Europe in Global Change [antikvár]

Foreword The collapse of the Socialist bloc has initiated far-reaching changes in the international political system that extend well beyond the European continent. Many of the old notions used to explain the structure of world politics have become obsolete or meaningless. With bipolarity gone, how much sense does it make to speak of a tripartite world? Yet what used to be labeled as the 'First World', the West, still continues to have a meaning in other parts of the globe. In a similar way, changes in other segments of international politics reveal paradoxical trends. While the system at large seems to be fragmenting in political and alliance terms, the break-down of communist rule clearly advances the globalization of financial markets and trade. While the strategic relevance formerly assigned to parts of the 'Third World' has declined and commitments by the great powers have been reversed, the conflicts and their externalities to the West point towards greater involvement for the future. Looking back at the year 1989, many of the assumptions made in light of the peaceful revolutions in Central und Eastern Europe have proven to be overly optimistic. Europe remains to be a challenge to international peace and development. On statistical terms, the continent in 1992 has become the region where more conflicts have turned violent than anywhere else. Equally, Western Europe remains to be highly vulnerable to changes in its neighborhood in the East and South. The ongoing debates about market access and transfers for and to the East and the Mediterranean, about migrations from both East and South and about the mobility to control aggression in former Yugoslavia are but cases in point. The contributions to this volume assess the wide range of global changes which will affect Europe, which need to be understood and conceptualized properly and which will ask for policy changes on the part of the Europeans. The book thus continues and expands the arguments raised in the first volume 'Global Responsibilities: Europe - 9 -