Trade in the XXI century

Abstract

If some Rip Van Winkle with a penchant for geopolitics had gone to sleep in 1989-about halfway through Horst Krenzler’s tenure as the European Commission’s Director-General for External Relations-he would awaken today to a startlingly different world. While security tensions on Europe’s eastern fringes might seem reassuringly familiar, he would no doubt be astonished to learn that the United States’ only real rival for political and economic pre-eminence was not Japan, a reformed Soviet Union, or even the European Union, but China.