EUROPEAN UNION AND THE CHALLENGES OF GLOBALIZATION.pdfVIP

EUROPEAN UNION AND THE CHALLENGES OF GLOBALIZATION Florin Bonciu ∗ Good news and not so good news: EU in search of itself One may say that the European Union is a success story: it is growing and in 2004 it witnessed the most significant enlargement in its history up to now – 10 new countries have become members; two other new countries – Romania and Bulgaria – are ready to join the Union and they will most probably access the community by January 1, 2007; after some difficulties, during the autumn of 2005, the accession negotiation with Turkey has started. At the same time, in many booklets and in the articles of some hasty journalists the European Union is presented as the largest economic block in the world as result of an arithmetic operation of adding the surface, the size of population and the GDP of the member countries. Despite the hardships encountered by the Constitutional Treaty, many people speak about a European Constitution and about political union as things that already exist or are anyway well within reach. Beyond these positive and encouraging facts the European Union seems to be confronted with a weakness with no self-evident cause, with an erosion of its future position: quite often the future seems to be a menace for the European Union. Some examples may substantiate this statement. Thus, the much debated Lisbon Agenda which boasted with pride at the beginning of 2000 that by the end of the decade the European Union will become the most competitive area in the world has proven to be a failure with no hope of redress – the economic growth is very low or even close to zero in the main economies like France, Germany or Italy; the unemployment reached in 2005 19 million a