Six months after stepping down as European Commission President,Jose Manuel Barroso claims he no longer has to be careful about what he says. But that has not stopped him from being an incurable optimist about Europe’s ability to wrest global economic hegemony from the US and China.

When Barroso took his first term as president in 2004, the EU had 15 member countries. Today it has 28 but Barroso spent much of his second term, fighting against the development of the 2008 financial crisis into an economic, social and political crisis that ultimately threatened to destroy the post-war European dream and could still do so.

Back in June 2012 Barroso invited to the European Commission (EC) the chief economists of the main European and American banks and was told that most of them expected Greece to be out of the European Union (EU) by the end of that year and saw a 50 per cent chance of an “implosion” of Europe.

“We said consistently that we were going to show the resilience of the EU and the eurozone,” he told the World Travel & Tourism Council’s Global Summit in Madrid. “Today we have 19 countries in the euro – more than were even members of the EU ten years ago. So the question I want to ask is: can you speak about decline when an organisation is expanding as it is. Europe is still the most important economy in thr world, by far the biggest trade bloc in the world and the biggest power in terms of tourism and travel. So Europe is an economic giant and I think we can be confident about Europe.”

Europe is in what Barroso describes as “a post traumatic situation but there are at last signs of recovery. Indeed the IMF sees Spain growing by 2.5 per cent this year and growth of at least 2 per cent across most of the other EU economies.

Eternal optimist: Former European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso

Small But Sustainable

“You can say that’s too small but it’s sustainable,” said Barroso. “Before, we had growth that was unsustainable, driven mainly by high levels of debt. There’s been a revision. reform is ongoing and with the notable exception of Greece, growth is coming back”