"Globalisation, change and European integration"

The primary purpose of this paper is to explore the usefulness of using ideas about globalisation to assist the theorisation of change in contemporary European integration. It reviews the ways in which external context has been used to explain developments in regional integration in Europe and thinks more generally about the globalisation-regionalisation interface. The paper goes on to explore the assumptions about globalisation, global context and the structuring of interests which reside (but which are often unacknowledged) in such accounts. These assumptions tend to revolve around highly rationalistic conceptions of interest which are then separated from the external economic environment so that changes in this environment induce utility-maximizing actors into various forms of strategic re-evaluation. Debate then tends to concentrate on identifying the key actors (state, supranational or non-state) involved in and capable of devising appropriate programmes of action. As a challenge to these assumptions, the paper then draws on constructivist arguments to explore--in relation particularly to the origins of the single market programme--the relationship between ideas, interests and identity on the one hand and the social construction of a context of global threat to ‘Europe’ on the other