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Comment by forapurpose | Hacker News Reader

The other real story, though a few years old now, is the reduction of the individual European powers from world leaders to second-tier powers.

The rise of China has made the first tier out of reach to countries with only 60-80 million people (such as the UK, France, and Germany). If the European powers combined - somehow, who knows how - then they would have the weight to be global powers and have more influence to move global affairs in directions the Europeans desire. With only 60 million people, the UK is destined to be a bit player.

One wonders why a neighboring second tier Eurasian power would want to disrupt European integration and the resulting arrival of a superpower on their doorstep. Stand together, or hang separately.

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Who is the superpower in this scenario? What is the analogy to hanging, in this instance? Is not being part of a superpower a necessarily bad thing? If so, why?

GP is refering to Russia.

Whether a superpower we can debate, but they still have massive influence.

> Is not being part of a superpower a necessarily bad thing? So long as you have NATO for defense and EU for free trade, then yeah, what is the difference?

Layers. NATO is a layer, one based on hard power. EU membership is another layer, one based on soft power.

With regards to power, no one is best served by losing power. If you lose power you will be unable to defend your best interests. If that's a good thing or a bad thing?

"second tier Eurasian power" = Russia.

"the resulting arrival of a superpower" = a stronger version of the EU.

Superpower status will be less relevant as oil becomes less relevant. Modern society requires sea lanes to the Middle East.

Once you have nukes, superpower status has a power ceiling. The US demonstrated that we can grind up a non-nuclear power like Iraq. We cannot do the same to any number of other tiny countries that have the bomb or similar leverage.

One wonders why any of this matters. I’d wager your average German wouldn’t want to move to the US, much less China.

EU - UK vs. Russia

Ukraine as the "trial" case?

Russia has a smaller economy than Italy. They have an disproportionally large military compared to their size, but this is running much closer to what they can sustain than European countries, which run a disproportionally small military.

To add to that, Russia's economy hasn't expanded much in real terms in the last 30 years. They've expended vast natural resources to slightly more than tread water.

Russia's GDP in the late 1980s was around half a trillion dollars. Today it's around $1.3 trillion. Accounting for even a small amount of annual inflation, they've grown the economy by perhaps 20% to 30% over 30 years. And that's coming from an extremely backwards Communist system.

>Russia's economy hasn't expanded much in real terms in the last 30 years

Russian GDP has dropped since 2014 due to sanctions. If you look at prior to sanctions, growth is more impressive.

From [1]:

GDP (USD billion) 1990 2014 --------------------------------- UK 1093 2999 India 317 2035 Russia 517 2064

Recent growth is much stronger [2] [3].

[1] https://www.google.com.au/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f...

[2] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-russia-gdp/russias-gdp-gr...

[3] https://www.focus-economics.com/countries/russia/news/gdp/ec...

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