Europe 1992: Danger or Opportunity?

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Introduction

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Overview

The year 1992 will mark the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus' discovery of the New World. But the date is fast becoming shorthand for events that are drawing attention back to the Old World instead. The 12 nations that make up the European Community (EC), also known as the Common Market, hope by then to have set up the world's largest trading bloc.

Two decades ago, such ambitions would have been unthinkable. The postwar economic miracle, fueled by American aid and investment, was fizzling out. The Western European market seemed to be corporate America's for the taking. “The Common Market has become a new Far West for American businessmen,” French publisher Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber wrote in his landmark book of the late 1960s, The American Challenge. “Their investments do not so much involve a transfer of capital, as an actual seizure of power within the European economy.”