POLITICAL ECONOMY OF THE SINGLE EUROPEAN MARKET Essay - 2

POLITICAL ECONOMY OF THE SINGLE EUROPEAN MARKET - Essay ExampleTotal Economic consolidation when monetary, fiscal, social and macroeconomic policy are entirely unified and a supra-national authority exists, whose decisions are binding for all member states (Laffan et al., 1999). The economic nature of this confederacy determined its integration in the field of economy to an extent the European founding fathers never imagined however, the ongoing process of EU enlargement provoked some controversies and problems colligate to the core nature of integration within the EU and the subsequent process of further expansion of the union. Two consecutive waves of enlargement after the mid-nineties led to visible economic, semipolitical and social problems and since then European integration was accompanied by increasing levels of Euroscepticism among European voters (Richardson, 2006). Without the present deep economic integration, the EU would have never emerged as a leading global playe r and economic power on par with the United States. On the other hand, problems related to its aggressive expansion in the past two decades leave many question marks about the future of the unions economic and political integration and the ways this integration will be pursued. A key element in this process will be the convergence between the spic-and-span member states and the old, and the richest, ones due to the significant income gap between them and this convergence could occur only in the presence of certain key growth factors and supporting policies as Andre Sapir (2005) wrote in his foreword to Economics and Policies of an Enlarged Europe.Both theory and practice suggest that there was no other way of development for the EU entirely to pursue deep economic integration in order to establish a strong and viable union, its roots being in the European char and Steel Community created with the Treaty of Paris in 1951 by Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg and the Nethe rlands a purely economic alliance. In 1957, the Treaties of Rome gave birth to the