Comparative economic performance, inequality and the market-led remaking of Europe1

The economic integration of Europe, the collapse of Communism, and the rise of three rival economic blocs in North America, East Asia and Europe have significantly reconfigured the world, as has the struggle for hegemony most strikingly reflected in the neo-Conservative United States project for the expansion of American imperial influence. At the same time globalization, economic transformation and integration have been profoundly shaped by the ascendancy of neo-liberal economic ideologies not least through their impact on the relative weight of convergence/equalising and divergence/unequalising tendencies. The aim of this paper is to consider some of the implications of these developments for the new Europe extending from the Atlantic to Russia. Essentially it will deal with three issues. First it will ask whether Europe has lost economic momentum relative to its trans-Atlantic rival qualifying the earlier view that Rhine capitalism was superior to Anglo-American capitalism. Second, it will pay brief attention to internal development disparities within the European Union and ask whether the European Union is a catch-up machine in a world in which inequalities are frequently widening. Third it will consider in some detail the territorial and social impacts of transition in Eastern and Central Europe. Throughout attention will be paid to the impact of market-led models of development on growth and inequality, and the way in which a subjection of different parts of Europe to similar economic mechanisms, while in some senses making different parts of the continent more similar, also produces profoundly differentiated economic and social geographies.