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"I love democracy. I think it's important. But I also think it's not a prerequisite to economic growth".

So commented the economist Dambisa Moyo in a 2009 interview with Forbes magazine. However alarming that sentence is to Western democrats, it nevertheless expresses something of the gentle frustration apparent to many observers of American and European attempts to respond to the current economic crises. For example, the grim stalemates reached during the American debt-ceiling negotiations earlier this year formed part of the justification of Standard and Poor’s downgrade of the US credit rating in August. S&P stated that "the effectiveness, stability, and predictability of American policymaking and political institutions have weakened at a time of ongoing fiscal and economic challenges to a degree more than we envisioned."

The US is, of course, a state that has a well established tradition of power being centrally focused and exercised at the federal level. The story for the EU is very different, and recent attempts by EU member states to mobilize a collective response have often arisen out of an incoherency of ultimate purpose. Frustration with the democratic decision making process has been only too evident within the EU itself recently, particularly as the partners of the usually piecemeal European project have needed and wanted to react more quickly than their silent behemoth of a union allows.

I hope that EU member states do decide to progressively consolidate resources in what is an increasingly multipolar world. If Standard and Poor had reasonable grounds to cite US institutional weakness in its downgrade, the same goes for Asian and US financiers as they look to the EU. Until the EU gets collectively better at forming and implementing economic policy, confidence in the economic status of the union as a whole, let alone the Eurozone, can only remain low. The general absence of Catherine Ashton, EU High Commissioner for Foreign Affairs, on the Asian continent does of course manifest a strategic vacuum in regard to the EU's wider Asia relations that must certainly be addressed. However, the fact that Ashton represents a union that is in financial turmoil, and which has great difficulty making decisions about internal economic interventions (let alone those elsewhere), means that even if Ashton were present, she would indeed appear less and less like a relevant player - namely, hailing from a union that doesn't effectively speak, or advocate, for its members.

The security announcement by the US and Australian governments that 2500 US marines will be stationed in northern Australia on a semi-permanent basis is a clear sign that the US is at the very least hedging its bets as to where the epoch changing events of the next century will take place. The response of the EU must therefore be uncharacteristically robust. That is, it must indeed make efforts to better engage with the region economically, diplomatically, culturally, and in terms of security policy. However, in order to do this effectively, it must first get its own house firmly in order. The first part of this will involve tighter political and economic union. In order to facilitate this, it is imperative that the EU also improve both its communication with its citizens as well as the democratic structures by which decisions are made.

New democratic structures must be developed by which EU decision makers are given a firm and unquestionable mandate with which to act quickly and decisively. This can only be an improvement on the recent situation, in which much financial policy has been formulated in response to erratic markets.

This will of course mean offering ultimatums to member states unsure about the extent to which they want to commit. However, once the EU speaks with a clear and united voice, it will speak as a union that has the largest economy in the world; it will speak as a culturally rich and diverse union; it will speak as the world centre for human rights, education, innovation, and finance. Moyo said she "loves democracy" and, of course, so too do Europeans; but like any asset, Europeans should be careful to make democracy work hard for, rather than against their burgeoning future.

Jack Bicker is an MA student in Philosophy of Public Policy at the University of London.