This contribution is a slightly re-worked version of a paper given on the occasion of the 50 th anniversary of the Italian Association of Procedural Law (Florence, 1998), and referring to a time when European economic integration was high on the political agenda and the focus was on the need to harmonise certain aspects of the member States' rules of civil procedure. 1 Considerable headway has been made since, although it was not then felt that the time was ripe for the approach recommended. No

more »

... doubt, however, recent developments in the field of EC competence will result in greater convergence of procedural law in the member States in years to come. The globalisation of the economy has accelerated in the course of the past decade, and the arguments which paved the way for the approximation of procedural law in a regional setting (above all, within the European Union but also, albeit to a lesser degree, within Mercosur) retain much of their relevance when pondered in the framework of more recent attempts to achieve a measure of harmonisation in the field of procedural law world-wide. One such project is the project sponsored by the ALI and UNIDROIT to draft Principles and Rules of Transnational Civil Procedure which, even in their present form, hold out realistic hopes of a successful outcome in the not too distant future.