European Integration and the Third World

Project 1992 aims at removing the last obstacles to the free movement of people, services, goods and capital within the EC, hence constituting a substantial contribution to accelerating the process of European integration. It has captured Europe’s imagination and has galvanised economic activities and plans, generating a new ‘Europtimism’, after the stagnation of the 1970s and early 1980s, rightly labelled as the ‘Community’s dark age’ [Hoffman, 1989: 29]. During that period business leaders complained about the ‘costs of non-Europe’, that is, the negative impact of market segmentation on innovations and demonstrated also by European direct foreign investment (DFI) shifting towards the US.