Category: Europe

Theory from the South, or Reading the Global Order from the Antipodes

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By John and Jean Comaroff

There appears to be a growing echo, slowly reverberating around the world, that, for good, ill, or both, Africa is the future, a harbinger of Europe鈥檚 history-to-come. Experts may debate the reasons for this: among them, a significant population bulge heavily skewed toward youth; an urban 鈥渞evolution鈥� unique in the current era; burgeoning consumer markets, rising middle classes, and accelerating techno-development; also, a propensity to repurpose material practices both foreign and homegrown, thus to remake modernity for late modern times. Says Keith Hart (2017:2), basing his prediction on the long historical relationship between demography and economy, 鈥淪ooner or later, Africa and Europe will change rank order.鈥� The former 鈥� Africa, the continent that once signified the West鈥檚 prehistoric past and remains a perennial 鈥渂asket case鈥� in the jaundiced eyes of Euro-America 鈥� is now frequently taken to prefigure what lies ahead for humanity at large.

A decade or so ago, our Theory from the South explored this proposition and its implications for the social sciences, one of them being that Africa, as an 鈥渆x-centric鈥� location (Bhabha 1994) and ground-zero of the Global South, has become a privileged axis from which to theorize the emerging world order of the twenty-first century. In so doing, it provoked a great deal of argument and, among northern intellectuals unused to the idea that their hemisphere may not be the font of all knowledge and theory-work, frank skepticism.

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The Changing Face of Imperialism: Colonialism to Contemporary Capitalism

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叠测听Sunanda Sen and

How is imperialism relevant today? How has it mutated over the past century? What are different theoretical and empirical angles through which we can study imperialism? These are the questions we deal with in our edited volume on (2018).

We understand imperialism as a continuing arrangement since the early years of empire-colonies to the prevailing pattern of expropriations, on part of those who wield power vis-脿-vis those who are weak. The pattern of 鈥榦ld imperialism鈥�, in the writings of Hobson, Hilferding and Lenin, were framed in the context of the imperial relations between the ruling nations and their colonies with political subjugation of the latter, captured by force or by commerce, providing the groundwork for their economic domination in the interest of the ruling nations. Forms of such arrogation varied, across regions and over time; including  the early European invasions of South America, use of slaves or indentured labour across oceans, and the draining off of surpluses from colonies by using trade and financial channels. Imperialism, however, has considerably changed its pattern since then, especially with institutional changes in the  prevailing power structure.

The essays in the volume offer a renewed interpretation, which include the alternate interpretations of imperialism and its changing pattern over space and time, incorporating the changing pattern of oppression which reflects the dynamics underlying the specific  patterns of oppression. The pattern can be characterised as 鈥榥ew imperialism鈥� under contemporary capitalism as distinct from its 鈥榦ld鈥� form under colonialism. The varied interpretations of imperialism  as in the literature do not lessen the significance of the common ground underlying the alternate positions, including the diverse pattern of expropriations under imperialism.

The volume offers fourteen chapters by renowned authors. In this blog, we organise them in the following manner: the first five of those deal with the conceptual basis of imperialism from different angles, the next three chapters deal with contemporary imperialism, and then the rest six chapters of book deal with India, colonialism and contemporary issues with imperialism.

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Whose Anger? A Review of Angrynomics

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The recent 鈥榠nsurrection鈥� on Capitol Hill should put an end to any liberal illusions that 2021 would usher in, in Biden鈥檚 words, a return to decency. Surreal images of the roaming the US Senate may yet become one of the defining photographs of the Trump presidency. In many ways it is symbolic of the President himself – and unashamedly atavistic yet, emboldened by , obstructive and corrosive.

Many of these themes are touched upon in Eric Lonergan and Mark Blyth鈥檚 short book . In many senses it is a timely book, published just weeks after the murder of George Floyd and in the midst of the largest global recession since the Second World War, these are fertile grounds for anger. Certainly there is very little to dispute about Lonergan and Blyth鈥檚 premise:

鈥淲e have an abject failure of policy. Rather than presenting a major programme of economic reform, the global political elite has offered nothing substantive, instead choosing either to jump on the bandwagon of nationalism or insist that nothing fundamental is wrong鈥� The political classes, bereft of ideas, are now desperately peddling old ideologies and instincts, or pursuing bizarre distractions like Brexit.鈥�

As a result of this abject failure, people are angry. They are either publicly anger or privately angry. That public anger either manifests itself in moral outrage (think, for instance, of an Extinction Rebellion protest) or tribal rage (for example, and this is used in the book, fans at a football match). Private anger, meanwhile, gives us an insight into the daily micro-stresses of people鈥檚 lives. This is the Lonergan and Blyth typology of anger.

Whose Anger?

While the authors are clear that 鈥渨e need to draw a clear distinction between legitimate public anger and cynical manipulation of tribal anger for political ends鈥� (22), their analysis often fails to live up to the task. Through the centrality of 鈥渓egitimate moral grievances in the Rust Belt鈥� in explaining the election of Trump (25) and the 鈥渞eal stressors鈥� of immigration driving the Brexit vote (111-112), Angrynomics ends up sidestepping important discussions of race for an overly simplistic explanation of class.

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Sino State Capital and the Strengthening of Serbian Stabilitocracy

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Chinese labour workers and their team manager laying the tracks on the Belgrade-Stara Pazova section of the Belgrade-Budapest railway. Source: author鈥檚 own.

The Belgrade-Budapest Railway has been lauded as the flagship Belt and Road project of the wider Central and Eastern European (CEE) region, and as such is promoted by Beijing as a successful template for Sino-CEE cooperation concluded via the 17+1 initiative, established in 2012 to foster relations between China and 17 CEE countries. In its host context of Hungary and Serbia, the investment has been politicised from the get-go, wherein criticism has largely focused on the project鈥檚 violation of EU public procurement , which require competitive dialogue and open-tender processes for projects of substantial size.

We would expect the Belgrade-Budapest Railway to be subject to greater scrutiny in both Hungary, as an EU member state, and Serbia, where of the EU is an important cornerstone of regime legitimacy, stemming from broad-based support for EU integration and cooperation. While this has played out in Hungary where there have been protests and where the EU launched against the construction for non-compliance, the Serbian section has proceeded relatively unhindered.

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Developmental Agency under the Radar: Developmental States and Coalitions in Dependent Market Economies and Low-Tech Sectors

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In a co-authored with L谩szl贸 Bruszt and published in a of Review of International Political Economy, we identify a developmental state in the least likely  of times 鈥� the period of hegemonic neoliberalism in the 1990s and early 2000s 鈥�  and the least likely of places, namely the post-socialist Central Eastern European (CEE) economies conventionally described as FDI-dependent (DMEs). 

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The return of the visible hand: How struggles for economic and political dominance turn state capitalism into authoritarian capitalism

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budapest-parliament-hungarian-parliament-building-hungary-people-politicians-viktor-orban-hungarianBy and

The state has made a return with a vengeance in economic matters in the past decade or so. Mainly due to the success of the Chinese model and the 鈥� less permanent 鈥� strong economic performance of countries like Brazil and Russia, the erstwhile Washington Consensus of the superiority of markets over states as mechanisms of economic coordination has been put in serious doubt.

Scholars have picked up on this trend by increasingly referring to the term (new) 鈥榮tate capitalism鈥�. consider it an undesirable threat to the existing economic world order, while others show how states can effectively promote development and economic growth.

While the term state capitalism has been useful to into debates in political economy, the term itself is not unproblematic. Indeed, there is a risk that it perpetuates, rather than surpasses, the sterile debate about the state versus the market. Put bluntly: If there is such a thing as state capitalism, what does non-state capitalism look like?Read More »

The latest significant step in the UK鈥檚 development agenda

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Michael Haig DFiD CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

By Susan Newman听补苍诲

Johnson鈥檚 announcement on 16 June that Department for International Development (DfID) would be merged into the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) has been met with criticism and condemnation from aid charities, NGOs and humanitarian organisations. By institutionally tying aid to UK foreign policy objectives, the merger would shift humanitarian aid away from the immediate needs for relief and longer-term development.

This latest move to merge the departments should be seen as the latest, and a very significant, step in the restructuring and redefinition of British Official Development Assistance (ODA) to serve the interests of British capital investment abroad, that has been taking place over the last decade. These developments need to be considered within a wider shift in development policy that has been shaped by the demand for new assets by investors in the global North in the context of a global savings glut that has grown out of economic slowdown.Read More »

Structural polarisation and path dependent development models in the EU

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The macroeconomic consequences of the CODID-19 pandemic in the EU economy are materializing against the background of underlying structural challenges. Ensuring long-term convergence and stability between EU countries will require coordinated fiscal, wage and industrial policies. This blog post finds that EU countries are stuck on different trajectories in their economic development. Core countries, periphery countries, East European countries and financial hubs have responded differently to increasing European economic integration. This leaves Europe mired in structural polarisation, where political tension relates to diverging economic developments and increasing gaps in the evolution of technological capabilities. As a consequence, counteracting polarisation and promoting convergence requires a coordinated strategy that includes fiscal, wage and industrial policies.

Several EU countries were already on diverging macroeconomic development paths when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, but the macroeconomic consequences of the crisis must be expected to further accelerate existing divergences. Even though large parts of the EU experienced an economic upswing in the years running up to the COVID-19 pandemic, this temporary upswing in the business cycle served to mask the underlying tendencies towards structural polarisation in Europe, which will become more apparent over the course of the current crisis.

In a, I argue with Claudius Gr盲bner, Jakob Kapeller and Bernhard Sch眉tz that essential factors for explaining the long-term polarisation between EU countries are to be found in the unequal regulatory conditions in the context of the European 鈥榬ace for the best location鈥� (for example, in the areas of labour market, tax and corporate law or financial market regulation), as well as in the different technological capabilities across EU countries.

We show that technological capabilities in EU countries are distributed unequally; EU countries remain structurally polarised, i.e. they are that contradict the political goal of ensuring convergence and stability in the EU. Notwithstanding short- and medium-term cyclical developments, existing differences in technological capabilities will continue to fuel a process of economic disintegration in the EU if policy-makers fail to counteract the polarisation trend by introducing a coordinated policy strategy that should include fiscal, wage and industrial policies.Read More »