The political economy of the European periphery furnishes empirical content to the thesis that the European integrational project locks its member countries into the relations of unequal labor exchange. Derived from crosscountry economic inequality and facilitated through international trade, such a scenario allows the affluent member states to take economic advantage over their less developed and, in this sense, peripheral trading partners. Accordingly, this chapter provides an analytical framework explaining the existing imperialist design as an antithesis to the idealized European Social Project. It explains why European integration demands for ever-expanding geographical coverage and why the peripheral countries' benefits are conditional upon much larger benefits draw by the core. Contrarily, through the analysis of the entire economic cycle, this chapter proves an argument that economic losses generally remain a peripheral concern. This asymmetrical crosscountry benefit distribution exhibits that the European integration is led by underlying economic forces which, instead of equality, solidarity, and cohesion, are structurally rooted in the crosscountry dependence and geographical value transfer, both of which benefit the core.