WASHINGTON, May 14 (UPI) -- Europe is predicted to become a second-ranking economic force over the next 50 years, its share of world output almost halving from its current 22-percent share to 12 percent, a top French think tank reported Wednesday.
Over the same period, the United States is expected almost to retain its 25-percent share, which will by 2050 be matched or even outpaced by China as the world's dominant economy.
"The enlargement of the European Union will not be sufficient to guarantee parity with the United States," says the report from the prestigious French Institute of International Relations. "The EU will weigh less heavily on the process of globalization and a slow but inexorable movement onto history's 'exit ramp' can be foreseen."
Even that decline to a 12-percent share of the global economy is based on IFRI's assumption that Europe welcomes 30 million young immigrant workers from North Africa and the Arab world, to swell its thinning labor force. Europe's falling birthrate, along with rigid labor markets and early retirement, means that even the enlarged EU won't be able to keep up with U.S. and Chinese growth rates over the next five decades.
The IFRI report, titled "World Trade in the 21st Century" carries some sobering political implications for European policy-makers. Currently no match for the United States in military or political weight, the EU prides itself on being America's economic and commercial equal. But a shrinking economic weight in world affairs will render Europe even more marginal politically.
The report comes in the month that U.S. President George W. Bush is to fly to France for a potentially difficult G8 summit, grouping leaders of the world's leading industrialized countries. The Bush administration is still resentful of French and German opposition to the Iraq war, and U.S.-EU trade rivalries are sharpening fast. The United States this week brought legal action under World Trade Organization rules against EU import restrictions on U.S. foods grown with genetically modified organisms.
The report could strengthen those in the Bush administration who argue that Europe's stalled economies and feeble military strength means that it is less and less important to U.S. strategic concerns. And coming from a think tank in France, a country that has long sought to build up the EU as a counterweight to U.S. predominance, the IFRI report suggests that the United States has little to worry about and the EU has few cards to play.
The IFRI report suggests that Europe could delay, but not fundamentally alter, the process by creating a European economic space that would include Russia and former republics of the Soviet Union, along with Turkey and North Africa to create a larger trading zone. But given the political difficulties Europe currently experiences with large-scale Muslim immigration, and the resistance to Turkish aspirations to join the EU, it is far from clear that Europe's voters would agree to save their economic status by changing their largely white and Christian club into an increasingly Islamic entity.
Even if it does absorb 30 million new immigrants by 2050, the European population is still expected to decline in the years 2000-2050, from 493 million to 434 million. In the same period the population of China is expected to grow from 1.34 billion to 1.5 billion with North America -- the United States, Mexico and Canada -- rising from 413 million to 584 million.
The report also predicts that by 2050 Europe will have 30 member states; the 15 current members, the 10 to join in 2004, plus Bulgaria, Romania, Switzerland, Norway and Iceland.
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