European Integration in Social and Historical Perspective

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Exploring the social dimensions of state formation and European integration, a respected interdisciplinary group of European and North American scholars takes a novel approach to the historical processes of integration. Rather than being led by EU institutions and intergovernmental policy, the contributors argue that integration is primarily influenced by non-state actors: unions, businesspeople, elites, and immigrants. Exploring the historical roots of integration, they trace contemporary integration efforts back to nineteenth-century social action in response to capitalist development. As today, it was a time when internationalism_both that of workers and of capitalists_sustained international cooperation and attempts to define universal standards for welfare and a social dimension to economic development. The reemergence of an integrated Europe as an alternative to the system of states produced by the settlements of 1918 and 1945 has provided a new opening for internationalism. The contributors view this as a positive trend, especially as a counterbalance to intensifying conflicts over growth, the distribution of wealth, welfare, and global access to markets and jobs.