Global trends and European integration: The South-East European perspective
Global trends and European integration: The South-East European perspective

Summary/Abstract: Societies in Western and Eastern Europe alike are facing the challenge of all-pervading global trends. Among them, the spreading of instrumental activism, individualization, upgrading of organizational rationality and value-normative universalization seem to exert the deepest influence. The South-East European societies have to cope with them under the precarious conditions ofprofound national transformations. Their core is the search for solutions to four major tasks. First, how to restructure the national economies by balancing instrumental activism with the value-normative and institutional patterns of sustainability. Second, how to complement the civilizational triumph of individualization by communitarian patterns of problem-solving. Third, how to upgrade organizational rationality and counteract the development of organizational pathologies. Fourth, how to co-ordinate the value-normative universalization with unavoidable particularisms. These tasks are complex and complicated. Therefore, South- East European societies will retain the potential of intensive risk. Most probably, their integration with the European Union will reduce this potential while loading the Union with internal tensions.

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