The European Union at 50. What Europe can learn from Latin American social science after 5 decades of European integration. An essay in honor of Osvaldo Sunkel
ABSTRACT:
One of the most famous pieces of Latin American scholarship, the article Sunkel,
Osvaldo 1973 “Transnational capitalism and national disintegration in Latin
America.” Social and. Economic Studies 22 (1): 156–171, published originally in
1969 and having appeared in many translations and editions around the globe
ever since, proposed the still provocative thought that transnational
investment and integration might go hand in hand, under certain
conditions, with an increasing relative social polarization between rich
and poor in the host countries of the evolving transnational system and
on the international level.
In 1998, the present author published an essay at the electronic archive of the
University of California at Riverside, which was – as a reference to Osvaldo
Sunkel - entitled “Transnational integration and national disintegration”.
Preparing for the festivities of Europe at 50, I came to the conclusion to republish
this essay as it was published in 1998, with an afterword, which will show
how right Sunkel was and how much the European decision makers can learn
from Latin American social sciences.
In 1998; I stated:
Europe faces three very important decisions about the future: east-ward
expansion of the European Union, European monetary union, and the structural
internal reform of the Union. Faced with these decisions, an intellectual battle
rages across the continent between Euro-skeptics and integrationists, between
federalists and nationalists, between centralists and regionalists. World systems
research and development research provides radical, fascinating and novel
answers to these old controversies.
With the latest data, we can show that Europe’s crisis indeed is not caused by
what the neo-liberals term a “lack of world economic openness” but rather, on
the contrary, by the enormous amount of passive globalization that Europe –
together with Latin America – experienced over recent years. Our combined
measure of the velocity of the globalization process is based on the increases of
capital penetration over time, on the increases of economic openness over time,
and on the decreases of the comparative price level over time: the United States,
Mexico, larger parts of Africa and large sections of West and South Asia escaped
from the combined pressures of globalization, while Eastern and Southern Latin
America, very large parts of Europe, Russia and China were characterized by a
specially high tempo of globalization.
The “wider Europe” of the EU-25 is not too distantly away from the social
realities of the more advanced Latin American countries. From the viewpoint of
world systems theory such tendencies are not a coincidental movement along the
historic ups and downs of social indicators, but the very symptom of a much
more deep-rooted crisis, which is the beginning of the real re-marginalization
and re-peripherization of the European continent.
