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The Curve of American Power
Will strategic failure in Iraq hasten a decline in US hegemony? Immanuel Wallerstein surveys the global landscape that might emerge from the longue durée of American rule, with rival regional powers competing for energy, water and markets in an unstructured world-political order.
Finance and the Fourth Dimension
The concept of alternative futures, banished from postmodernity’s eternal present, flourishes on the financial summits of the global economy. Robin Blackburn argues against a neo-Luddite dismissal of the new financial engineering techniques by the Left, while coolly assessing the economic and social costs of their current configurations.
Choking the South
Charting the impact of fluctuating currencies, volatile stock markets and interest rates on the developing world since the end of the Bretton Woods system, Robert Wade contends that untrammelled mobility of capital—private funds above all—reinforces dynamics of debt and underdevelopment.
Superintending Global Capital
The end of US hegemony has been announced more often even than that of neoliberalism. Yet American power persists, with little resistance so far from rival centres of accumulation. Rationales and indices of the continuing role of the United States as overlord of world capital.
Imbalances of the Global Economy
Wide-ranging account of the growing disequilibria within an increasingly integrated global capitalism. Andrew Glyn takes the measure of China's still gigantic catch-up potential, in comparison to previous Asian NIEs, and assesses the impact of its rise across different sectors of the world economy.
Dividing the Big Family Assets
Where is the PRC heading? One of its leading intellectual iconoclasts, after describing his origins in the Cultural Revolution, offers a long-range comparative perspective on the Chinese state’s strategy for land and industry today. The divisions in the intelligentsia and the fate of the peasantry, the overwhelming majority of the country, as China enters the WTO.
The Social and Political Economy of Global Turbulence
In a landmark engagement with Robert Brenner’s account of the long downturn of the world economy since the 70s, Giovanni Arrighi lays out a social and political economy of the roles of labour unrest, national liberation and corporate financialization in the crisis of the post-war order, and the prospects for a militarized US hegemony today.
Pacific Panopticon
The Filipino analyst and organizer of Focus on the Global South, veteran of the years of Allende and Marcos, discusses the prospects for the World Social Forum after September 11, arguing for the need to link protests against the IMF and WTO to campaigns against US military expansion.
Demos and Cosmopolis
As representative democracy spreads it is steadily thinning: the nation-states that have been its traditional framework are losing much of their power. Popular sovereignty can only be recovered, Daniele Archibugi argues, in a cosmopolitan order antithetical to its simulacrum in the ‘international community’ of today.
Globalization and September 11
How far might the current conjuncture alter received notions of globalization? Michael Mann considers the pattern of ‘ostracizing imperialism’ and the springs of Islamic resistance to it, amid wider shifts in the sources of social power—military, economic, political, ideological—at the threshold of the new century.
Neoliberal Cosmopolitanism
A reigning doctrine of international relations proclaims that, despite everything, the world is entering a new epoch of hopeful cosmopolitanism—narrow state sovereignty being overcome by the common and, where necessary, armed resolve of a ‘Pacific Union’ of democratic nations. What then of the asymmetric hegemony of the United States?
Will Global Capitalism be Anglo-Saxon Capitalism?
A decade ago, German and Japanese capitalism were widely held superior in economic performance and social cohesion to American or British. Now the stockmarket-based, deregulated US/UK model has the upper hand in market competition. Will it force all other societies to conform to its rules? Ronald Dore doubts it.
The Boom and the Bubble
In the last four years, the US economy has posted its best performance since the sixties. What is the connexion between the formidable boom in the real economy and the historically unprecedented bubble on the stock market? Could the inflation of asset values far beyond the rise in corporate earnings be preparing a Japanese-style nemesis?
Running the World on Windows
Reviewing Daniele Archibugi’s case for a ‘cosmopolitical democracy’ in NLR 4, Geoffrey Hawthorn argues nation-states can neither be wished away, nor shadowed in parallel by a global civil society: they remain the Hobbesian precondition of a realistic politics, which Kantian prospects set aside at their peril.
Cosmopolitical Democracy
When the nation-state loses many of its traditional powers, Daniele Archibugi argues, democracy requires a cosmopolitan political authority above it. But current ‘humanitarian’ interventions do not fulfil such higher norms—they betray them, as the self-arrogated prerogatives of the few.
The New Imperial State
Globalization is the watchword of the moment. Does it mean the irresistible sway of markets over states—or are welfare regimes in Europe or dirigiste governments in East Asia still potentially robust? Neither, Leo Panitch argues: the reality is an unprecedented dominance of the United States over world capital flows and allied political systems alike.
Japan’s Economic Crisis
The 20th century’s most dynamic economy has fallen into prolonged paralysis. What are the causes of Japanese stagnation, and why have the country’s rulers reacted so phlegmatically to it? Taggart Murphy highlights the potentially explosive interdependency between Japanese recession and the American bull market.
Managed Openness: Beyond Neoliberal Globalism
“There are two recurring themes that continue to stir interest in the topic of economic globalization. One concerns the character of the global system that is apparently being created through the integration of production, finance, and trade. Can the world economy be selfequilibrating, as many of the more . . .” read more
The Last Utopia
“John Gray originally came to prominence in the 1980s as one of the most formidable and articulate defenders of the anti-rationalist tradition of liberalism which had been revived by Hayek and his associates in the Mont Pélerin Society after 1945 and had subsequently become an important intellectual strand . . .” read more
Capitalism at the Turn of the Century: Regulation Theory and the Challenge of Social Change
“My book, A Theory of Capitalist Regulation, was written more than twenty years ago. The new edition perhaps testifies to the longevity of the ideas it sought to communicate. These two decades, however, have not been kind to anyone trying to make sense of the erratic and sometimes . . .” read more
The Korean Crisis and the End of 'Late' Development
“The Asian economic crisis has created a watershed in contemporary history, where questions long buried by the demise of Western communism and a militant Left in the democratic countries amid an appallingly self-congratulatory liberal triumphalism, now come sharply to the fore. A systematic failure of capitalism has struck . . .” read more