Balancing State Intervention

Despite the high degree of convergence and integration between Europe and the United States in the past, the threats created by recent pressures and circumstances require a reexamination of the relations between state and market in those nations. The evolution of the international system; the gradual erosion of state control over industrial change, public action, and political authority; and changes in American and European economic, political, technological, social, and demographic conditions have created a wide array of problems that render the current environment quite unrecognizable from that of the Cold War world. In Balancing State Intervention, distinguished European and American scholars and public officials discuss the social and cultural circumstances that create different roles for market forces in Europe and America. The authors make projections about how the role of the state in the market will be reshaped on both sides of the Atlantic in order to help policymakers anticipate and avoid points of friction.