ABSTRACT
Much of the contemporary discussion of ‘Europe’ in the national press of different European member-states, as well as in other media of the new Europe, focuses, very heavily, on the one hand, on the fast-approaching launch of the common currency in eleven of the member-states, and, on the other, to a slightly lesser extent, on the prospects for the enlargement of the liberalised European market. The unleashing of liberal market politics, in which the prizes have gone to the most entrepreneurial or the most advantageously situated regions and cities, has encouraged the emergence of a series of extremely well-placed regions. Each of the dimensions of inequality (gender, age and location) will have a familiarity to social scientific commentators trained in the analysis of individual member-states in the Fordist-period; they now have to be thought through in respect of the trans-national and post-Fordist market-place that dominates the everyday working life of most Europeans.
