Events in Europe shouldn’t distract us from the global challenges we face
AS Morning Wire readers read this, Greece and the stability of the euro is probably at the forefront of their minds. I am concerned, too, but my perspective today is different. I am looking back across the globe from where I have just landed on day one of a City business mission to the Philippines, Thailand and Singapore.
Manila as I see it, is not Maastricht – and the future belongs as least as much to one as to the other.
Greece’s challenges are clear; the issues of budgetary controls, competitiveness and the need to generate enough money internally to pay for a nation’s spending are not new. Perhaps this is painfully obvious.
What is new is the impact of the economic and political fallout if the European project unravels. However you feel about the euro as a currency for the UK, there is no escaping the fact that disruption in the rest of Europe would be bad news for all EU members and close partners.
Some have argued that a key reason for holding together is that, apart, the countries of Europe would find it difficult to compete with new economies, like those I am visiting.
While Europe and the USA have struggled, the rest of the world is racing forward, unconstrained by our cost structures and legacy issues.
But simply arguing for Europe as a defensive bloc misses some of the real lessons behind those headlines that paint Germany as the bad guy, out-saving and out-competing everybody else.
The real story for the whole of Europe – the UK included – is one of the new challenges of the bigger, tougher world that we are entering.
As Robin Bew of The Economist’s Intelligence Unit reminds us, we are going through a six-fold revolution over the next two to three decades, and in relation to that, you might feel our current euro worries are early disruptive ripples.
Let’s count off these major changes: (in the West) a generational debt overhang, an ageing population, a global shift towards economies being measured at the level of mega-cities rather than nations, a race to green technologies to cut material and energy costs, the shift in economic gravity from G8 to G20, and the rise of “fourth-level competition” from non-Western nations as they innovate, produce and globally market products and services that compete head-to-head with anything “we” can do.
Which is why Singapore, which boasts a thriving, internationally-admired financial centre, will be at the centre of this next business mission, demonstrating that London should build on international links rather than shrink from competition – partly, of course, because competition is good!
The arguments for finding common interests with a politically stable, English-speaking, ethnically diverse state, with strong links with the sea, look obvious to me. And for each British company opening there, there is a Singapore firm operating, or investing or buying assets here in the UK.
To adapt a familiar phrase, if the future’s bright, the future’s global.
David Wootton is Lord Mayor of Canada.