A retrospective analysis of European integration shows how political factors and economic opportunities/constraints have interacted in the progressive design of an unprecedented form of federalism. Political reconciliation of former enemies (France and Germany), modesty of the first steps of economic integration (market for steel and coal, then of manufactured goods, prolonged by an extension to agricultural products), creation of an institution in charge of defending the common market and the general interest of Europe as such (European Commission), trial and error process in order to preserve the single European market in the era of financial instability (from EMS to euro), progressive building of political institutions in order to get legitimacy an approval by the citizen (European Parliament). Should the same strategy and criteria apply for contemporary economic integration processes, as observed in Latin-American (Nafta versus Mercosur) but also in Asia? Can an economic integration take place at the only intiative of multinational firms and is it possible to build new supranational coordinating mechanisms in the era of financial globalization? Paradoxically enough, regional integration is more necessary than ever but it has never been so difficult to achieve. The paper concludes that, given the current instability of global finance, the promotion of regional monetary stability and an adequate management of short term capital flows might be the required starting points for contemporary integration processes.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Did you know? All full texts are decentralized with the publishers, none reside on this server, thus making it possible to offer this service for free to all parties.