The ascendancy of the European Union to world power status is reflected in its power to dictate trade regulations worldwide, says investigative journalist Mark Schapiro in his recent book, Exposed.

The EU Observerreported,

Power is notoriously difficult to locate, quantify and date. … Historians brawl over the precise causes and date of the collapse of civilizations’ empires. …Mark Schapiro … believes however that we can date the eclipse of the United States by the European Union quite precisely indeed—25 June, 2004.On that day, some 200 million Europeans went to the polls to elect their representatives to the European Parliament, consolidating the Union’s ascendancy. Europe’s parliament leapfrogged the U.S. Congress in size of population represented, with an additional two member states, Romania and Bulgaria, boosting the numbers still further to almost half a billion people in 2007. Even more critically, in 2005, the gdp of the EU overtook that of the States.

“The EU is now the single largest trading partner with every continent except Australia,” Schapiro writes in Exposed. In his book, says the EU Observer, Schapiro “considers the massive global economic power shift that has occurred as a result of these changes. He looks at how companies and state governments in the U.S., China and the rest of the world increasingly take their legislative lead—whether willingly or dragged kicking and screaming—on issues such as environmental standards, health and safety regulation and consumer protection not from Washington, but Brussels” (emphasis ours throughout).

In an interview with the EU Observer, Schapiro discussed this noteworthy yet underreported trend:

Globalization is taking hold very deeply, so U.S. corporations along with other companies are increasingly reliant on foreign markets to sustain their profitability. For many American firms, that means Europe. In order to hold on to access, how do they react at the same time when Europe starts saying: “Take the chemicals out of cosmetics! Take the chemicals out of your electronics! Take the phthalates out of toys!”Nothing close to this had ever happened before to American companies. Reaction number-one has been to launch a massive transatlantic lobbying campaign to try to prevent these measures from happening. … [But] “How do you do lobbying in the EU?” they had to find out. “How do you lobby the European Commission, members of the European Parliament? How does it work?” These lobbyists flooded over here and their first reaction was to try to do whatever they could to stop the Europeans.

But American lobbyists have discovered that their many complaints have fallen upon deaf ears.

It used to be that the U.S. could go to any foreign capital and basically say: “Look, we don’t really like what you’re doing, so change it here and there.” The U.S. had huge influence in terms of foreign governments, but now for the first time, there were people saying: “Wait a minute, what are you doing here? We’re talking about what we’re doing to protect Europeans. We’re not here to worry about your problems as an American company.”

Europe’s policy of regulatory imperialism is a critical trend worth watching. History offers a powerful lesson: The nation setting global economic standards and controlling the world economy possesses the political and strategic power to shape the world. To learn more about this trend and its prophetic import, read “Bending the World to Its Rules” and “EU Ruling Trumps the World.”