brown writes in an article published in the liberal daily Gazeta Wyborcza:

"Europe's stagnating economy is in the throes of the transition from our 20th-century western-dominated economy to an Asian-led world. Once Europe was responsible for 40% of the world's output; already it is down below 20%. Within a decade - if we do nothing - it will be little more than half that, 11 percent. We are, in fact, at the sharp (and currently losing) end of huge historical processes moving production investment and trade from the continent of the first industrial revolution to the new Asia. And the jury is still out on whether today's crisis is, in effect, writing its own penultimate chapter in a story that will be entitled 'the decline of the west'. ... A strategy for growth through radically reforming our competitiveness would have been - and still is - Europe's best way of meeting and mastering this challenge, for without such a shift Europe will become marginal to global growth."

See more on eurotopics and follow the links to the original article here