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European welfare states are undergoing profound change, driven by globalisation, technical changes, and population ageing. More immediately the aftermath of the Great Recession and unprecedented levels of immigration have imposed additional pressures. This book examines welfare state transformations across a representative range of European countries and at the EU level, and considers likely new directions in social policy. It reviews the dominant neo-liberal austerity response and discusses social investment, fightback, welfare chauvinism and protectionism. It argues that the class solidarities and cleavages that shaped the development of welfare states are no longer powerful. Tensions surrounding divisions between old and young, women and men, immigrants and denizens, and the winners in a new more competitive world and those who feel left behind are becoming steadily more important. European countries have entered a period of greater political instability and this is reflected in policy directions. Austerity predominates nearly everywhere, but patterns of social investment, protectionism, neo-Keynesian intervention and fightback vary between countries. We identify areas of convergence and difference in European welfare state futures.

Between 1998 and 2010, an unprecedented wave of left-of-center candidates reached power in Latin America. In spite of a shared concern for social inequality and opposition to the Washington Consensus, their governments pursued dramatically different economic policies. Why did some governments reverse neoliberal economic policies amid the supremacy of market orthodoxy? Why did others embrace market orthodoxy after denouncing it for decades from the opposition? Why were nationalizations, price controls, and trade barriers implemented in Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Venezuela, but not in Brazil, Chile, Nicaragua, and Uruguay? More generally, what are the conditions that make the initiation and maintenance of economic reforms likely? In answering these questions, this book conducts a theoretical and empirical study of economic reforms in Latin America. It takes stock of the left’s economic transformations in the region and challenges widely held views that resource dependence, economic crises, or strong executives are responsible for them. Instead, it argues that party systems are crucial in explaining reform: when institutionalized, party systems are likely to preserve the prevailing market orthodoxy; when in disarray, they are conducive to drastic economic changes. Marshalling evidence drawn from ten countries and case studies of the governments of Ricardo Lagos in Chile, Lula in Brazil, and Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, this study not only sheds light on one of the most puzzling aspects of contemporary Latin America, but also advances our general understanding of the left as a political ideology, economic reforms, and party systems beyond the region.

This book advances a new distributional framework to guide the evaluation and design of environmental policies. Drawing on capabilities theory, and especially on Martha Nussbaum’s capabilities approach to justice, the book proposes that environmental policies should aim to secure the basic capabilities that make it possible for people to live a flourishing and dignified human life. Holland establishes the protection of the natural environment as central to securing these capabilities and then goes on to consider the implications for debates in environmental valuation, policy justification, and administrative rulemaking. In each of these areas, she demonstrates how her “capabilities approach to social and environmental justice” can minimize substantive and procedural inequities that result from how we evaluate and design environmental policies in contemporary society. Holland’s proposals include valuing environmental goods and services as comparable—but not commensurable—across the same dimension of wellbeing of different people, justifying environmental policies with respect to both the capability thresholds they secure and the capability ceilings they establish, and subjecting the outcomes of participatory decisions in the administrative rulemaking process to stronger substantive standards. In developing and applying this unique approach to justice, Holland primarily focuses on questions of domestic environmental policy. However, in the closing chapter she turns to theoretical debates about international climate policy and sketches how her approach to justice could inform both the philosophical grounding and practical application of efforts to achieve global climate justice. Engaging current debates in environmental policy and political theory, the book is a sustained exercise of both applied and environmental political theory.

Recent elections in the advanced Western democracies have undermined the basic foundations of political systems that had previously beaten back all challenges—from both the Left and the Right. The election of Donald Trump to the US presidency, only months after the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union, signaled a dramatic shift in the politics of the rich democracies. This book traces the evolution of this shift and argues that it is a long-term result of abandoning the postwar model of egalitarian capitalism in the 1970s. That shift entailed weakening the democratic process in favor of an opaque, technocratic form of governance that allows voters little opportunity to influence policy. With the financial crisis of the late 2000s, these arrangements became unsustainable, as incumbent politicians were unable to provide solutions to economic hardship. Electorates demanded change, and it had to come from outside the system. Using a comparative approach, the text explains why different kinds of anti-system politics emerge in different countries and how political and economic factors impact the degree of electoral instability that emerges. Finally, it discusses the implications of these changes, arguing that the only way for mainstream political forces to survive is for them to embrace a more activist role for government in protecting societies from economic turbulence.

The book examines key intellectuals who were directly and actively involved in the process of designing a European monetary union that would be sustainable. Their role was distinguishable from that of the political founders and drivers of this process and from that of expert advisers. They were embedded in the process of giving substance to monetary union and gained influence through their formidable resources of character and intellect. The selected architects include Raymond Barre, Jacques Delors, Roy Jenkins, Alexandre Lamfalussy, Robert Marjolin, Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa, Karl-Otto Pöhl, Hans Tietmeyer, Robert Triffin, and Pierre Werner. The book looks at their intellectual biographies, the ideas to which they became committed, their network-building skills, and their practical involvement in the issues of monetary integration and union. The principal emphasis is on their individual contributions, their legacies as seen from the vantage point of the Euro Area crisis, and the prescience and adequacy of their views about the appropriate foundations of EMU. The book considers the strengths and limits of intellectual biography and the thorny question of the roles of structure and agency in historical explanation. It also reflects on the question of the architects’ share of blame in the design flaws of European monetary union.

Following the global financial crisis and repeated scandals, US and UK state managers made substantial efforts to reform the culture of their banking sectors. This book argues though that they focused on an extremely narrow definition of bank culture. They did so for two reasons: firstly, because the structural pressures of financialization—which are a far more important driver of the problematic features of bank culture in Anglo-America—are harder to remedy; but secondly, state managers also used their bank culture response to tackle a legitimacy crisis facing their institutions of government. In so doing they abdicated responsibility for the real problems—of inequality and instability—associated with their respective financial systems. Drawing on interviews with over 150 bankers this book explains the strategies employed by state managers before then examining what has and has not changed in the culture of banking in the US and UK.

States and banks have traditionally maintained close ties. At various points in time, states have used banks to manage their economies and soak up government debt, while banks enjoyed regulatory forbearance, restricted competition and implicit or explicit guarantees from their home governments. The political foundations of banks have thus been powerful and enduring, with actors on both sides of the aisle reluctant to sever relations. The central argument of this book, however, is that in the world’s largest integrated market, Europe, political ties between states and banks have been transformed. Specifically, through a combination of post-communist transition, monetary union, and economic crisis, states in Europe no longer wield preponderant influence over their banks. In the East, high levels of foreign bank ownership have disrupted politically infused bank–state ties, while in the Eurozone, European Banking Union has supra-nationalized bank governance. Banking on Markets explains why we have witnessed the radical denationalization of this politically vital sector, as well as the consequences for economic volatility and policy autonomy. Contrary to expectations, marketized bank–state ties and elevated foreign bank ownership levels mitigated volatility in Europe’s recent economic crises. But marketized bank–state ties also limit national economic policy discretion. The findings from Europe have implications for other world regions, which, to varying degrees, have also experienced intensified pressure on their traditional models of domestic political control over finance.

Does globalization erode the nation state's capacity to act? Are nation states forced to change their policies even if this goes against the democratic will of their electorates? How does government action change under conditions of globalization? Questions like these have not only featured highly in political debates in recent years, but also in academic discourse. This book contributes to that debate. The general question it addresses is whether globalization leads to policy convergence — a central, but contested topic in the debate, as theoretical arguments can be advanced both in favour of and against the likelihood of such a development. More specifically, the book contains detailed empirical case studies of four countries (the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Switzerland) in a policy area where state action has been particularly challenged by the emergence of world-wide, around-the-clock financial markets in the last few decades, namely that of the regulation and supervision of the banking industry. Based on careful analysis of historical developments, specific challenges, the character of policy networks and institutions, and their interaction in the political process, this book argues that nation states still possess considerable room for manoeuvre in pursuing their policies. Even if they choose supranational coordination and cooperation, their national institutional configurations still function as filters in the globalization process.

We live in an increasingly prosperous world, yet the estimated number of undernourished people has risen, and will continue to rise with the doubling of food prices. A large majority of those affected are living in India. Why have strategies to combat hunger, especially in India, failed so badly? How did a nation that prides itself on booming economic growth come to have half of its preschool population undernourished? Using the case study of a World Bank nutrition project in India, this book takes on these questions and probes the issues surrounding development assistance, strategies to eliminate undernutrition, and how hunger should be fundamentally understood and addressed. Throughout the book, the underlying tension between choice and circumstance is explored. How much are individuals able to determine their life choices? How much should policy-makers take underlying social forces into account when designing policy? This book examines the possibilities and obstacles to eliminating child hunger. This book is not just about nutrition, it is an attempt to uncover the workings of power through a close look at the structures, discourses, and agencies through which nutrition policy operates. In this process, the source of nutrition policy in the World Bank is traced to those affected by the policies in India.

This book takes seriously the frequently maligned and trivialized global beauty economy, just as it has become one of the most important worldwide industries. Through the lens of beauty products, practices, and ideas of youth in Guadalajara, Mexico, the book analyzes whether and how beauty norms are changing in relation to the globalizing beauty economy; who benefits and who loses from beauty globalization; and what this means for gender norms among youth. Weaving together an ethnographic approach to understanding beauty practices, global political economy, and feminist analysis, the book presents a feminist analysis of the global economy of beauty. Rather than a sign of frivolity, the beauty economy is intimately connected to youths’ social and economic development. As in the popular fiesta de quince años, a fifteen-year-old girl’s birthday party, cosmetic makeovers have become a modern rite of passage for girls, enabling social connections and differentiations, as well as entrepreneurial activities. The global beauty economy is a phenomenon generated by young people, mostly women, laboring in, teaching, and consuming beauty. Globalization in the beauty economy is a phenomenon propelled by youth, eager for belonging and originality, using every mechanism at their disposal to look good. Contrary to popular wisdom, globalization in the beauty economy is not homogenizing beauty standards to a Western ideal; it is diversifying beauty standards. Globalization, combined with youths’ desires for uniqueness, is enabling the spread of a diversity of beauty cultures, including alternative visions of gender-appropriate looks and behavior.

This book shows how the privatization of politics assumes a new dimension when billionaires wield power in world politics, which requires a re-thinking of individual agency in International Relations. Structural changes (globalization, neoliberalism, competition states, and global governance) have generated new opportunities for individuals to become extremely rich and to engage in politics across borders. The political agency of billionaires is being conceptualized in terms of capacities, goals, and power, which is contingent upon the specific political field a billionaire is trying to enter. Six case studies explore the power of billionaires in their pursuit of security, wealth, and esteem. The chapter on security analyzes Raj Rajaratnam’s relationship to the Tamil cause in Sri Lanka, and Sheldon Adelson's transnational electioneering in the Israel-Palestine conflict. Regarding the economy, the book studies how the Koch brothers' political protection of fossil fuels is affecting climate change mitigation, and how Rupert Murdoch's opinion-shaping is valorizing conservatism across borders. The chapter on social entrepreneurship and esteem examines the role of Bill Gates in the governance of global health and George Soros's attempts to build open societies as a 'stateless statesman'. An analytical conclusion evaluates the prior findings in order to address three major questions: Is it more appropriate to see billionaires as 'super-actors', or as a global 'super-class'? What is the relative power of billionaires within the international system? What does the power of billionaires mean for the liberal norms of legitimate political order?

To what extent and in what ways have European integration redrawn the boundaries of national welfare states? What are the effects of such redrawing? These questions are interesting and relevant because boundaries “count”: they are a pre-requisite for bonding individuals, groups, and territorial units, and for activating or strengthening their dispositions to share. Historically, welfare state formation can be read as a process of boundary-building — essentially through the establishment of compulsory public insurance schemes. European integration has prompted a reversal of this process: free movement and competition rules have in fact started to challenge the traditional bounding prerogatives of the nation-state in the social sphere. Today, the EU constrains not only the scope and content of bounding decisions (who is entitled to share what), but also the very “right to bound” in the first place. Such constraints have far reaching economic and financial implications. But their social and political implications may be even greater, given the importance of nation-based social sharing for material life chances, cultural identities and legitimation dynamics. As shown by the chapters in this book, reshuffling the “boundaries of welfare” can destabilise the basic architecture of Europe’s national societies and political systems. In order to counter this destabilisation, a carefully designed strategy of institutional reform is needed, capable of reconciling “solidarity” and “Europe” through stronger citizenship rights and more socially friendly regulatory instruments.

The book focuses on the study of women combat soldiers in the fields of Security Studies and International Relations. It addresses this issue by bringing the soldiers’ voices and silences to the forefront of research in these domains and by presenting the women soldiers as narrators. The book introduces a theoretical framework in Critical Security Studies for understanding—by binary deconstructions of the terms used in these fields—the integration of women soldiers into combat and combat-support roles and the challenges they face. The book draws on Feminist IR scholarship and introduces an interdisciplinary theoretical perspective that aims to lead scholars to consider why and how women’s experiences should be incorporated into the analysis of violence, state violence, combat trauma, security, and insecurity. The book therefore emphasizes the importance of including, in critical approaches to security, the understudied topic of the voices of women in combat. The book explores the voices and silences of women who served in combat roles in the Israeli Defense Forces. The analysis, however, extends beyond the Israeli case insofar as the book offers important general insights into the larger issues of the links between war and gender, body and gender, trauma and gender, and politics and gender. It also raises methodological considerations about ways of evaluating power relations in conflict situations and patriarchal structures. The binary deconstructions discussed in the book offer a paradigm shift in Security Studies and Conflict Studies.

In the context of an ongoing global power shift, the largest emerging economies (China, Russia, India, Brazil) formed an exclusive and informal club called the BRICs. Subsequently joined by South Africa, the BRICS have exercised collective financial statecraft, defined as the use of financial and monetary policies by sovereign governments for the purpose of achieving larger foreign policy goals. This volume identifies four types of such financial statecraft, ranging from pressure for inside reforms of either multilateral institutions or global markets, to outside options exercised through creating new multilateral institutions or jointly pushing for new realities in international financial markets. The joint actions of the BRICS have been largely successful. Although each member has its own unique rationale for collaboration, the largest member, China, controls resources that afford it the greatest influence in intraclub decision-making. The BRICS hang together due to common aversions (resentment over being perennial junior partners in global economic and financial governance, resistance to infringements on their autonomy and dollar dominance) and common interests (obtaining greater voice in international institutions, such as the International Monetary Fund). The BRICS are neither revolutionaries nor shirkers. The group seeks reforms, influence, and leadership roles within the existing liberal capitalist global economic order. Where blocked, they experiment with parallel multilateral institutions in which they are the dominant rule-makers. The future of the BRICS depends not only on their bargaining power and adjustment to market players, but also on their ability to overcome domestic impediments to the sustainable economic growth that provides the basis for their international positions.

When financial crises occur, it has long been accepted that national economies need a lender of last resort to stabilize markets. In today’s global financial system, crises are rarely confined to one country. Indeed, they often go global. Yet, there is no formal international lender of last resort (ILLR) to perform this function for the world economy. Conventional wisdom says that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has emerged in recent decades as the de facto ILLR. Yet that premise is incomplete. This book explores how the United States has for decades regularly complemented the Fund’s ILLR role by selectively providing billions of dollars in emergency loans to foreign economies in crisis. Why would US policymakers ever put national financial resources at risk to bail out foreign governments and citizens to whom they are not beholden when the IMF was created for this purpose? I argue the United States has been compelled to provide such rescues unilaterally when it believes a multilateral response via the IMF is either too slow or too small to protect vital US economic and financial interests. Through a combination of historical case studies and statistical analysis, I uncover the defensive motives behind US decisions to provide global liquidity from the 1960s through the 2008 global financial crisis. The book paints a more complete picture of how international financial crises have been managed and highlights the unique role that the United States has played in stabilizing the world economy in troubled times.

What is the relationship between capitalism and sexuality, and why are they so often assumed to be antithetical? The book interrogates these questions by bringing together insights from two fields that have often overlooked each other, international political economy and queer theory. It develops a queer political economy lens to understand how the history of capitalism has been intimately entangled with the history of sexuality. Yet central to this story has been the construction of sexuality as something that needs to be protected from capitalism’s adulterating influence at all costs. As the author examines, this is no accident since capitalism profits greatly from the illusion that economic and sexual relations exist in distinct realms that can and must be kept apart. Focusing on the specific site of sex work in Britain, the volume draws on wide-ranging archival research to chart a genealogy of capitalist development from the Middle Ages to the present day. It shows that capitalism has long been organized around the extraction of unpaid sexual labor that, in turn, has been made possible by the creation and maintenance of a dualism between sex and work. By exposing the historical mechanisms through which the economy/sexuality dichotomy has been constituted, the book opens up new space for critical inquiry into the intersections between sex, work, and economic and sexual injustice.

Contributing to the literature on austerity, this book identifies and compares episodes of ‘fiscal squeeze’ (that is, substantial efforts to cut public spending and/or raise taxes) in the UK over a century from 1900 to 2015. It looks at how different the politics of fiscal squeeze and austerity is today from what it was a century ago, ways in which fiscal squeeze can reshape the state, leading to new ways of organizing government or providing services, and at how political credit and blame play out in the aftermath of fiscal squeeze. The analysis is both quantitative and qualitative, starting with reported financial outcomes and then looking at the political choices and processes that lie behind those outcomes to identify patterns and puzzles that have not been recognized or explained adequately so far in received theory. Thus the book identifies a long-term shift from deep but short-lived episodes of spending restraint or tax increases in the earlier part of the century towards episodes in which the pain is spread out over a longer period during the latter part of the century. It also identifies a marked reduction of revenue-led squeezes in the last part of the century. Analysing fiscal squeeze both in terms of reported outcomes and a qualitative analysis of loss imposition, political cost to incumbents and state, helps to solve a puzzle in the literature about the electoral effects of austerity and apparently erratic voter ‘punishment’ of governments that impose austerity policies.

In 2010, because of a geopolitical incident between China and Japan, seventeen elements of the periodic table known as rare earths became notorious overnight. An “unofficial” and temporary embargo of rare-earth shipments to Japan alerted the world to China’s near monopoly position on the production and export of these indispensable elements for high-tech, defense, and renewable energy sources. A few months before the geopolitical confrontation, China had chosen to substantially cut export quotas of rare earths. Both events sent shockwaves across the markets, and rare-earth prices skyrocketed, prompting reactions from industrial nations and industry itself. The rare-earth crisis is not a simple trade dispute, however. It also raises questions about China’s use of economic statecraft and the impacts of growing resource competition. A detailed and nuanced examination of the rare-earth crisis provides a significant and distinctive case study of resource competition and its spill-over geopolitical effects. It sheds light on the formulation, deployment, longevity, effectiveness, and, perhaps, shortsightedness of policy responses by other industrial nations, while also providing an example of how China might choose to employ instruments of economic statecraft in its rise to superpower status.

China’s Digital Nationalism explores online networks and their nationalist discourses in digital China. It asks what happens to national community sentiments when they go digital. Nationalism, in China as much as elsewhere, is today shared through digital information and communication technologies. It is adopted, filtered, transformed, enhanced, and accelerated through digital networks, and it interacts in complicated ways with nationalism ‘on the ground’. Understanding these processes is crucial if we hope to make sense of the social and political complexities that shape the twenty-first century. In China’s Digital Nationalism, Florian Schneider analyses digital China first-hand, by empirically examining what search engines, online encyclopaedias, websites, hyperlink networks, and social media accounts can tell us about the way that different actors construct and manage a crucial topic in contemporary Chinese politics: the protracted historical relationship with neighbouring Japan. Using two cases, the infamous Nanjing Massacre of 1937 and the ongoing disputes over islands in the East China Sea, Schneider shows how various stake-holders in China construct networks and deploy power to shape nationalist discourses for their own ends. These dynamics in an emerging great power, this book argues, provide crucial lessons on how nation states adapt to the shifting terrain of the digital age.

This book shows how international changes can reconfigure domestic politics. Since the late 1980s, developing countries have come under considerable pressure to revise their intellectual property policies and practices. One area where pressures have been exceptionally controversial is in pharmaceuticals: historically, developing countries did not grant patents to drugs. Now they must do so. This book analyses different forms of compliance with this new imperative in Latin America, comparing the political economy of pharmaceutical patents in Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico. The book focuses on two periods of politics: initial conflicts over how to introduce drug patents, and subsequent conflicts over how countries’ new patent systems should function. In contrast to explanations of national policy based on external pressures, domestic institutions, or ideologies, this book attributes cross-national and longitudinal variation in patent policy to the ways that changing social structures affect political leaders’ abilities to construct and sustain supportive coalitions. The analysis begins with the relative resources and capabilities of national and transnational pharmaceutical sectors, and these rival actors’ strategies for attracting allies. From this starting point, emphasis is placed on two ways that social structures are transformed so as to affect coalition-building possibilities: how exporters may be converted into allies of transnational drug firms, and the differential patterns of adjustment among state and societal actors that are inspired by the introduction of new policies. It is within the changing structural conditions produced by these processes that political leaders build coalitions in support of different forms of compliance.