The Emerging World Order and European Change

Abstract

Transformations in the global political economy of the 1970s and the 1980s, including the momentous events in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, have created a set of conditions now linked to a renewed impetus towards the economic and political unification of the EEC. Beyond this immediate horizon, discussions are under way concerning the prospects of a future enlargement and deepening of the EEC's geographical, social, economic and political potential. This might, in the long-term, lead to the possibility of Europe, understood as a collection of states, coordinated through the institutions and processes of the EEC, becoming a more coherent politico-economic entity and actor in the emerging world order, with sufficient capability and resources to offset American and Japanese power in the global political economy, a proposition that I would wish to challenge here. However, looking at the question of Europe in this way abstracts from many of the key social forces which are simultaneously integrating and disintegrating sets of socio-economic structures and institutions, not just in Europe, but world wide. Thus what seems to be emerging is a recomposition of dominant socio-economic forces and associated political forms within the global political economy, and a corresponding fragmentation and division of many other social forces, reflecting an intensification of global inequality, and a restructuring of global power relations.