Europe and an inter-dependent world: Uneven geo-economic and geo-political developments

Abstract

This paper examines some of the main geo-economic and geo-political inter-dependencies which are structuring Europe’s relations with the wider world and how various European and European Union (EU) policy frameworks work to create relations of increasing yet uneven inter-dependency between Europe and that wider world. The paper begins with an examination of the economic and financial crisis and its role in transmitting crisis across inter-dependent space, and the consequences for political and urban struggles across Europe and beyond. This is followed by discussion of the entanglement of Europe with the forces which gave rise to the so-called “Arab Spring” in North Africa and the Middle East. The paper then turns to a discussion of the relocation of economic activity outside of Europe to “emerging economies”, of geographical shifts within Europe of elements of value chains in order to cope with increasing competitive pressures from other parts of the global economy by reducing labour costs but ensuring proximity to the main EU markets, and the emergence of new economic players with their origins in emerging economies within European value chains. The paper concludes with a consideration of the primary geo-economic and geo-political dimensions structuring Europe’s urban and regional inter-dependencies with the wider world.

Keywords

Uneven development geo-economic interdependency geo-political interdependency Europe and the wider world

Introduction

The current financial and economic crisis in the Eurozone and beyond has become a constant reminder of the inter-dependent nature of the world in which we now live. Centred very much on the sovereign-debt and banking crises emerging after the 2008 financial meltdown, austerity, public expenditure cuts, rising unemployment and declining real material levels of living are being experienced across Europe, with dire consequences for sustaining economic activity, livelihoods and everyday life (Benediktsson and Karlsdóttir, 2011; Blažek and Netrdová, 2012; Hadjimichalis, 2011; Kiss, 2012; Pavlínek, in press; Smith and Swain, 2010). The rapid geographical transference of economic crisis from the financial and housing markets of the USA, via the UK banking system and European financial and economic systems (Gowan, 2009; Smith and Swain, 2010), to the wider consequences across the Eurozone and beyond, has all too readily shown the consequences of the form of integration into the inter-dependent economies within which we all live.

The papers in this special issue of European Urban and Regional Studies, which marks the twentieth volume of the journal, aim to reflect on different aspects of Europe’s global inter-dependencies and their consequences for cities and regions. The papers consider in various ways how understanding the transformation of European macro-regional spaces requires, at the same time, an understanding of the inter-relationships between those spaces and the wider world. The emphasis lies on the geo- economic and geo-political inter-dependencies which are structuring Europe’s relations with the world and how various European and European Union (EU) policy frameworks work to create relations of increasing yet uneven inter-dependency between Europe and the wider world. The full-length papers are combined with a collection of Euro-commentary papers arising in part from a workshop organised by Sara Fregonese on the comparative trans-Mediterranean spaces of protest against austerity and authoritarianism in southern Europe and North Africa and the Mediterranean Middle East. Together, this combination of papers aims to make important interventions in our understanding of the increasingly inter-dependent world in which actors, spaces and processes in Europe are situated and that they actively shape.

European inter-dependencies

Economic crisis, resistance and global inter-dependence

The financial and economic crises of the last six years have highlighted the inter-dependent nature of the economies within which we live. The transmission of crisis from North America to Europe and beyond has been rapid and uncompromising. Equally so has been the transmission of state responses in the form of programmes of austerity, state retrenchment, and in some cases (Italy and Greece) the imposition of temporary unelected technocratic state elites to manage the short-term dimensions of the crisis. The Eurozone dimension of the crisis is fundamentally challenging the EU’s commitment to cohesion and solidarity as core EU economies increasingly yet somewhat unwillingly play the role of debt guarantors to ‘peripheral’ economies, whilst also imposing structural adjustment. The crisis also highlights the mismatch between an EU of monetary integration and the much more fragmented commitment to political union, highlighting the difficulty of governing a monetary union in the absence of a federal political union (Aglietta, 2012; Watkins, 2012).

The crises have also given rise to transnational counter-movements aiming to challenge the consequences of crisis and the material impacts on the lives of those caught up in the events. From the Spanish indignados and the Greek aganaktismenoi, to the London August 2011 and the Occupy movements across Europe and beyond (Douzinas, 2013; Fregonese, 2013; Taibo, 2013), a movement has emerged refusing to accept the consequences of crisis, which favour political and economic elites and an attempt to re-establish a neo-liberal, finance-driven status quo. These new social movements are themselves linked, connected and inter-dependent. Whether they constitute a new form of ‘multitude’, as envisaged by Hardt and Negri (2001), remains an open question, although they do involve networked and inter-dependent forms of political action. The movements do constitute bold and important attempts to put a break on the dominant responses of austerity and further liberalisation, which appear to be all that the mainstream European imagination can conjure. As Taibo (2013) has suggested, there has been an important shift in the trajectory of these movements ‘from civic ideals centred around political parties and ideals of state citizenship, to radical anti-capitalist attempts to resist and go beyond the state capitalist system altogether’ (Fregonese, 2013: 113). Nowhere is this more clearly witnessed than in the struggles around the 2012 Greek elections and the rise of new radical political movements opposed to further rounds of austerity.

Elite and popular responses to the crisis are but part of the attempts to manage European and global inter-dependencies. The 2005 Lisbon Strategy of the European Union was focused on creating a liberal, competitive system of market integration, jobs and growth that would lead to both convergence across the Union and enhanced economic competitiveness. This internal agenda was accompanied by an external agenda of ‘global Europe’ (European Commission, 2006: 2) involving increasing global integration ‘to liberalise international trade further, opening markets in which European companies can compete and providing new opportunities for growth and development’. More recently, in relation to the EU’s foreign policy dimensions, the creation of the European External Action Service (EEAS) has attempted to enhance the core of the EU’s diplomatic relations with non-member states and associated policy frameworks, and has involved the continued deployment of new and re-worked geographical knowledge in the process of place-making and regional integration (Kuus, 2011a, 2011b). For some this represented an enhancement of the foreign dimensions of the EU’s role in the world. This deepening of relations with the wider world and its formalisation through the bureaucracies of the EEAS were accompanied by macro-regional strategies in the creation of new state spaces involving the EU’s relations with its neighbours following the completion of the 2004 and 2007 enlargements (Bialasiewicz, 2009, 2011; Bialasiewicz et al., 2009; Jones, 2006; Kuus, 2011a, 2011b). Encapsulated in the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP), the EU’s macro-regional state arrangements are primarily focused on the negotiation and management of what Casas-Cortes et al. (2013) call ‘non-accession integration’; the deepening of economic and (geo-)political arrangements with the EU’s neighbours without a commitment to membership.

The ‘Arab Spring’ and Europe: transforming ‘Mediterranean’ spaces

Recent events in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) have also underlined the connectedness and independent ways in which European regional spaces articulate with the wider world, issues which are treated in depth in Casas-Cortes et al.’s (2013) and Bialasiewicz et al.’s (2013) papers, and in this collection of Euro-commentaries. The so-called ‘Arab Spring’ (Dabashi, 2012) has a number of implications for Europe, including but not limited to (i) immediate increases in migration, which EU states struggled to manage, (ii) geopolitical tensions most readily seen in the NATO intervention in Libya and political pressure on Syria currently, (iii) the rapid revision of policy frameworks such as the European Commission’s approach to developing relations with countries in the MENA region, which led to a review of the EU’s ENP (Bialasiewicz et al., 2013; Casas-Cortes et al., 2013; European Commission and High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, 2011), and (iv) the emerging institutional architecture of European-led marketisation and development attempting to ensure a private-sector led, neo-liberal approach to transition in North Africa, exemplified most recently by the extension of the activity of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development to the region (see Smith, 2002, on the EBRD and Eastern European transitions and Smith, 2012a, on parallels with today). As Dabashi (2012) has argued, the Arab Spring requires that we not only understand the profound consequences of revolution but also consider its meaning for how we consider forms of domination. For Dabashi (2012) this requires a transformation in the ‘imaginative geographies’ we use to represent and analyse places. In undertaking such a transformation we need to move away from the domination of orientalist forms of thought and understand the agency of revolution in the region outside of the hegemony of Western control and of authoritarian domination within the region. This requires a de-centring and a re-mapping of the world allowing for a greater space for ‘non-European’ interests in establishing trajectories of change. Dabashi also recognises that current events in the Arab world are also part of a broader movement of unrest and protest:

That the Arab revolutions are changing our imaginative geography is already evident in the interaction between the southern and northern coasts of the Mediterranean in terms of modes of protest, with the spread of Tahrir Square-style youth uprisings evident from Greece to Spain, and indeed to the United States and the Occupy Wall Street movement …

(Dabashi, 2012: xviii)

Thus, the Arab Spring represents a movement against ‘a vast imaginative [and material] landscape of domination’ (Dabashi, 2012: 44) which is conjuring into being a ‘liberation geography’ of protest responding to political authoritarianism and its links to earlier forms of political-economic engagement between Europe and North Africa, and the process of macro-region making in the Mediterranean. Of course, interdependencies between European spaces and territories to the immediate south of Europe are not new. For example, in the 1930s the geographer Gordon East (1938) deployed a Mackinderesque analysis of the Mediterranean space as critical to the European control of transportation routes across the region, especially waterways, and Giaccaria and Minca (2011) have recently provided a critical review of French and Italian writing on the Mediterranean “macro-region”.

The causes of the Arab revolts are many and complex (Dabashi, 2012), but two central forces stand out which articulate with European geo-economic and geo-political inter-dependencies. First, the revolutions were (and continue to be) revolts against decades of authoritarian rule in the region, which was a form of rule that was at best unchallenged, if not supported, by Western and European political elites. One only has to think of the role that Hosni Mubarak played as the first co-chair of President Sarkozy’s Union for the Mediterranean (UfM) initiative, the support given to Muammar Gaddafi by the British state as it sought to improve relations with the Libyan regime (before it decided that Gaddafi was no longer expedient to British and European interests), or the offer by Michele Alliot-Marie, France’s then foreign minister, of police assistance to the Ben Ali regime in Tunisia to quell the widening social revolt against authoritarian rule in 2011. In other words, the West, and Europe in particular, was implicated in authoritarian rule across the MENA region, in somewhat similar ways to how it had been during colonial times (Evans, 2012). Of course, part of the Western rationale for this support was that authoritarian rule provided the best way to prevent the spread of radical Islam in the region, no matter what the cost. As Hunt (2011: 174) has argued, EU policy has been ‘a non-military means to promote enhanced security within the EU by providing improved employment opportunities and living standards within partner states, thereby reducing incentives for the disaffected to join fundamentalist movements and migrate to Europe’.

Second, the origins of the Arab revolts also lie in the social and economic consequences of the development models pursued across the region and supported by Western states. These models involved processes of authoritarian economic liberalisation and an uneven integration into the EU’s Single Market as part of a series of free trade agreements accompanying the Europe Agreements (Smith, 2012a). Export-oriented models were pursued unevenly across the region, and for many countries this involved a close articulation with the EU’s Single Market and with investment of firms from the EU to establish export-oriented platforms. This was articulated with wider macro-regional projects of liberalisation and capital mobility, both in relation to the EU’s macro-regional construction of new regional spaces as part of the European Neighbourhood Policy (Jones, 2006) and through flows of surplus capital from Gulf Cooperation Council countries in the form of productive, speculative, and infrastructure investment into the MENA (Hanieh, 2012). However, the inability of this articulation of economies across macro-regional Mediterranean spaces to create employment and social developmental opportunities for the burgeoning population of the young unemployed (many of whom were graduates) was part of the material conditions leading to the revolts starting in December 2010 in Sidi Bouzid, Tunisia (Smith, 2012a). Inherent in this model was a contradiction between different frameworks for mobility and an uneven inter-dependence between the two sides of Mediterranean space. The mobility of European (and other) capital was accompanied by the increasingly free movement of industrial products into the Single Market from North Africa. However, this was not accompanied by a parallel liberalisation of the movement of labour between the Association Countries and the EU, which has resulted in a form of border policing characterised by Casas-Cortes et al. (2013) as ‘Schengen border space’. This involves the externalisation of EU border controls, the militarisation of border spaces to constrain (if not prevent) mobility, and the emergence of camps and detention centres to deposit illegal migrants who did manage to traverse these increasingly dangerous border regimes.

Uneven development cemented through the extension of capitalist macro-regional integration between the EU and North Africa was, therefore, highly unbalanced, with strict limits on legal North–South migration at the same time as there was the liberalisation of market access and the environment for foreign investment. Recognition of the damaging constraints on mobility of persons from MENA, in the context of renewed EU efforts to forge closer links with North Africa following the Arab revolts, is implicit in recent EU policy initiatives to encourage still constrained yet more open movements of people between North Africa and the EU. As the 2011 review of the European Neighbourhood Policy made clear in the context of the Arab revolts, ‘A new approach is needed to strengthen the partnership between the EU and the countries and societies of the neighbourhood: to build and consolidate healthy democracies, pursue sustainable economic growth and manage cross-border links’ (European Commission and High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, 2011: 1). Indeed, the Communication emphasised the need to enhance higher education staff and student mobility and to ensure controlled visa liberalisation through ‘well-managed legal migration, capacity-building on border management, asylum and effective law-enforcement co-operation’ (European Commission and High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, 2011: 11). It is doubtful however that this approach will be able to overcome the structural inequalities between the EU and MENA.

Shifting geographies of economic activity and the doubling of the world’s labour market

This reworking and refocusing of the EU’s relations with the MENA region is, however, only one element of a fundamental and on-going transformation in how ‘EUrope’ reworks its interdependencies with the wider world. Indeed, the EU’s Lisbon Treaty and the attendant ‘global Europe’ frameworks were part of a wider strategy to reposition the EU on the global stage. Not least this was in recognition of the increasingly inter-dependent world in which Europe was situated, and the shift to multi-polar economic and political centres of gravity (see Dunford and Yeung, 2011). The increasing consolidation of economic power in ‘newer’ parts of the world economy, notably China and India (but the BRICS more generally), has created a number of challenges for European economies and for regional development in the continent. Not least among these has been the increased out-sourcing and off-shoring of production and services from core EU economies. Three dimensions are important here. The first is the relocation of economic activity from Europe to so-called emerging economies. International de-localisation of production has become a common form of this process of industrial relocation (Labrianidis et al., 2011; Pickles and Smith, 2011). Driven in large measure by the strategies that Western capital adopted to respond to what Freeman (2007) has called the doubling of the world’s labour market through the addition of nearly 1.5 billion workers to the capitalist world economy following China’s adoption of reform policies, the collapse of state socialism in the former Soviet Union and east central Europe, and the adoption of liberalisation measures in India, this new global labour market created a resource which Western capital could only benefit from. More recently there are increasing constraints on the strategy of accumulation pursued in China as capital meets with resistance from labour, the tightening of Chinese labour markets and new forms of state regulation of labour are implemented (Lan and Pickles, 2012), and as capital responds with new strategies of spatial relocation of economic activity (Zhu and Pickles, 2012). De-localisation also took place in service activity and business process operations, most notably with the shift of call centre activity from peripheral regions in Western Europe and elsewhere (Richardson et al., 2000) to countries with proximate language abilities (James and Vira, 2009, 2012; Taylor and Bain, 2005, 2008).

The second dimension involves the geographical shift within Europe of certain parts of the value chain in order to cope with increasing competitive pressures from other parts of the global economy, notably the Asian economies (Pickles and Smith, 2011), by reducing labour costs but ensuring proximity to the main EU markets. This is a tendency particularly found in more labour-intensive aspects of industrial production such as clothing and certain parts of the automobile assembly value chain (Begg et al., 2003; Pavlínek, in press; Pavlínek and Ženka, 2011; Pickles et al., 2006) and, more recently, services (Hardy et al., 2011). Central to this process of what could be called ‘macro-regionalisation’ has been the strategic use of geographical proximity to manage the reduced turnover time of capital in supply chains. The implications for local and regional development are uneven and contested, not least because on-going processes of trade liberalisation and the contemporary economic crisis have challenged some of the relative geographical competitiveness of proximate regions to core markets.

The third dimension involves the emergence of new economic players with their origins in emerging economies within European value chains. The result is a further ‘opening’ of European economies and regions to much wider and more genuinely global processes of development. This continues an earlier process of internationalisation of EU regional economies driven by Asian foreign direct investment (e.g. Phelps et al., 1998). More recently the seeming return to profitability of the ailing UK automobile sector has been connected, at least rhetorically, to the involvement of foreign investment, for example in the take-over by the Indian Tata Motors of Jaguar Land Rover, which also allowed Tata Motors to generate significant increases in its own profitability (Reed and Crabtree, 2012). In areas such as the Italian textile and clothing industrial districts of Prato, the use of Chinese workers has become commonplace, with some recent reports suggesting that the district is now home to the largest concentration of Chinese workers in Europe (Donadio, 2010). This reflected a trend throughout the early years of the 21st century in which labour replacement by non-EU workers was a strategy to recreate a competitive environment for Italian capital in the main industrial districts (Hadjimichalis, 2006). In the service economy of major European cities such as London, migrant labour has also been central to attempts to achieve competitiveness, through the out-sourcing of labour contracting and the creation of poor conditions of employment for migrant workers; what Wills et al. (2009a, 2009b) have called a ‘migrant division of labour’.

Conceptualising geo-economic and geo-political inter-dependencies

These increasing inter-dependencies between Europe and the wider world raise important questions concerning how we can best conceptualise the fast changing nature of these relationships. Recent years have seen the growth in perspectives emphasising relationalities and relational economic geographies with a focus on ‘the ways in which socio-spatial relations of actors are intertwined with broader structures and processes of economic change at various geographical scales’ (Yeung, 2005: 37). Yeung develops the concept of ‘relational geometries’, which refers to ‘the spatial configurations of heterogeneous relations among actors and structures through which power and identities are played out and become efficacious’ (Yeung, 2005: 38). While sharing some of the concern to develop frameworks for the analysis of power and identities, others emphasise the concept of inter-dependencies (Dunford et al., 2013), with a focus on inter-dependent scales and inter-dependent economic spheres (finance, accumulation, the state) in the restructuring of economic spaces. The contributions to this special issue contribute in various directions to our understanding of such inter-dependencies and Europe’s global and macro-regional mutual inter-connectedness.

A key part of Europe’s global inter-dependencies involves the restructuring of geo-economic relations and the reconfiguration of the value chains with which European economic actors are engaged. One of the most powerful frameworks for the conceptualisation of economic inter-dependencies has been global value chain (GVC) and global production networks (GPN) research (Bair, 2005, 2009; Coe et al., 2004; Gereffi et al., 2005; Henderson et al., 2002). The key contribution of these frameworks is their ability to relate in situ changes in firm-level and regional economic activity to wider processes of value chain restructuring, and in the case of work on global production networks to recognise the complexity of the range of actors and agents involved in the configuration of GPNs. In particular, the emphasis in GPN work as compared with GVC research has shifted to a consideration of the institutional contexts within which international production takes place (Coe et al., 2004; Neilson and Pritchard, 2009), although, despite this institutional turn, GPN research lacks an adequate theorisation of the state in international production (Smith, 2012b). As Dunford et al. (2013) argue in their paper, the social and institutional foundations of economic competitiveness are key to understanding the geographical mobility of production complexes; in their case, in the photovoltaic sector between Germany and China. Critical here is the role of respective national state policy frameworks and international trade disputes. In their paper, Dunford et al. (2013) highlight the importance of the evolution of inter-dependent industrial trajectories to understanding regional trajectories within Europe. They also emphasise the role of credit, money and finance in explaining the relative competitiveness of economic forces and in the creation of demand for industrial products, which remains a neglected dimension of GPN and GVC research. As Dunford et al. (2013: 17–18) argue ‘capital expenditure, credit and investment subsidies and the creation of markets are crucial drivers of industrial dynamics’. Consequently, they chart how shifting geographies of production are linked to a shifting geography of demand in explaining the changing trajectories of the German and Chinese photovoltaic sector.

A second dimension relating to Europe’s changing inter-dependencies with the wider world is geo-political, especially in relation to how Europe (notably the EU) manages its relations with neighbouring states. This dimension also requires that attention is given to the institutional frameworks within which inter-dependencies are structured; not least EU policy frameworks for managing external relations with neighbouring states. A host of mechanisms are in place to manage these relations, particularly as they have developed following the 2004 and 2007 enlargements of the EU: what Casas-Cortes et al. (2013) in this issue have called ‘non-accession integration’. The ENP is at the core of these relations and provides the focus for Casas-Cortes et al. (2013) and Bialasiewicz et al.’s (2013) contributions to this special issue. However, these frameworks also embody an entanglement of geo-political and geo-economic relations, as do negotiations over potential Icelandic membership of the EU (Jones and Clarke, 2013). This entanglement is witnessed starkly in the disjuncture between constrained labour migration and the management of EU borders and illegal migration (particularly from Africa), while capital and goods flow relatively easily across Mediterranean space. A key dynamic to these relations is one of building macro-regional integration in the wider Europe which ensures the protection and policing of the EU’s borders whilst also allowing for increased and deepening economic relations. This has most recently taken the form of enhanced access to the Single Market and reciprocal trade cooperation agreements with selected EU neighbours, which in its most advanced form involves the negotiation of so-called Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreements (DCFTAs) (see Wijkman, 2011, in relation to DCFTAs and the EU’s eastern neighbours and Smith, 2012a, in relation to MENA countries).

Casas-Cortes et al. (2013) highlight how the contradictions between economic integration and mobility policies at the EU’s borders result in the externalisation of those borders outside the EU to manage the consequences of uneven development. They deploy the notion of frontier regimes to examine these new border geographies, which they argue complicate notions of a tightly bounded space of ‘fortress Europe’. Their focus is on the Mediterranean space, and this has been brought to the fore in the context of the Arab Spring. In particular, they ask what the prospects are for deepening integration across the Mediterranean and highlight the remaking of state sovereignty as ‘the sites … [at which] interior and exterior are located and acted upon [which] are no longer defined only by the limits of the state borders of EU member states’ (Casas-Cortes et al., 2013: 53).

In different ways, Jones and Clark (2013) highlight the intermingling of the geo-economic with the geo-political in relation to the EU’s negotiations with Iceland over prospective accession to the EU. The paper raises critical questions in relation to the potential northern extension of the boundaries of the EU as it relates to the redefinition of the European project. Jones and Clark (2013) highlight the critical element of the financial crisis and its devastating impacts in Iceland as a motivating force in the initiation of negotiations (see also Benediktsson and Karlsdóttir, 2011; Wade and Sigurgeirsdottir, 2010). Despite the dominance of financial collapse in Iceland, fisheries and agriculture remain the critical elements – and potential stumbling blocks – of negotiations with the EU as ‘Icelandic interests’ (to the extent that there singular identifiable interests) are unable to meet the requirements of EU membership and integration into the Single Market; not least given the reverberations of the financial crisis in how economic elites and the general populace perceive the ability of political elites to ensure the interests of the state and economy. In many ways similar to the southern border of the EU, but in very different contexts, Jones and Clark (2013) highlight how the process of potential membership of Iceland is part of a wider (re-)negotiation of European identities, boundaries and geo-politics.

Bialasiewicz et al. (2013) extend this theme to the social construction of macro-regional, cross-border formations in the Mediterranean. Through a focus on the EU’s MEDGOVERNANCE project, they highlight the various narrative constructions of macro-regional spaces on the boundaries of the EU and link these to long-standing conceptions of macro-regional spaces such as the Mediterranean. Through a historical analysis Bialasiewicz et al. (2013) provide a reconstruction of the emergence of conceptions of Mediterranean macro-regional spaces. Crucially, they highlight how these various programmes of macro-regional construction are also projects of border making: of scripting insides and outsides of the EU, most notably in the recent attempts to control cross-border migration flows and of border externalisation (see also Casas-Cortas et al., 2013).

Cassidy’s (2013) paper turns the attention to cross-border economies and informal economic practices on the eastern border of the enlarged EU. Her focus is on how the new bordering of the EU transforms cross-border petty commodity trade and the gender relations that are involved. She explores how cross-border activity at the EU’s borders and the social relations involved shape gender relations in ‘communities outside of the EU, but that involvement in cross-border economic activities is determined by the gendered discourses and performance that take place at the border’ (Cassidy, 2013: 91). Thus, Cassidy’s paper extends our understanding of border economies in at least two ways. It does so by illustrating the arbitrage opportunities provided by the new border, ones embedded in state socialist social relations, by insisting on the gendered and sexualised performance of cross-border petty commodity trading, and by exploring their role in the reproduction of wider gender divisions across border spaces. Cassidy concludes that the experiences of cross-border traders which she analyses suggest that they are

increasingly characterised not by the emancipation of women from the double or triple burden inherent in the socialist system but by a subversion of this burden away from formal employment and into informal economic activities, where there is little or no protection or support afforded to them by the state.

(Cassidy, 2013: 104)

Together, then, these papers aim to make critical interventions into debates over how the relations between Europe, the EU and the wider world can be conceptualised and understood. The papers highlight the co-mingling of political-economic forces with discursive frameworks of Europe, and of borders, boundaries and their ‘management’. Critically, the papers provide important insights into the need for any understanding of urban and regional processes in contemporary Europe to be situated within a simultaneous understanding of the inter-dependencies shaping ‘European’ trajectories. At the time of the current conjuncture of crisis and protest, an understanding of these inter-dependencies has become an essential research and political project.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Parts of this paper arise from research funded by the British Academy (grant number: SG111852) for a project entitled ‘Europe and North Africa after the “Arab Revolts”: Economic Integration and Uneven Development’. I am very grateful to the British Academy for funding this research and to Neil Coe for comments on an earlier version.

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