@Adventurer,
Western Europeans have it pretty good quality-of-life-wise, yeah.
It's hard to tell what the future holds there exactly. Part of Western Europe's wealth is due to its high status within the Anglo-American Empire. Europe spends very little on defense yet never has to worry about foreign invasion. We haven't had lasting peace in Western Europe like the Pax Americana basically since the peak of the Roman Imperial era, when all of Southern and Western Europe were largely free from war for a prolonged period (with the war occurring along the wilds of Germania, plus with the Picts and Caledonians in Northern Britain). This is a very unusual (and historically unsustainable) situation.
You can already see the grumblings from the Americans about not wanting to pay for European defense. Of course, not paying for European defense means Europe rearms, which means gains a lot more independence from the US. But that also means a much heavier burden comes onto Europe.
European industry has been heavily damaged, particularly over the last several years, with the energy price spikes plus tough competition from Chinese imports. Europe is really not good at creating homegrown companies anymore to replace those it's lost, either; the taxes and regulations around starting new businesses are stifling. That can obviously change, and you would think would be one of the first things to change, when Europe wants to start competing more... but then again you never know.
Right now the European elites are fighting against a popular upswell, with basically the elites wanting to remain tied to the Empire while the common folk want to be free of it. It's not clear to me what would happen to a Western Europe free from US imperial oversight. Would Germany reindustrialize? Would Spain and Greece climb out of the pits? Europe has a very high taxation rate already to maintain its social services; if you add military spending on top of that...?
I will say this:
Often, when a civilization goes into decline, the main power center remains secure from invasion for a good long while still, but its outer territories, which have generally been stripped of their militaries and turned soft and rich, become plumb targets for invasion. That is what happened to Roman Gaul, it is what happened to Byzantium's territories in Northern Africa and Anatolia, it happened in turn to
the Ottomans in the 19th Century. But that assumes an external enemy willing and motivated to invade.
But not always. Sometimes it's just "territory splits off the Empire and becomes independent."
Anyway, it all matters why you want to be somewhere and what the objective is.
If it is simply "enjoy good quality of life" and you conclude "quality of life in Western Europe > quality of life elsewhere", then the savvy play would be to remain in Western Europe unless/until it looked like that was changing.
The only real challenge comes if you need to put down roots -- start a local business, start a family, some other thing where you will not be able to easily move around should you want to. Then you need to be able to forecast 20-30 years ahead at least (I would say more like 50 if having children, because you want to raise your children in a society where they can count on being prosperous into middle age).
The trouble with Western Europe for that is the cloudiness about what happens when it frees itself from the US imperial yoke.
There are a lot of ways I can see that going. Some excellent! Some not so excellent. Some potentially dreadful.
(for my part, I would put better odds on an "excellent" outcome for a post-imperial Europe than one of the less-good outcomes
)
Chase
