This joint Austrian and Irish study is the outcome of empirical research on the development and decay tendencies of the capitalist world economy since the early 1980s and the role, that Europe will play in these constellations. In a way, it continues the socio-liberal re-reading of dependency theory, presented by Arno Tausch in ‘Towards a Socio-Liberal Theory of World Development’, published together with Fred Prager in 1993 with Macmillan. Over these years we came to the conclusion that the logic of capitalist world development changes with the ups and downs of longer Kondratieff cycles, and that different periods of hegemony and of world political constellations, connected with these Kondratieff cycles, in turn give rise to different constellations of world economic ascent and decline.