https://i.imgur.com/PwGHIWH.png
Countries with negative or near-negative per capita growth since 2007 (as of the end of 2018) in nominal terms:
Denmark, Sweden, Netherlands, France, UK, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Austria, Finland, Belgium, Greece
The sole positive result? Germany, a mere 6-7% GDP per capita growth over a decade. In non-inflation adjusted terms, since 2007. Inflation adjusted those other nations have seen that much larger of a contraction.
That's a recipe for disaster in Europe.
How long can most of Western Europe continue to contract economically while social demands increase with aging demographics? It's fundamentally why France is rioting for these past two months, they're being smashed between high taxes, negative growth, and negative quality of life progress.
The UK's GDP per capita has contracted by 20% since 2007 just in nominal terms. Throw a tiny bit of inflation onto that, and you're looking at the UK losing 1/3 of its economy in dollar terms over ~11 years or so. Continue that process for another decade and the result is predictable: people will freak out in increasingly dramatic ways.
Each and every country would face the same problem, separately and with interesting various plans bbut no negotiation position compared to China or Russia or US. Even Germany or France alone would have serious problems negotiating with these economic powers.
Positive action like promoting internal market, good trade deals, subsidizing and making it easier to run manufacturing again, rebalancing from pure services. Pooling resources. It is what EU all offers much better than any individual country could... even then it it's just not enough.
You cannot outmaneuver 3/4 of the planetary manpower ever without a serious technological gap, and that is closing or already has closed. Even with Russian force and resources they will ultimately fail to dominate. US with their remaining tech lead is already failing...
>a large scale conflict is more likely or a west that isn't as united and can't respond as well to aggression from Russia.
The default foreign policy consensus appears to be that anything Russia does is "bad" and should be opposed, perhaps militarily. This is nonsense, and really is a "Cold War mindset" that is not applicable in a post-9/11 environment.
Freedom of expression/speech, free press, representative democracy, independent court system, individual (women/minority) rights. There are other things like not being a religious theocracy, but I think the first few cover the most general important pieces.
> you make it sound like it was large scale cyberwar, which it wasn't
Evidence suggests it was large scale and directed by Putin through the Russian IRA [1], though it was likely more effective than even they expected (and more of a disinformation campaign than a cyber war).
"But it quickly became clear that the Russians had used a different model for their influence campaign: posting inflammatory messages and relying on free, viral spread. Even by the vertiginous standards of social media, the reach of their effort was impressive: 2,700 fake Facebook accounts, 80,000 posts, many of them elaborate images with catchy slogans, and an eventual audience of 126 million Americans on Facebook alone. That was not far short of the 137 million people who would vote in the 2016 presidential election."
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/09/20/us/politics/r...
> Russia would now start a global war in Europe that would very likely go nuclear because ... the West isn't "standing up to it"?
I'm not suggesting they'd start a global war, but they're targeting NATO allied countries by influencing elections towards instability. Maybe it's just to free up access to their funds by trying to get rid of the Magnitsky Act [2], but if they wanted to more aggressively take over Ukraine or do something else hostile increased global instability might lead to something larger.
Obviously these things are hard to predict, but only a couple years prior to WWI people said the connected world economy made large scale conflict impossible. [3]
"A 1910 best-selling book, The Great Illusion, used economic arguments to demonstrate that territorial conquest had become unprofitable, and therefore global capitalism had removed the risk of major wars. This view, broadly analogous to the modern factoid that there has never been a war between two countries with a MacDonald’s outlet, became so well established that, less than a year before the Great War broke out, the Economist reassured its readers with an editorial titled “War Becomes Impossible in Civilized World.”"
> This is nonsense, and really is a "Cold War mindset"
It's not that anything they do is bad, but if you read about the people in power there from those that have interacted with them like Bill Browder, Gary Kasparov, and others - (in addition to the Russian government's current behavior) it suggests that they're not a government interested in rule of law.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnitsky_Act
[3] http://blogs.reuters.com/anatole-kaletsky/2014/06/27/world-w...
It's worth noting that both Serbia and Ukraine had McDonalds. Hell, even Panama had a few when the USA invaded them.
The west and what it stands for is threatened both directly (Russian involvement in attacking elections both in the US, in the UK with brexit, and elsewhere) and indirectly (rise of authoritarian power/censorship in China). This is ignoring smaller, but still violent direct threats like ISIS.
With the remaining powerful moderates in Europe struggling (Merkel, Macron) and extremists waiting at the sidelines to be elected, increased nationalism and division from brexit could lead to more instability creating a situation where a large scale conflict is more likely or a west that isn't as united and can't respond as well to aggression from Russia.