ABSTRACT
It has been argued that the main lines of Europe's future development can be understood best if one considers the main challenges it is confronted with today. It turned out that these apparent contradictions are ever more closely interwoven with the contradictory developments in the global political economy. The globally accepted currency today is the US Dollar; but the times of an unchallenged hegemony of the USA, which Ronald Reagan had been able to reinforce in the 1980s, seem to come to an end. There is a rapidly growing amount of theoretical work on global value chains recently. Lockdowns of large economies suddenly showed on whom the production and consumption sequences really depend. Within a country certain basic services had to be kept running, exposing workers in these areas to a higher Corona risk.
