This article starts from the assumption that there are two basic scenarios for the future of an enlarged European Union in the world system. One is an enlarged EU that would be a global challenger, a scenario, which would amount to the repetition of the cycles of global challenges, this time on the part of the European Union. Such a scenario might sound very distant at the moment, both culturally and politically, but it would correspond to the logic of world capitalism over the last 500 years, re-analyzed in this paper. Although such a scenario is not applicable to the present EU-15 or, at any rate, an EU-15, enlarged by the two island economies of Malta and Cyprus, and the present 10 Central and East European accession countries, an EU comprising up to 40 nations of the third and fourth enlargement wave indeed would be a major change in the structure of the international system and could be driven by its own internal deficient dynamics, characterized by low innovation and high government spending, and by the pressures of the world system, into such a position. A large section of the paper is thus dedicated to show that a global challenge option - which might be implicit in the thinking behind the trilateral competition between Europe, America, and Asia - is not only not feasible, but that it is world politically dangerous. A second scenario is the European Union as the driving force behind a movement towards global governance, the only and reasonable alternative to the workings of the capitalist world system and its tendencies towards inequality and conflict.
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Paper provided by University Library of Munich, Germany in its series MPRA Paper with number
319.
Length: Date of creation: 2003 Date of revision:
2003 Publication status: Published in Schriftenreihe des Zentrums für Europäische Studien, Universität Trier 49 (entire).49(2003): pp. 1-133 Handle: RePEc:pra:mprapa:319
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