There seems to be a pattern here. Yesterday, I was reading Richard Florida's Creative Class War in Washington Monthly. His point is that the current USA policy (restricting VISA for immigrants, the war on terror...) makes other nations become more attractive to mobile immigrant talents (the so-called creative class). That means: less creativity in the US, less entrepreneurship and down the road, less leadership. The reason might be Georges Bush but also a change in the country's political-economic demographics:

As many have noted, America is becoming more geographically polarized, with the culturally more traditionalist, rural, small-town, and exurban "red" parts of the country increasingly voting Republican, and the culturally more progressive urban and suburban "blue" areas going ever more Democratic.

So people do not ove to the US, they go elsewhere... Europe for instance:

But the bigger problem isn't that Americans are going elsewhere. It's that for the first time in modern memory, top scientists and intellectuals from elsewhere are choosing not to come here. (...) Cities from Sydney to Brussels to Dublin to Vancouver are fast becoming creative-class centers to rival Boston, Seattle, and Austin.(...) The world's leading airplanes are being designed and built in Toulouse and Hamburg, not Seattle

And today, there is a paper in the Financial Times about "Europe as a new role model for world".

Just when Europe is being dismissed as a power in terminal decline, Jeremy Rifkin advances a compelling case for its ascendancy, writes Andrew Moravcsik

Of course every country always feel to be in decline at a cerain point and the neighbor always appear to do better. But there seems to be a trend. Now sci-fi writer Bruce Sterling is not the only one to believe in Europe in angry wired columns. The reasons why Europe could be a model, as described in the FT are not on the same level as the one described in Florida's paper. It's more about the EU policy that tries to take into account a multi-lateral world and not a single direction.

Of course Europe is not doing so well, but there are certainly some interesting options, like the new emerging and multi-lateral governance in the EU. Would that be a model for the UN?