European Integration from a Club-Theoretical Perspective

This year marks the 60th anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Rome. This Treaty created the legal foundations of a united Europe that ensures freedom and security for all its citizens. European Integration is an unprecedented process that brought dozens of countries closer and provided an environment in which countries could grow and converge. However, is it true that all countries converged towards the same level of economic development, can we suppose that once all countries will reach the same level of economic growth and wealth? In this paper, I am looking for answers to this question, and approach the question of integration from the aspect of economic complexity and club convergence. I am dealing with the past 20 years of European integration between 1995 and 2015, examining whether complexity is prevalent within the European Union and identify clubs within the European Club, to see if the members of different clubs converged and also to find out whether the clubs themselves converged or not. The answer to my questions are not entirely straightforward: it is true, that being in the European Union helped Member States to catch up to a higher level of economic development, so it is true that the European Union is a highly complex system that is composed of clearly identifiable clubs whose members share the same characteristics. However, the question of convergence remained open: it could have been confirmed that on club-level, convergence occurred in almost all clubs, however at the level of the European Union, countries tend to either diverge or there is no convergence at all.