Suchergebnisse

Any consideration of "The Europeanization of the Globe and the Globalization of Europe" must confront the problem of how to specify the spatio-temporal coordinates of the concept of Europe. When does "Europe" begin as a meaningful cultural, social and political expression and how far east from the shores of the Atlantic and the North Sea does it extend? In this paper I will begin with Charlemagne, which is to say around 800. It is at about this time that that the designations of Europe and European first begin to be used. Denys Hay (1966:25) cites an eighth-century Spanish chronicler who refers to the forces of Charles Martel, Charlemagne's grandfather, at the celebrated Battle of Poitiers in 732 as Europeenses or Europeans, rather than as Christians, and their opponents as Arabs, rather than as Muslims, a nice example of ethnic as opposed to religious identification of "ourselves" and "the other." In terms of space I will go not too much further east than the limits of the Carolingian Empire at its peak, which is conveniently depicted in the map provided by Jacques Boussard (1976:40-41). In this map it is remarkable to see how closely the empire coincides with the area covered by the "Inner Six" of the European Common Market, with the addition of Austria and Hungary. To the west the Iberian Peninsula was largely under Muslim control, with the British Isles under the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms and their "Celtic Fringe". Scandinavia in the north was still pagan as was Germany east of the Elbe, while southern Italy was largely under Byzantine or Muslim rule. Thus for the purposes of this paper I shall take "Europe" to be the sum of all these territories i.e. what is conventionally regarded today as Western Europe. This is purely for analytical convenience and should not be taken to imply any sinister desire to exclude peoples and nations further to the east on historical and cultural grounds from belonging to Europe. The paper will concentrate on Europe's contacts and trading relations with other parts of the world and their reciprocal impacts upon each other, in keeping with the themes of "Europeanization" and "Globalization". As the reader of this volume will note I will be using the latter term much more broadly and loosely, in the spirit of Humpty Dumpty, than David Sylvan would like us to do in his contribution. Concentrating on the external relations of this entity "Europe" with other economic and cultural units does not imply that I regard purely internal developments as necessarily any less significant in the overall evolution of the European economy.

It is by now a trite commonplace that we live in an increasingly integrated global economy, in which the barriers to the free movement of goods and capital, though not labor, are rapidly disappearing as a result of both policy reforms and the progress of technology in transport and communications. The rhetoric as well as the substance of national economic policy is now preoccupied with the problem of how each country can hope to survive and prosper in a world where capital controls and trade restrictions are off the agenda. Is the simple laissez-faire principle of simply doing nothing correct, or is there anything an activist government might usefully strive to accomplish? With the global pool of capital at any instant restlessly searching for the highest return, regardless of borders, a popular prescription has come to be the provision of public infrastructure and the training and education of the labor force. With these measures the nation can attempt to secure for itself a higher share of the global capital stock and thus ensure for itself higher wages and better quality jobs for its own labor force.

"The question of the size of political units never seems to attract among historians and sociologists the attention which it deserves. What determines why states and empires have expanded to the limits which they have historically achieved? What are the conditions under which it has been possible to maintain those frontiers? Why have the larger states normally broken up into fragments after a certain period of time? As a general problem—distinct from the specific question of why particular units have disintegrated—this is still largely unexplored territory."

"The resurgence of nationalism all over the world in the last few years can be said to arise, in every case, from a lack of congruence between "state" and "nation." While each of these terms is highly complex and controversial, we all know the main difference between them. The state is a political and administrative unit, claiming the "monopoly of the legitimate use of force" over all the inhabitants of a given territory. The nation, on the other hand, is an "imagined community," including the dead and the unborn, who are bound together by the ties of kinship, language, custom and shared myths that separate it from other similar collectivities.-7 Thus we can have a nation without a state, as in the case of the Kurds, or states that comprise many nations, such as the former USSR and Yugoslavia, and a nation divided between several states, as in the case of the Italians and Germans before unification in the nineteenth century, or the two Germanys and two Koreas of more recent history."

The collection of taxes, in any economic system, clearly requires the use of resources. In modern democratic states tax legislation is almost always controversial, and subject to extensive lobbying. In developing counties the wealthy often successfully avoid payment of taxes and the burden has to be borne by relatively impoverished rural classes, who are themselves not easy to tax directly because of poor record -keeping and difficulty of communications. In earlier times kings and princes often lacked the necessary means of direct taxation and were forced to rely on decentralized institutions such as feudalism. To convince the skeptical reader that the issue of tax-collection costs is neither trivial nor obvious, we pose the following question. What is the effect of greater efficiency in tax collection on the welfare of the tax-paying public? If the government is benign, taxing only to defray socially necessary public expenditure, a reduction in the costs of collecting these minimal taxes would clearly be a 'good thing'. What, however, if the state is inherently "predatory" in nature, as argued by Brennan and Buchanan (1980) and a number of others? In this case the state taxes not only to pay for public services but also to raise revenue for its own, possibly nefarious, purposes. Would an increase in the efficiency if tax-collection be undesirable under this alternative scenario?

The principle of laissez-faire, so closely associated with Adam Smith and the classical economists, should certainly not be considered an endorsement of anarchy as the ideal form of social order. Despite the theological overtones of divine providence in the imagery of the "invisible hand", Smith and his followers did not regard the market and the price mechanism as a spontaneous form of natural order that would prevail in any social group. Political organization in some form is necessary to provide the framework of law and order within which justice could be maintained and contracts enforced. Thus even one of their harshest critics, Thomas Carlyle, described their system not as anarchy, but as "anarchy plus the constable". The necessity of the "state" in the sense of the institution that claims a monopoly of the legitimate use of force over a given territory, or as Max Weber (1964, p. 154) defined it, for the proper functioning of "the market" and indeed of all forms of civilized human endeavor, can be traced back to the seminal influence of The Leviathan, the foundation of modern political thought laid by Thomas Hobbes (1651).

This paper studies some interesting implications of economic integration in the context of a neoclassical model of international trade, optimal public investment, and capital mobility. Due the endogeneity of the productive public capital stock, international capital mobility, while equalizing returns to capital, can lead to a divergence in the wages earned by labor. We also demonstrate that international capital mobility can set off an "infrastructure" investment boom. If the benefits of public capital spill over across national borders, governments in the Nash equilibrium spend the "1992" dividend on an excessive provision of public services, attempting to free ride on the public capital of their neighbors.