ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book argues that there are a number of themes linking the Third World and southern Europe, before and after Spain, Greece, and Portugal became full members of the European Economic Community (EEC) in the 1980s. The case in southern Europe before EEC membership, and it has been the case in the Third World. Wages, labor laws, and trade unions are much stronger in the advanced countries than in Indonesia, Peru, and Nigeria, or southern Europe before EEC. The process of southern Europe's EEC integration clearly illustrates that external forces matter as much if not more than domestic sociopolitical dynamics, that dependence on the United States (US). The US projected its political economy as the most significant export. Transformation policy carried all the Americentric assumptions from value system and institutions to concepts about progress and success.
