Globalización, Crisis Económica Mundial y Desarrollo Regional. Tendencias Globales e Implicaciones Europeas (Globalization, World Economic Crisis and Regional Development. Global Tendencies and European Implications)

The current paper investigates the cross-national relevance of quantitative world systems theory for two dimensions of development (human development, income redistribution) on a global scale and on the level of the European regions and tries to confront the basic pro-globalist assumptions of the “Lisbon process”, the policy target of the European leaders since the EU‟s Lisbon Council meeting in March 2000 to make Europe the leading knowledge-based economy in the world with a world systems perspective. Starting from the 1970s and during a phase in the long swings of global economic cycles, which is comparable to the current global economic slump, the Swiss sociologist Volker Bornschier, in a series of quantitative analyses on the drivers of world economic stagnation and social imbalances, published in the world‟s leading social science journals maintained that dependency from the large transnational corporations may dynamize economic development in the short term, but that this dependency causes stagnation and social imbalances in the long term. Dependency from the large, transnational corporations, as correctly predicted already by Latin American social science of the 1960s and 1970s, and by Bornschier and by later world systems theories, emerges indeed as one of the most serious development blockades on a global and on a European level. There are significant negative effects of MNC penetration on human development, and social cohesion during the current global economic crisis. Secondly, we analyze European regional performance since the 1990s in order to know whether growth and development in Europe‟s regions spread evenly among the different parts of the continent. It emerges that dependency from the large transnational corporations is incompatible with a balanced, regional development