Crises and policy responses within the political trilemma: Europe, 1929–36 and 2008–11

The recent debate on the Eurozone failed to appreciate a particular characteristic of European crisis experiences, namely their fundamentally political character. To make my argument, I borrow from Dani Rodrik (2000) the framework of a “political trilemma” between cross-border economic integration, national institutions and democracy (in the sense of mass politics) and discuss its relation to the more commonly known “macroeconomic trilemma” as well as some limitations of the framework. The recent experience of a European debt crisis and the experience of Europe's Great Depression can be interpreted as a “political trilemma”: both reflect the problem of designing effective policy responses to major economic shocks within the environment of deep economic integration across political boundaries and the regime choices that this involves. Within this framework I highlight some aspects of the 1930s that are informative to the policy choices in Europe today. Once we accept that some policy choices should be avoided, attention should be shifted to the remaining options and the obstacles that prevent their implementation, notably the challenge to transform democracy beyond national borders.     

Between Survival and Revolution: Another Community Development System is Possible

Abstract: The tensions between capitalism and community have created a situation where, from the depths of multinational corporate headquarters to the diverse urban streets of America, the latter is now being co‐opted by the former. Couple this with the current neoliberal order being imposed on the world by multilateral institutions, high‐ranking government officials, and the corporate elite, and you have an economic imperial agenda being carried out in all corners of the globe. In this article, I take a dialectical and investigative approach in critiquing the neoliberal ideology that dictates how the work of community development corporations is funded and controlled. Much of today's reality within community development consists of an environment where funding restrictions undermine community power, community development trumps community organizing, professionalization creates a disconnect between community development staff and community members, and competition for funding forces organizations to spend more time on funders' needs than the needs of the communities they serve. J P Morgan Chase is profiled to illustrate how economic neoliberal globalization and so‐called community capitalism shape the modern community development movement. I conclude with an analysis of how empowerment, organizational democracy, and collective ownership have the potential to open up spaces of hope for urban communities in the United States who have been forced to live under the hegemony of economic neoliberal globalization.     

The euro crisis and European citizenship: The euro 2001–2012 – celebration or commemoration? (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

The Eurozone crisis has highlighted the problems of European economic integration, but what effects is it having on social cohesion in the European Union? Using symbolic, historical and anthropological perspectives this article examines the relationship between the single currency and European citizenship. I argue that the roots of the crisis lie in the euro's origins. Economic and monetary union (EMU) was an assemblage of two very different rationales: one economic and based on neoliberal assumptions, the other political and geared towards forging social cohesion among Europeans. Binding Europe through a common currency was always a risky endeavour, placing heavy expectations on the identity‐effects of money. EU leaders also seemed curiously oblivious to the possible negative effects that weaknesses in the euro might have for European solidarity. Drawing on theories of money and its role as a technology of citizenship and symbolic boundary marker, I argue that the euro continues to symbolize European integration, only now it has come to symbolize the cleavages and tensions that divide Europe. Paradoxically, one effect of the Eurozone crisis is not fragmentation but an acceleration of the deepening of European economic governance. However, the centralization this entails imposes heavy costs on the EU's peripheral members and raises concerns about the future of democracy in Europe.     

Restructuring Intra-urban Space during China's Transition. Jian Feng

An American geographer whose research focuses on Europe reports on changes in geographical patterns and trends in merchandise export trade after the dismantling of political- economic divisions prevailing during the Cold War and their replacement by European political and economic integration as well as globalization. Analysis and comparison of international trade data for the years 1960 and 2010 reveal a dramatic expansion in the role of Germany and China in European merchandise trade, accompanied by a decline in the importance of the United States and United Kingdom. The author also demonstrates how some countries such as the Netherlands have expanded their exports to a broader range of European countries, whereas others appear to be consolidating their roles as leaders of regional trade blocs (e.g., Italy in Southeastern Europe).     

Metelkova as Autonomous Heterotopia

This article examines conflicts concerning urban space, focusing on relationships between autonomous space and neoliberal urbanism through the empirical example of the cultural centre AKC Metelkova Mesto in Ljubljana, Slovenia. Through a thematic discourse analysis of activist interviews and collective statements by activist groups connected to Metelkova, research questions concern how urban conflict is constructed from the vantage point of autonomous space; what role autonomous space is assigned in relation to such conflict; and how tensions and antagonisms within the autonomous space can be understood. Theoretically we engage in a reinterpretation of the notion of heterotopia in conjunction with critical urban theory, analysing Metelkova as an autonomous heterotopia. Further, we argue that theoretisations of autonomous spaces need to consider experiences from Central and Eastern Europe, in which the conditions are shaped and constructed in conjunction with particular configurations of abruptly implemented neoliberal governance and the rise of the authoritarianism.     

Towards the Baghdad Pact: South Asia and Middle East Defence in the Gold War, 19477ndash;1955

This article illustrates US policy on European integration and the European Economic Community (EEC) by focusing on the General Agreement on Tarriff and Trade (GATT) Kennedy Round negotiations (1963–7). However underestimated in the history of international relations, GATT provides in fact an outstanding framework for analysing the foreign policy of its members. Whilst analyses of the Round per se already exist, no scholar thus far has focused on US policy towards European integration. Moreover, no previous author has utilised the European archives and has examined the stances of the EEC. This article shows that US support for European integration, which both Kennedy and Johnson followed at the behest of the ‘Europeanists’ in their respective administrations, conditioned the bargaining position of the United States in Geneva. The US negotiators tried to enhance US trade interests while at the same time attempting to encourage European regional integration. In so doing, the United States played a role in the strengthening of European regional integration by favouring the unity of the area. Moreover, contrary to previous accounts, this article shows that US negotiators were able to direct and move forward a complicated negotiation, showing Washington's leadership. The article concludes by showing that the Kennedy Round ended a period of about twenty years during which the United States acted to promote the unity of Western Europe. At the end of the 1960s, with the worsening of the US economic conditions, the tension in transatlantic relations over monetary and security issues, and the strength that the EEC demonstrated during the Kennedy Round, ‘the Europeanists’ were no longer able to prevail with their line in the internal discussions. This change became apparent when the Nixon administration shifted to a more detached and ambiguous policy towards European integration.     

The ‘Girl Effect’ and martial arts: social entrepreneurship and sport,gender and development in Uganda

In recent years, three notable trends have emerged in the gender and development landscape: the increasing use of sport as a tool to achieve gender and development objectives (SGD); the expanding involvement of transnational corporations (TNCs) in creating, funding and implementing development programs; and the ‘girling’ of development. The last trend has largely been facilitated by the proliferation of the global ‘Girl Effect’ campaign, or ‘the unique potential of 600 million adolescent girls to end poverty for themselves and the world’ (Girl Effect 2011). This article reports on findings from a global ethnography – involving semi-structured interviews, participant observation and document analysis – that considered how sport-oriented Girl Effect interventions impact the lives of girls they target. Using a Girl Effect-focused partnership among a TNC (based in Western Europe), an international nongovernmental organization (NGO) (based in Western Europe) and a Southern NGO (based in Uganda) as a case study, this article examines how SGD programs for Ugandan girls encourage them to become ‘entrepreneurs of themselves’ (Rose 1999) equipped to survive in the current global neoliberal climate using social entrepreneurial tactics such as training to be martial arts instructors combined with activities such as cultivating nuts. Results show how Girl Effect-oriented SGD programs that focus on social entrepreneurship tend to overlook the broader structural inequalities and gender relations that marginalize girls in the first place. I conclude by suggesting that future studies must further explore the socio-economic, cultural and political implications and consequences that social entrepreneurship and ‘economic forms’ of SGD interventions hold for girls.     

Economic Regionalism and Social Stabilisation: the International Labour Organization and Western Europe in the Early Post-War Years

The International Labour Organization (ILO) played a concrete role in shaping the mechanisms of international economic co-operation created in Western Europe in the early post-war years. Its tripartite composition and orientation towards social dialogue were perfectly in tune with the productivist principles sponsored by the United States after the Second World War, which largely permeated European economic integration. Thanks to its solid know-how in the field, the ILO made a key contribution in promoting labour mobility, by helping the organisation and co-ordination of national employment services and vocational training systems and, most of all, by assisting institutions such as the Organisation for European Economic Co-operation (OEEC) and the European Communities in implementing freedom of circulation between their member countries. At the same time, in the mid-1950s it offered theoretical support to the economic liberalism on which the European common market was being modelled, arguing against claims for social harmonisation as a precondition to economic integration, and thus contributing to giving European co-operation the shape which still characterises it today.     

Austerity,Right Populism,and the Crisis of Labour in Canada

In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, neoliberal governments embarked on austerity programs that include reducing public services, imposing public sector wage restraint, and reorganizing public sector working conditions and labour relations. In this context of economic crisis and austerity, populism has risen across North America and Europe on both the right and left of the political spectrum. The rise of right populism in particular confronts unions with key organizational and strategic challenges as neoliberal governments seek to mobilize right populist discourses in their efforts to restructure work and labour relations. Using a socio‐geographic framework, and based on an examination of post‐2008 legislative and policy measures undertaken at the federal, provincial, municipal levels in Canada, this paper explores the nexus between “uneven austerity”, rising populism, and union strategic capacities. We examine this intersection of austerity and populism at multiple scales to reveal the implications for organized labour.     

Hybrid Uptakes of Neoliberal Conservation in Namibian Tourism‐based Development

Neoliberal conservation schemes involving nature‐based tourism are implemented throughout the developing world to address rural poverty. Drawing on socio‐economic surveys and in‐depth interviews, this article uses the case of Uibasen Conservancy in Namibia to investigate social responses to neoliberal conservation. We find that people's aspirations for upward economic and social mobility lead them to participate in neoliberal conservation projects in an attempt to combine economic opportunities created by nature‐based tourism with traditional livelihood strategies. In this case, certain aspects of neoliberal conservation are perceived as a source of hope for non‐elites seeking to achieve economic self‐sufficiency and to ascend social hierarchies. We find that intra‐community power struggles dominate discourses of discontent and local‐level conflict which consequently masks the disruptive and anomic forces of the global tourism industry. We additionally provide insight into specific social contexts that may increase the allure of neoliberal conservation and explain why marginalized individuals may embrace some neoliberal logics despite — or, perhaps, because of — their disruptive tendencies.     

Who cares in Nicaragua? A care regime in an exclusionary social policy context

In Latin American countries with historically strong social policy regimes (such as those in the Southern Cone), neoliberal policies are usually blamed for the increased burden of female unpaid work. However, studying the Nicaraguan care regime in two clearly defined periods — the Sandinista and the neoliberal eras — suggests that this argument may not hold in the case of countries with highly familialist social policy regimes. Despite major economic, political and policy shifts, the role of female unpaid work, both within the family and in the community, remains persistent and pivotal, and was significant long before the onset of neoliberal policies. Nicaragua's care regime has been highly dependent on the ‘community’ or ‘voluntary’ work of mostly women. This has also been, and continues to be, vital for the viability of many public social programmes.     

From the Panama Canal to Post‐Fordism: Producing Temporary Labor Migrants Within and Beyond Agriculture in the United States (1904–2013)

In the historical study of modern American capitalism, labor unfreedom in agriculture has been conceptualized as an exception to liberal labor relations in the post‐slavery polity, from debt peonage to the threat of deportation from workplaces populated by non‐citizen migrants. At the same time, state‐enforced labor compulsions and restrictions are increasingly part and parcel of what scholars call neoliberal exceptionalism. This article argues that agricultural and neoliberal exceptionalisms are related, by tracing the historical genealogy and juridical production of a restrictive work status, the deportable temporary labor migrant, across political economies in the modern United States, from imperial construction in the Panama Canal Zone, to agriculture, to the knowledge economy. Contrary to existing notions of temporary work visas as a new form of unfreedom in neoliberalized advanced capitalist states, I show how the threat of deportation is older and rooted in the rise of the liberal regulatory state in a post‐slavery, yet persistently racial capitalist political economy. The import of understanding this history of government intervention increases as the liberal regulatory state's coercive logics and practices intensify and circulate in agriculture and under a post‐Fordist regime of accumulation, reproducing racial capitalism in the labor process.     

European Socialist regimes facing globalisation and European co-operation: dilemmas and responses – introduction

So far, historians working on the two sides of what used to be a divided Europe have had considerable contacts but they have operated – at least in the realm of international history and the history of European integration – with largely separate agendas and networks. The authors of this special-issue introduction have both come to work on the increasing interaction between East and West in the framework of détente, and feel that the time is ripe for a scholarly analysis of the concepts, strategies and approaches of the Socialist regimes to pan-European co-operation in the long 1970s. Through a collaborative research effort, specialists on specific Socialist countries and historians of Western Europe (and particularly of its integrative experience) are brought together in this special issue of the European Review of History to bridge the existing gap between two parallel strands of scholarship. Their close collaboration is the key to the conceptual development of a broader view of pan-European co-operation against the background of global economic trends.     

THE ART OF NEOLIBERALIZING PARK MANAGEMENT: COMMODIFICATION,POLITICS AND HOTEL CONSTRUCTION IN PALLASYLLÄSTUNTURI NATIONAL PARK,FINLAND

Following the growth of nature‐based tourism, national parks and other protected areas have become important tourist attractions. This article examines the legislative process of revising the Act on Pallas‐Yllästunturi National Park, located in northern Finland, to enable the renovation and enlargement of the old hotel. The first draft of the government bill published in 2008 led to widespread public opposition, and thus, construction rights were reduced substantially before the new Act was passed in 2010. The main question of this article is why the Finnish government changed its policy on national park governance that had existed for decades. We assess the extent to which the changes in park governance can be interpreted as part of the worldwide neoliberalization of nature, as well as what kind of forces and values work against neoliberal management ideologies. We examine how the process of revising the Act proceeded in the Parliament and analyse on what grounds the hotel construction was defended and opposed in the discussions. Finally we ponder how the political disagreements are explained by neoliberal frames. We conclude that the neoliberal element was one part of the process, but it intertwined with local political reality creating results hardly resembling textbook definitions of neoliberal or classic liberal ideals. Mixed ideological principles, contextual economic conditions, and complex dependencies between individual actors create cases which must be analysed carefully to find out if neoliberal elements really exist and how they are transformed. Close relations between economic and political actors and creation of economic monopolies should raise doubts if vocabulary of liberalization is just a disguise of actions supporting hidden political and economic interests.     

INDIA,THE GREAT DIVERGENCE,AND THE WRECKAGE OF MODERNITY

Research over the last two decades on the economic divergence of Europe and China before the nineteenth century has stimulated much recent scholarship investigating similar diverging paths between Europe and India. Following the lead of Kenneth Pomeranz, this work focuses on the demographic, ecological, and geographical factors in this divergence and argues for the direct comparability of the most economically advanced parts of Europe with such places as Gujarat and Mysore in Mughal India, which showed considerable proto‐industrial development before their relative economic decline and deindustrialization in the nineteenth century. The book under review approaches this topic by deploying a modified Marxian‐Weberian framework and draws on extensive research in Indian and British archives to argue that both Gujarat and Mysore might have embarked on paths of sustained economic growth through natural commercial expansion and deliberate mercantilist statecraft hindered by the East India Company. Despite resurging interest in Marx, much recent work in global economic history highlights the limitations of modernization theories drawn from a long tradition of Western social science indebted to the theories of Marx and Weber.     

追寻西欧市场经济的中世纪起源——评徐浩著《中世纪西欧工商业研究》

徐浩著《中世纪西欧工商业研究》一书,旨在探讨中世纪中期开始西欧如何和为何逐步走上市场经济的道路。该书将社会转型问题从资本主义的起源转换为市场经济的兴起,在理论上充分吸收了经济学的历史经济学理论和经济社会史的商业化理论,着眼于中世纪西欧工商业史中一系列既独立又相互依托的重要专题,探讨中世纪西欧工商业存在和发展的特定历史环境、商业诸问题以及工业诸问题。该书的研究特色体现为对中世纪西欧作长时段的考察,关注普通民众的命运,研究方法上注重比较,主张对社会经济变化的原因作多视角的阐释。     

Caring for ethics and the politics of health care reform in the United States

It is increasingly recognized that the work of (unpaid) informal caregivers constitutes an important contribution to care delivery in the United States and in many other societies. Accounting for the range of social, economic and political circumstances in which this care is produced has become the focus of a number of academics and others theorizing the ‘third sector’, or the ‘social economy’. However, some scholars are concerned that the increasing attention paid to the role of informal economic activity will either legitimate neoliberal state withdrawal from social reproduction or facilitate continued invasive commodification of relationships that were formerly part of social life. While these are possible dangers, J.K. Gibson-Graham's diverse economy framework and theory of community economy allow us to understand the social and economic conditions that support, rather than undermine, a caregiver's fidelity to the process of caring. Given the size of the informal caregiving sector, it would remain an important aspect of the care economy even if the United States developed a national health care system. It is important to understand informal caregivers as economic subjects, with their desires, motivations, hopes and anxieties. What emerges from my qualitative research is an understanding of informal caregivers as ethical subjects who operate best in a network of collective recognition and support. Informal caregivers are neither self-interested economic actors nor (necessarily) victims of failed social support. Rather, they are, potentially, agents of change in a new politics of health care reform.     

Isomorphism and legitimacy in Spanish contract archaeology: the free-fall of an institutional model and the caveat of change

Societies today face multiple challenges stemming from the conflict between ‘market efficiency’ and ‘social welfare’ that are, in turn, the result of neoliberal policies affecting institutional legitimacy. Complex institutional logics associated with organisational responses are part of the early sociological debate about how organisations cope with established institutionalism in order to maintain legitimacy and survive. By employing an institutional framework and historical event sequencing approach, we aim to understand whether normative pressures can be understood to exert an influence of embeddedness and change. The paper analyses the emergence of Spanish contract archaeology after the 1990s. This new organisational pattern in the field of archaeology was a complex institutionalised process that gave rise to a new labour market. The economic crisis starting in 2008 has impacted this sector severely, to the extent that it is, at the time of writing, on the brink of extinction.