Introduction

For several reasons it is likely that the two years of 1991 and 1992 will receive more than a footnote in economic and political history later on. During these two years important political decisions were taken in virtually every part of the globe, thereby moving countries and economies away from a stalemate situation of uncertainty. In Europe, the Maastricht agreements signalled the further deepening of both political and economic integration while the agreements on the European Economic Space and the so-called Europe Agreements with Hungary, the Czech and Slovak Federal Republic (CSFR), and Poland fixed the conditions for integration widening. At the same time the Soviet Union was dissolved and replaced by an extremely fragile, heterogeneous and probably non-durable construction called the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS).

In the Americas, the foundation of a “regionalist” economic strategy was laid with the beginning of negotiations on the Southern enlargement of the North American Free Trade Area (NAFTA) between the United States and Mexico. In the Middle East, the UN-supported military engagement to end the occupation of Kuwait reflected a renaissance of global political co-ordination. It has found its economic counterpart in the annual G-7 meetings as well as in the endeavours to cope with global environmental problems (such as the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED]) by setting world-wide binding limits to the use of the earth as a sink.

Finally, in East and Southeast Asia the need to co-ordinate macroeconomic policies on a broad regional level was felt more strongly than ever before. Such co-ordination will come to new horizons when China begins to implement what it declared in 1992, that is to further deepen and widen the opening of its market. On a subregional level in Asia, the Association of Southeast Asia Nations (ASEAN) brought an end to its 25-year rule of not committing itself to binding economic targets and schedules. It announced a Free Trade Area that was to be finalized within 15 years.