NEW YORK, December 16. /TASS/. The European Union is on the decline and has been gradually losing its influence on the global stage, Oxford University lecturer and political analyst Anton Jager wrote in an op-ed for The New York Times.

According to Jager, negotiations on a Ukrainian settlement clearly indicate that the European community has been "steadily reduced to a second-rate participant in world affairs." Brussels itself no longer tries to deny that it is falling to the background. Former European Central Bank President Mario Draghi made a similar acknowledgement last year. He bluntly listed the laundry list of problems facing the European economy, from lack of competitiveness to lagging productivity, Jager recalled.

"Economic growth across the continent, long anemic, has dwindled toward nought, with even Germany’s industrial behemoth slumping. Dynamism has disappeared, replaced by painful dependencies: Europe’s technology comes from America, its critical minerals from China," the author states.

European politicians don’t seem to have a viable solution to these problems, the analyst believes. "The far right offers a familiar prescription: a racial cordon around the continent. Europe’s center, in turn, vaguely gestures at a strategy of renewal through remilitarization and technological advances. The left, for its part, either rails against European overreach or welcomes the continent’s retreat," Jager wrote.

In the past decade, the hope that the European Union could achieve some sort of military or financial independence from the United States "has proved illusory," Jager said. Instead, the continent "has slid into ever deeper dependence" on the US, which will accelerate rather than halt the decline, lamented by EU leaders. Large-scale acquisitions of US weapons and energy resources, for example, will not reinvigorate European industry into the global engine it once was, the political analyst concluded.