Word: westerners
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Portuguese fishermen or Welsh hill farmers may not endorse that claim as they struggle to wrest a living from sea and soil. Like the U.S., Western Europe has its rust belt and its regions of rural poverty. Nor has Western Europe totally escaped the scourges of drugs and violence. Yet many West Europeans are not only matching Americans in material wealth, but they also believe themselves to be enjoying a better quality of life. "I don't know what America has to offer me that I haven't got already and that I would envy," says British architect Ian Grant...
...services and workers can circulate freely, and where competition can reward efficient enterprise. In 1957 the E.C.'s founding treaty promised just such a common market, but although member states dismantled intra-Community tariff barriers, they retained a bewildering barrage of regulations to restrict trade and curb competition. Although Western Europe has no immediate plans to create a common currency, E.C. countries have already made significant progress toward their goal of unstitching the area's patchwork quilt of protected national markets...
Amid these shifting security sands, Western Europe is also seeking to adapt to a changing world economic order in which America's pre-eminence has eroded as fast as its foreign debt has grown. Project 1992 is a response both to a global economic leadership vacuum and to the growing commercial challenge posed by North America, Japan and the fast industrializing economies of Asia. The opening up of Western Europe's protected national markets will hurt inefficient firms, but the hope is that enough competitive winners will emerge to ensure that Western Europe has its champions in the 1990s...
...competing with America's IBM or Japan's Fujitsu. "We know very well that European companies still are a long way away from having the critical mass necessary to stand up to the competition," concedes Gianni Agnelli, chairman of Italy's Fiat. Still, some success stories show that Western Europe has not been entirely eclipsed at the high-tech end of the market, where the battle for survival will be keenest. Airbus Industrie has emerged as Boeing's main competitor in the lucrative commercial aviation sector. While the U.S. struggles to regain momentum in its space shuttle program, Western Europe...
...club, and even neutral Switzerland is worried about being left standing on the platform as the 1992 train pulls out of the station. East European countries are cozying up to the Community via bilateral trade and aid deals while Moscow watches with envious desire. "What is going on in Western Europe is a serious challenge for us," says Vitali Zhurkin, director of the Soviet Academy of Science's recently created Institute for Europe. "It is a positive process that shows us perestroika should be moving quicker. We too are behind...