Is the economic decline of Europe worse than the last decades of the Qing dynasty? That’s a question posed by Luis Vassy, director of Sciences Po, one of France’s premier universities. It has caused something of a stir in Europe and China.

“The European Union has seen its share of the world economy fall from 30 per cent to 17 per cent between 2008 and 2025, a span of 17 years,” he wrote in Le Grand Continent, a European current affairs publication, last week.

“China covered the same distance between 1820 and 1870. In relative terms, we are declining three times faster than the Qing dynasty.”

If this had been written by a Chinese person, far fewer people would have paid attention. But as pointed out by Lo Wing-hung, publisher of the online Chinese-language Bastille Post and former CEO of Sing Tao News Corporation, Vassy was a big cheese in the European diplomatic corps, having served as chief of staff for both the French ministers for Europe and foreign affairs, and as French ambassador to the Netherlands.

His historical comparison inevitably upsets some people in Europe but amuses others in China. Is he predicting a similar fate for the EU? As you can probably tell from the essay’s title – “Penser la puissance, un défi intellectuel de notre temps” (How to think about power: an intellectual challenge of our time) – it’s really a call to arms. That is, it’s time for the European Union to relearn power politics rather than rely on international law, bureaucratic rules and regulations, and equitable negotiations.

“These figures reveal the new condition in which we must think and act: understanding nothing of what is unfolding beyond our borders is both an intellectual shortcoming and an existential risk,” Vassy warned.