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Deepening vs. Widening |
| Section: CURRENT ISSUES / SPECIAL REPORT--THE GOP AT THE CROSSROADS |
| Author: Robert Silver |
| Publication:
The World & I Online |
| Issue Date: 12/1/1992 |
| Size: 1,527 Words, 9,140 Characters |
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Soon after the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989-1990, many argued that the three most westerly ex-communist states--Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Poland--would soon be accepted into the European Community, thereby cementing their rejection of communism. Had the EC's setup as a free-trade area--with substantial, finite rules on trade, agriculture, transport, and environmental issues, plus 1992's single market--stayed in basic terms as in 1990, their early entry would have been in the cards. But the EC, after Maastricht, has taken a new turn. It is centered on monetary convergence, plus a "social chapter" with new rules for the labor market, also taking on defense and foreign policy matters (in the defense case, via the Western European Union [WEU]).
It is axiomatic in the higher ranks of the community that there is a trade-off between intensifying of "deepening" the EC through the Maastricht proce...
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...rungs to it, each identified by how near it is to a full role in an EC that may revert to being eventually no more than a magnified trading area, a zollverein in nineteenth-century German terms. This moving, competitive hierarchy of fluctuating relationships threatens to fixate Europe for decades, to the exclusion of other practical goals, such as aid to the Third World and industrial growth.
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Publication Details
(The World & I Online) |
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The World & I Online is a
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Originally published monthly in print as The World & I, our site
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