In Western Europe, which after all is the cradle of the European Union, we had grown accustomed to looking at the US and the UK with a certain amount of awe.
In certain respects they were seen as role models. There are historical reasons for that, such as the fact that the UK has an empire stretching from north to south and from east to west of the globe.
The US is not any lower down in the scale of things. There is the awareness and the knowledge that without the support of the US, first Adolf Hitler and then Josip Stalin would have overrun Europe.
After the war, Western European countries would not have been able to grow the economy without the support of the US.
Today, both the UK and the US are viewed from a different perspective. This explains why I question whether we have a new order of things in the world.
I doubt whether the US will be viewed as a role model anymore in Western Europe
The UK is still uncertain as to how it is going to exit the EU, three years after it activated the Brexit process.
Following the UK parliament’s assent to go to the second reading of the Bill related to the withdrawal agreement from the EU, Prime Minister Boris Johnson lost the vote on the timetable of the Parliamentary debate on the Bill, which will probably lead to a past October 31 Brexit. Theresa May, before him, had not fared any better.
This has confounded a number of governments in Western Europe. For them, the UK was a point of reference on a number of fronts, including the economy. This in part explains the success of London as a leading international financial centre, even though the UK economy is not the leading European economy.
Describing the UK as the tutor of a number of Western European economies may be a bit over the top, but that is the way it has been viewed by businesses around Europe. One doubts whether this view will still hold.
On its part, the US is certainly not making new friends, to put it euphemistically. The tariff war in which it is engaging itself with China, other Asian countries, and the EU has taken people by surprise. It is indeed very indicative that when, last week, the Italian President stated that the EU and the US should seek to find common ground to address the issue of the tariff war, Donald Trump retorted that these import tariffs are a form of compensation and not a form of retaliation.
The current unpredictability of the US foreign and economic policy is such that it has wrong-footed a number of EU governments. Therefore one starts to wonder what economic relations with the US will be like in the coming years.
I doubt whether the US will be viewed as a role model anymore in Western Europe. Maybe the US is itself not interested in having this role.
If there will be a new order of things in the global economy, at this stage it is difficult to forecast what it will look like. However, it will certainly have a big impact on future internaltional political and economic alliances.
Given the past traditions both countries have, there is no doubt that both of them have the strength to emerge successfully from what seems to us in Western Europe, at present, as a confusing situation.
On the other hand, I think there will be a change at the way we will be looking at these two countries. They are unlikely to remain our reference points.