In 2006, the big 5 Western European states (UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain) had a similar share of global GDP PPP to the US, double China's, and 4x India's. In 2026, their share is now half of the US and China's and is comparable to India's.
The "rules based" model that the EU promulgated only worked in the 1990s-2000s when we lived in a unipolar world where the US and the EU represented the bulk of global production and those 5 countries had the economic power to successfully negotiate or pushback against the US.
The rise of Asian economies, EU expansion leading to the inclusion of hybrid regimes like Hungary and Poland under PiS who monkeywrenched procedural work within the EU, and the EU+UK's lost decade due to the Eurozone Crisis and Brexit degraded their comparative power.
Additionally, countries like the US, China, Russia, India, Japan, South Korea, etc also began strategically leveraging FDI in order to negotiate with subsets of EU states unilaterally, which reduced the EU's aggregate negotiating power.
Edit: Can't reply
> Why does being rules-based have anything to do with it?
Access to markets and capital along with defending IP are predicated on mutually agreeing to those terms. When the EU (then including the UK) was at it's peak in the 2000s, it was able to drive favorable IP protection and market access agreeements to help underwrite innovation. The European "rules-based" system also eschewed large scale subsidized industrial policy, viewing these as potentially accelerating trade wars.
This is less true now in the 2020s, with countries like the US, China, Japan, India, and others adopting large scale industrial policy and subsidy programs (IRA/CHIPS, Make in China, GX 2040, PLI) and co-opting pillars of European industry like Volkswagen, BMW, Stellantis, Renault, ZF, Bayer, Sanofi, GSK, Dassault, Airbus, Leonardo, Safran, Rolls Royce, Siemens, EDF, TotalEnergie, etc to join these programs on their terms and having them lobby for their interests in Brussels.
> I think the main "culprit" is energy
Industrial energy prices in Europe only began spiking in 2022 following Russia's escalation of it's invasion in Ukraine (it started back in 2014). The trends I mentioned began all the way back in 2007-12 when energy prices were at all time lows.
Why does being rules-based have anything to do with it? Innovation industries, especially software, have been the massive driver of GDP growth globally since the 1990s. The US and China have been excellent at nurturing those industries domestically (China with its heavy hand of government, the US with the rawest capitalistic structures to support innovation investments) while Europeean countries haven't.
I think the main "culprit" is energy. Europe has had expensive energy prices for decades. Even poor countries in Europe pay 2-3x more for gasoline than Americans do (because of taxes - The EU requires a minimum of $1.47 of excise taxes per gallon of gasoline). I think these energy prices compound to a lot of manufacturing and business not manifesting in Europe.
All the other stuff matters too, but it's crazy to think that paying 2-3x more for fuel wouldn't show up as a negative influence on the economy somewhere. This is particularly the case because Europe didn't go heavily into nuclear and it is one of the worse places for solar power.
Does your partial amnesia also affect the part where US tech companies such as Facebook actively embedded engineers within political campaigns who then ran fake news campaigns for extreme candidates, resulting in the two-time refusal of US voters to vote for a woman?
There was also significant Facebook involvement in fake news concerning Brexit, Rohingya genocide, anti-EU and anti-Ukraine sentiment.
Now that we have established that US tech workers have significantly harmed free people and societies in various countries, I have to point out that also your reasoning is all wrong.
Brexit, Hungary, and Trump are not an example that the EU "rules based" model is not working, quite the opposite. When the EU flourishes as a free society due to free trade between people with extremely different cultural backgrounds, the people living under autocrats notice that this is could also be an option for their own future.
Due to this fact, the EU has been under massive attack by autocrats for quite some time, and workers at US tech companies have played a vital role in amplifying these attacks.
