Ben Clift

Economic patriotism: reinventing control over open markets

We analyse how tensions between international market integration and spatially limited political mandates have led to the phenomenon of economic patriotism. As discrimination in favour of insiders, economic patriotism goes beyond economic nationalism and can include territorial allegiances at the supranational or the local level. We show how this prism helps to understand the evolution of political intervention in open economies and present the ambition of this collection.

Credible Keynesianism? New Labour macroeconomic policy and the political economy of coarse tuning

This article questions prevailing interpretations of New Labours political economy and challenges the assumption within the comparative and international political economy literatures of the exhaustion of the Keynesian political economic paradigm. New Labours doctrinal statements are analysed to establish to what extent these doctrinal positions involve a repudiation of Keynesianism. Although New Labour has explicitly renounced the ‘fine tuning’ often (somewhat problematically) associated with post-war Keynesian political economy, we argue that they have carved out policy space in which to engage in macroeconomic ‘coarse tuning’ inspired by Keynesian thinking. This capacity to ‘coarse tune’ is precisely what is being sought in New Labours quest for credibility through the redesign of British macroeconomic policy framework and institutions. Our empirical focus on New Labour in government since 1997 offers considerable evidence that this search for the capacity to ‘coarse tune’ has been successful.

French Corporate Governance in the New Global Economy: Mechanisms of Change and Hybridisation within Models of Capitalism

This article analyses the implications of the internationalisation of capital markets, and the influx of Anglo-Saxon institutional investors, for the French model of capitalism. Its central contention is that the global convergence thesis misrepresents contemporary evolutions because it pays insufficient attention to mechanisms of change within models of capitalism. Secondly, framing analysis in terms of hybridisation and fragmentation of national models, rather than convergence, offers greater explanatory purchase over the French model, constitutes a more accurate characterisation, and helps avoid the ‘convergence or persistence’ impasse within models of capitalism analysis. In exploring French corporate governance, it emphasises the importance of specifying the role of institutional mechanisms as transmission belts of change as a precursor to an assessment of how far shifts in international political economic context bring about changes within French capitalism. Focusing on financial market regulation regime, new legislation in corporate governance and company law, and the market for corporate control as three key potential mechanisms of change, it finds that pre-existing norms and structures endure, mediating the nature of a national political economys articulation with the international context. Hybridisation and recombination of capitalist institutions drawn from different models provide a far more persuasive account than convergence.

The Second Time as Farce? The EU Takeover Directive, the Clash of Capitalisms and the Hamstrung Harmonization of European (and French) Corporate Governance

This article focuses on the EU Takeover Directive and its transposition into French law. French outcomes diverge from European Commission aspirations for greater clarity and uniformity. The clash of European capitalisms as well as heightened uncertainty and differentiation in takeover regulation exacerbate problems of asymmetric vulnerability of EU states (and firms) to the European Commissions liberal reform agenda. This explains the failings of EU-level harmonization of varieties of capitalism and corporate governance.

Comparative Party Finance Reform The Cases of France and Britain

In Britain, the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act has revolutionized the regulation of party finance after several half-hearted failures at attempted reform. In France, a series of high-profile corruption scandals in the 1980s and 1990s provoked a bout of ‘legislative incontinence’ – resulting in over eight laws in seven years, which profoundly transformed the regime regulating party finance. The comparative analysis of reforms in each country presented here questions the utility of crude ‘constitutional engineering’ theories, and the notion of party system ‘cartelization’ by major parties, neither of which offers a wholly convincing account of the paths of reform in Britain and France. It explores the use of new institutionalist theories as a comparative framework and concludes that these provide a cogent explanation for the alternative paths taken by each country with party finance regulation.

When rules started to rule: the IMF, neo-liberal economic ideas and economic policy change in Britain

ABSTRACT This article reassesses the neo-liberal shift within British economic policy-making and the international political economy, focusing especially the role of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in the 1960s. The IMF has always used the conditions attached to its lending to try and shape borrowers policy; here we explore the evolving content of that conditionality and the economic ideas underpinning it. Using recently released IMF records, as well as other archives, we argue that the negotiations between the IMF and the UK Government in the 1960s can be seen as part of the Funds drive towards a crucial change from discretionary to rules-based approaches to macroeconomic policy making. This drive took place within a struggle over a specific policy instrument, domestic credit expansion (DCE), at that time regarded as an important measure of monetary policy. The article locates the IMF advocacy of DCE within an attempt by the Fund to constrain discretionary policy-making through increasingly specific and binding rules. In response, UK Government officials began to pre-empt and even deceive the Fund to avoid being tied down. Our analysis unpacks which neo-liberal economic ideas the Fund embraced, noting its rejection of monetarism. In the period charted here (1965–69), the rules-based regime remained compatible with Keynesianism. However, the UK Governments grudging acceptance of this approach provided a crucial condition of possibility for a significant qualitative shift in macroeconomic policy-making when rules later became infused with an increasingly neo-liberal character.

Comparative Capitalisms, Ideational Political Economy and French Post- Dirigiste Responses to the Global Financial Crisis

This article advances the case for the more systematic incorporation of ideational factors into comparative capitalisms analysis as a corrective to the rational choice proclivities of the Varieties of Capitalism approach. It demonstrates the pay-off of such an ideationally attuned approach through analysis of French capitalist restructuring over the last 25 years, placing it in comparative context. A modus operandi for such ideational explanation is elaborated through delineating different national conceptions of the market, and setting out their impacts on practices of market-making. The claim made in this article is that understanding the evolution of French capitalism requires recognition of the ongoing market-making role of the French State, in combination with the French conception of the market and its embedding within a social context characterised by the inter-penetration of public and private elitist networks of Frances ‘financial network economy’ which remains substantially intact. The ideational dimension is crucial because French understandings of the market and competition, the ideational building blocks of market-making, inform French state interventions and leave footprints on French institutions and market structures, and the evolutionary trajectory of French capitalism. In charting this trajectory, this article deploys the concept of post-dirigisme. We map out the parameters and causes of the post-dirigiste condition in France through examination of French bond market development, privatisation, the shift from a government- to a market- dominated financial system, and French capitalisms internationalisation. It then uses post-dirigisme to explain French state responses to the financial crisis and the banking bailout, noting how state actors, in concert with the banking elites, actively facilitated dominant market positions of French international champions.

The Jospin Way

Since Malmo, Tony Blair has castigated all those who do not share his proselytising zeal for the ‘third way’. Underpinning his view is a thinly veiled assumption that ‘there is no alternative.’ Another reading, advanced by Sassoon, is that—under the influence of globalisation—the whole of the European left is converging on overwhelmingly similar positions, and all else is rhetorical embellishment and detail.1 Neither narrative is accepted here. Substantive differences are detectable between the ‘projects’ of Blair and Lionel Jospin, which go beyond the merely stylistic or rhetorical, suggesting qualitatively different ‘models’ of social democracy. This article examines the Jospin government’s first three years against the backdrop of the debate between the British and French premiers over the future direction of the left. The analysis focuses on those areas where commentators have located the fault-lines within European social democracy—macroeconomic policy, the role of the state, labour market and welfare reform, and employment policy.

Social Democracy and Globalization: The Cases of France and the UK

This Article Explores The Nature Of Contemporary Social democracy, questioning, with like-minded scholars, John Grays interpretation of the relationship between social democracy and globalization, which asserts that social democracy is a historically exhausted project. Garrett, for example, in rejecting such assertions, argues that social democracy remains a distinctive and viable ‘project’ within the global economy, specifically in cases where strong left-of-centre parties are linked to ‘encompassing labour movements’. He has subsequently argued that social democracy in ‘Euroland’ (with or without encompassing labour movements) can pursue a less constrained fiscal policy, and expect a more accommodating monetary policy than some predict. Garrett thus insists that social democratic governments within the Eurozone are able to ‘use macroeconomic policy to lessen market dislocations and to redistribute wealth and risk in the ever more globalized economy’.

Negotiating Credibility: Britain and the International Monetary Fund, 1956–1976

For twenty years before the famous crisis of 1976 Britain was a regular borrower from the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Through this lending role, the Fund in these years played a key part in determining the credibility of British policies. Borrowing from the Fund meant that British policy had to be seen as conforming to certain norms, but these norms were always negotiable, albeit within shifting limits. This article uses archival material from London and Washington to examine these processes of negotiation, showing how far British policy was shaped by the desires of the IMF, and how far it was able to maintain autonomy in national economic policy.