Globalization an the European Union

The phenomena and processes comprising contemporary globalisation trends can and should be seen in the context of the European Union, which is not only their object and result, but also their subject and perpetrator. The universality of these trends means that they affect – albeit to varying degrees – all countries and all national economies, but the relationships of these economies individually or within integration groupings are not identical. Identity or differentiation must influence the responses of national economic and social policies, provoke specific challenges and therefore also specific adjustments. There is generally consensus (although not unanimity) in defining contemporary globalisation trends as a historically specific form of integration of the world economy. This text considers that the process of integration of the world economy is an inevitable secular process. Just as local economies and markets once merged into national economies and national markets, so gradually national economies merged into the world economy, as witnessed at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. The further evolution of the social and international division of labour deepened this integration, and it took the form of globalisation trends in the second half of the 20th century. These trends seem irreversible (although history is capable of making unexpected turns), but their contemporary form is by no means necessarily determined and unchanging.