Capitalism, Crises and European Integration: from 1945 to the present ͳst (E)RS‐R)C()E Conference ‐ ʹ͸‐ʹͺ/ͷ/ʹͲͳ͸, Florence ͳ Uneven Development and Stabilization: the Engines of European Integration Francesco Petrini (Università di Padova) draft My basic premise is that you can fully understand the origins and the development of European integration only if you strictly connect that story with the working of the capitalist system. )n this perspective the concept of uneven and combined development, originally proposed by Lev Trotsky and more recently resurfaced in some seminal works in the international relations field, and the concept of stabilization, as defined by Charles Maier in the early ͳͻͺͲs, provide two powerful heuristic tools to the historian. The concept of uneven development, defined by Trotsky «the most general law of the historical process», simply points to the coexistence within the international system of social formations with different degrees of development. This was, of course, a feature common to all historical epochs, but it had assumed a particular prominence since the inception of industrial capitalism which, with its tremendous productive and technological power, threatened with extinction backward societies. These, under Dzthe whip of external necessitydz to quote Trotsky again, were pushed to adopt the new modes of production lest they either ended up subjugated by the more advanced states/empires or they were compelled to recede into oblivion. An important consequence of unevenness is that in the process of catching up the laggards did not necessarily have to repeat the same path of the leaders, they could skip some passages. Thus uneven development had always had a combined character by which various stages of development are compressed or skipped altogether. This led to hybrid forms of development in which the archaic and the modern coexisted within the same society and in turn it led also to serious imbalances and deep tensions within and between societies that sometimes exploded into crises ͳ . The instability inherent in capitalist development takes us to the second engine of integration cited in our title: stabilization, a term we use in the sense Maier does in his seminal article The Two Postwar Eras. )n his words: ͳ See for ex, Alexander Anievas for an interpretation of the two world wars as a product of Uneven and combined development.