by Carlo Altomonte, Associate Professor of European Economic Policy



Step by step, in the decade immediately following the end of the Cold War, the European Union was able to reshape itself in a way apt to restore peace and stability on the Continent, as well as gaining competitive traction in the emerging new global equilibrium. This was done through the creation of novel institutions. On the one hand, through a deepening of the process of economic integration from the Single Market to the Single Currency, thus developing the larger economies of scale needed in a market that was becoming increasingly globalized. And on the other hand, with procedures able to absorb the Central and Eastern European countries that had been freed by the dissolution of the Soviet regime, guaranteeing the build-up and preservation of democratic institutions, the market and the rule of law, through an orderly widening of the same Union.

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