> > Europe was born in June 2000. Of course, we have been talking about
>> Europe for 50-odd years now. But heretofore Europe has meant western
>> Europe, not Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals, dear to both Charles
>> de Gaulle and Mikhail Gorbachev. Hitherto, the Germans would not really
>> hear of it because of their post-1945 fidelity to the United States.
>
>For someone who invented world-systems theory, I always
>wondered why Wallerstein's vision of the EU is so, well, national
>(talking about "the Germans", "the French", "the Americans", as if there
>were still national capitalisms which corresponded to the term). The EU
>was born in 1990 when Eastern Europe finally put Marxism into practice,
>tossed out their one-party states, and forced the doors of Fortress Europe
>open for good, the general idea being, "Pay now for a Continental
>welfare state, or pay later for 40 million refugees". It's true the new
>metropoles are consolidating rapidly, but we need more in-depth analysis
>of why and how this is happening. Anyone know if the Binghamton folks are
>working on this?
>
>-- Dennis
Yes! He does not seem to have learned the extent to which the
neo-liberal program is successfully advancing. Bind all prosperous
market economies of the world into one single bloc in which the
prosperous development of all is a precondition for the prosperous
development of each. Then embrace-and-extend as countries that adopt
Marshall Plan politico-economic institutions are brought into the
core as they receive massive amounts of technology transfer from
core-located firms, and countries that remain outside the core strive
to adopt political democracy, free trade, and market economics.
Yesterday the United States! Today the OECD! Tomorrow the World! (It
ain't Utopia, but it's the only game in town--unless you think, like
Lars-Erik Neilsen in the _New York Review of Books_, that Mexicans
ain't fit to assemble staplers and should go back to the subsistence
agriculture that they came from)
Brad DeLong
--
Professor J. Bradford DeLong
Department of Economics, #3880
University of California at Berkeley
Berkeley, CA 94720-3880
(510) 643-4027; (925) 283-2709 voice
(510) 642-6615; (925) 283-3897 fax
http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/
