Foreword by Pascal Lamy

Summary

World politics and economics are increasingly being shaped by the drive towards “institutionalization” on a global or regional scale.

For years, nation states have searched for answers to the challenges of globalization. But reality has shown that economic forces such as capital movements, foreign direct investment, trade flows or even currency movements can dwarf the power of the national economies. Even large economies such as the United States of America have come to realize their dependence on economic globalization.

This has led nation states to develop close coalitions or even cooperative frameworks. They choose partners pursuing analogous objectives. This bodes well for the future of the world and the solidity of economic globalization, which has provided the world with robust and persistently high economic growth for several decades.

Efforts towards greater international cooperation point in the direction of a political desire to harness economic globalization, rather than leaving it solely in the hands of the market. This is what inspired the creation of the World Trade Organization sixty years ago. This is also at the heart of the project of greater European integration, which has now celebrated its fifty years of existence.

The European Union is certainly not the first historical experiment of greater economic integration, but it is definitely one of its most successful and far-reaching illustrations. Europe may today harbour questions about the future of its integration, nevertheless there is among Europeans an overwhelming endorsement of its achievements since its first steps in 1952 with the creation of the European Coal and Steel Community, which preceded the Treaty of Rome. Today Europeans benefit from a single market that has boosted European economic growth. A Common Foreign and Security Policy is the platform for a global presence of the European Union in the world. Europeans have created a common currency, the Euro. Even the sensitive questions of immigration, human security or the fight against international crimes, just to name a few, have found their place in the European treaties.