Europe’s ‘proud empire’ is entering a cul de sac of history

Commentary feature. The author writes: 'the EU is giving off the strong historical whiff of an empire plateauing out into long years of relative stagnation, but with no external threat thanks to the west's victory in the cold war a generation ago. Birth rates, defence expenditures, bond prices, welfare spending versus wealth creation; everything that historians look to in order to gauge the health of empires suggests that Europe's fire has gone out'.