EUOBSERVER / INTERVIEW - Power is notoriously difficult to locate, quantify and date. It cannot so easily be measured as GDP or milk production or barrels of oil that remain under the ground or the effect on an economy due to sick-days taken the fortnight after an new edition of Grand Theft Auto is released. Both US companies and the Bush Administration lead an 'unprecedented' lobbying campaign to hold back the tide of EU regulation Historians brawl over the precise causes and date of the collapse of civilisations' empires. Did Suez deliver the definitive coup de grace to the British Empire, or should we avoid such exactness and rather talk more generally of the empire's near-bankruptcy at the end of the Second World War? Do we date the fall of the Roman Empire as 476, when Romulus Augustulus was deposed by Odoacer? Or as 395 - upon the death of Theodosius I - the last point at which the empire was politically unified? Or do we yet wait a decided few centuries later for the Fall of Constantinople in 1453 to hold funeral rites? Mark Schapiro - an American investigative journalist of some twenty years' standing and the editorial director of the Center for Investigative Journalism - believes however that we can date the eclipse of the United States by the European Union quite precisely indeed - 25 June, 2004. On that day, some 200 million Europeans went to the polls to elect their representatives to the European Parliament, consolidating the union's ascendancy. Europe's parliament leap-frogged the US Congress in size of population represented, with an additional two member states, Romania and Bulgaria, boosting the numbers still further to almost half a billion people in 2007. Even more critically, in 2005, the GDP of the EU overtook that of the States.
EUOBSERVER / INTERVIEW - Power is notoriously difficult to locate, quantify and date. It cannot so easily be measured as GDP or milk production or barrels of oil that remain under the ground or the effect on an economy due to sick-days taken the fortnight after an new edition of Grand Theft Auto is released.
Both US companies and the Bush Administration lead an 'unprecedented' lobbying campaign to hold back the tide of EU regulation
Historians brawl over the precise causes and date of the collapse of civilisations' empires. Did Suez deliver the definitive coup de grace to the British Empire, or should we avoid such exactness and rather talk more generally of the empire's near-bankruptcy at the end of the Second World War? Do we date the fall of the Roman Empire as 476, when Romulus Augustulus was deposed by Odoacer? Or as 395 - upon the death of Theodosius I - the last point at which the empire was politically unified? Or do we yet wait a decided few centuries later for the Fall of Constantinople in 1453 to hold funeral rites?
Mark Schapiro - an American investigative journalist of some twenty years' standing and the editorial director of the Center for Investigative Journalism - believes however that we can date the eclipse of the United States by the European Union quite precisely indeed - 25 June, 2004.
On that day, some 200 million Europeans went to the polls to elect their representatives to the European Parliament, consolidating the union's ascendancy. Europe's parliament leap-frogged the US Congress in size of population represented, with an additional two member states, Romania and Bulgaria, boosting the numbers still further to almost half a billion people in 2007. Even more critically, in 2005, the GDP of the EU overtook that of the States.
