For Western Europe in the 1960s, full employment seemed a nearly achieved reality while full integration seemed an unattainable goal. Today, the opposite is true. The movement for European integration has yielded a European Union of fifteen states with a unified monetary system that will eventually connect over 370 million people (OECD 1998: 19). With an independent budget of over a billion dollars and a combined GDP of over 8 trillion dollars, the EU's economy is only slightly smaller than that of the United States (Cottrell 1999). Its rate of joblessness is, alas, much larger. Europe's days of nearly full employment began to wane in the mid-1970s and never returned. Now, an average of one in ten West Europeans is without work. Unemployment among Europeans under the age of twenty-five hovers around 20%. Over 50% of those who are jobless have been without work for over twelve months (OECD 1999: 242). Not surprisingly, the European public ranks joblessness among its primary political concerns.

This book focuses on both unemployment and economic unification. It examines the consequences of each and their interconnections. The connections between high unemployment and European Monetary Union are of special concern. The book's scope is ambitious, and thus the contributors' essays are wide-ranging. The first three offer, at the empirical level, broad overviews of the New European landscape. David Cameron sets the different national patterns of unemployment in relief, drawing our attention to cross-national contrasts and relating statistical peaks and valleys to the chronology of unification. Peter Hall looks at the institutional and economic bedrock beneath the patterns that Cameron describes.