Halting State, Charles Stross

"... And what we're facing is a real headache -- a three-way struggle to be the next economic hegemon."

Who is we? That's the question you're asking yourself...

" 'We, ' for these purposes, is the intellectual property regime we live in - call it the European System. The other hegemonic candidates are the People's Republic of China, and India. America isn't in play -- they've only got about three hundred and fifty million people, and once we setting up the convergence criteria for Russian ascension to the Group of Thirty, the EU will be over seven hundred. China and India are even bigger. More to the point, the USA went post-industrial first. Their infrastructure is out-of-date, and replacing it, now oil is no longer cheap, is costing them tens of trillions of euros to modernize. It's exactly the same problem Britain faced in the 1930s, the one that ultimately bankrupted the empire. But today, our infrastructure -- Europe's -- is in bette shape, and the eastern states are even newer. They went post-modern relatively recently, so their infrastructure is new as the shiny new stuff in Shanghai and New Delhi. So, there's this constant jockeying for position between the three hyper powers while the USA takes time out..."