Brigitte Young

Financial Crises and Social Reproduction: Asia, Argentina and Brazil

“Anti-globalists see the ‘Washington consensus’ as a conspiracy to enrich bankers. They are not entirely wrong.”1

Reflections on Werner Bonefeld's ‘Freedom and the Strong State: On German Ordoliberalism' and the Continuing Importance of the Ideas of Ordoliberalism to Understand Germany's (Contested) Role in Resolving the Eurozone Crisis

A historian and a political scientist take issue with Bonefelds interpretation of ordoliberalism from the viewpoint of our historical knowledge of the Freiburg School. Our major disagreement is with Bonefelds underlying assumption that the ideas of the Freiburgers on strong state authority were very durable and continued to be so across a divide as great as that of 1945 when a more strictly chronological use of the sources would have shown significant transformations. The earlier quasi proto-fascist ideas of the strong state were replaced with a much more muted role for the state in providing a constitutional framework in which the market forces could develop. It is through this break with their own initial sympathy with Hitlers strong state that the ideas of the Freiburger Ordnungspolitik underwent profound changes to a constitutional state as guarantor of economic stability, and only in this changed form do the ideas of a legal rule-based system of the Freiburger ordoliberals continue to play an important role in understanding Germanys role in resolving the Euro crisis. It is this significant shift, in the ideas of ordoliberals, that is missing in Bonefelds article.

Globalization and Gender: a European Perspective

Globalization has to be understood as an open and contradictory process that entails restructuring the nationally bounded economic system and its Keynesian institutional regulatory structures. More specifically, we are facing a process of de-nationalization of the political and economic spaces that symbolized the preceding period of capitalism, generally referred to as the Fordist regime of accumulation (Aglietta 1979; Jessop 1988). After 1945, Fordism came to mean the highly successful synchronization between mass production and mass consumption. The novelty of the post-Second World War Fordist regime was based on the way liberal democratic societies were able to assert themselves against the destructive forces of the market. At the center of the unique historic Fordist compromise was the synchronization of real (male) wages with productivity growth, and the national anti-cyclical monetary and fiscal policies that led to one of the longest growth periods in history. The Keynesian welfare state was central to stabilizing consumer demand and expanding social rights to average citizens who, for the first time, were given access to mass consumer goods. Since 1973, the “virtuous circle” between mass production and mass consumption has come under increasing stress. The neo-liberal answer to the crisis has been the deregulation and flexibilization of the Fordist model of a nationally bounded economic and social system.

German Ordoliberalism as Agenda Setter for the Euro Crisis: Myth Trumps Reality

German political leaders have extolled the advantages of the rule-based ordoliberal doctrine as a panacea for the Eurozone countries to regain competitiveness. This legalistic doctrine has been used by the German Bundesbank as an important agenda setter to prevent alternative ideas from challenging the austerity discourse in the Eurozone. A closer look across German economic history tells a different story. At no time did perfect market competition work in practice as the ordoliberal doctrine postulates. In fact, it was the London Debt Agreement of 1953 with the Marshall Plan, and the combination of Ordnungspolitik with a more ethical and publicly provided social policy (what has become known as the Soziale Marktwirtschaft) which account for the German Wirtschaftswunder. But rather than rejecting Ordnungspolitik on the grounds that it is ‘a dangerous idea’, we should focus on institutional reforms based on an ethical and socially oriented economic model for the European Union (EU). In fact, this is what Germany has done since the 1950s, with the scales tipping sometimes in the direction of strengthening the ordoliberal side of competition policy, and at others shifting to more inclusive social measures. The question is whether Germanys ‘real’ economic history can provide a more realistic model for a sustainable social EU.

Does the American Dairy Industry Fit the Meso-Corporatist Model?

Corporatism having become a less useful label for describing entire political systems, corporatist scholars have emphasized the importance of meso-level corporatism, using dairying as the classic example. Analysis of the American dairy industry does not support the claim that there is ‘no corporatism in the United States’ but it suggests why meso-corporatist enclaves in a macro-pluralist system are liable to be ephemeral. What sets the American dairy industry apart from its European and Canadian counterparts is that the meso-corporatist institutional arrangements were undermined by the emergence of large regional cooperatives in the 1960s and as a result present dairy policy-making has reverted once more to a pluralist paradigm.

Politik und Ökonomie im Kontext von Globalisierung. Eine Geschlechterkritik

Globalisierung1 heist das neue Schlagwort am Ende des zweiten Milleniums. Statt der vielversprochenen „neuen Weltordnung“ mit weniger Krieg, mehr Demokratie und allgemeinem Wohlstand herrschen am Ende des Ost-West-Konflikts mehr Krieg, zunehmende Armut auch in den reichen Industrielandern, Schrecken, Fluchtlingselend und existentielle Angst. Das „kurze goldene Zeitalter des Kapitalismus“ mit dem weltweit „ungleich verteilten Wohlstand“ (Narr/Schubert 1994: 11) wird am Ende des „kurzen 20. Jahrhunderts“ (Hobsbawm 1995) zu Grabe getragen.

Finanzialisierung, Neoliberalismus und der deutsche Ordoliberalismus in der EU-Krisenbewältigung

Der Begriff der Finanzialisierung wird verwendet, um den Bedeutungszuwachs der institutionellen Strukturen der globalen Finanzmarkte – einschlieslich neuerer Akteure wie Investment- und Pensionsfonds und der gestiegenen Attraktivitat von Anlagen – sowie eine hermetische Finanzkultur, die durch ein logisches, mathematisches und abstraktes Denken der Akteure gepragt ist, zu charakterisieren (Epstein 2005, S. 3; Heires und Nolke in diesem Band). In den 1980er Jahren wurden diese Veranderungen gemeinhin noch unter dem Begriff der Globalisierung beschrieben.

The Gendered Dimension of Money, Finance, and the Subprime Crisis

The recent financial market instability in the US, and its world wide spill-over into regional and local financial markets with its devastating impact on the real side of the economy in both industrial and developing countries, has shifted the discourse from the benefits of financial liberalization to the costs of fast and excessive financial liberalization (Semmler/ Young 2009). The Efficient Market Hypothesis, the cornerstone of neoclassical economics, has largely been refuted as a myth (Stiglitz et al. 2006). Even the representative voice of liberal international capital, The Financial Times, published an article which read: “On September 15, 2008 the era of Ronald Regan officially came to an end” (Freeland 21.9.2008: 9). This statement is in response to the collapse of the investment banking structure (Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch) and the conversion of Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs into regular commercial banks. The collapse, according to the argument, has undermined the confidence in the superiority of the American free market philosophy by the fact that the financial crisis has its epicentre on Wall Street and not in the periphery such as in Latin America, Russia or Asia.

Nothing but gloom: Women and academia in the new Germany

The real losers in restructuring the former East German university system are women scholars. Women are not only the first to lose their positions in the process of Abwicklung they are also the last to be considered in the new stage of rebuilding the university system. Thus the politics of Abwicklung, has to be understood as a microcosm of the gendered nature of German unification as a whole. Unification has provided German conservatives the opportunity to roll back not only the social policies of the east, but also the feminist achievements in the west. While this process may, because of the specificity of unification, be restricted to the German situation, nevertheless many studies show that even without the process of unification, women in virtually all former eastern European countries are experiencing their ‘forced’ return to the private sphere.

Geschlechter(un)gleichheit und Öffnung der globalen Märkte

Der im Juli 2004 verOffentliche UNDP Human Development Report 2004 kommt zu der erschutternden Bilanz, dass in vielen Teilen der Welt der Lebensstandard heute niedriger ist als im Jahr 1990. Oder anders ausgedruckt, die Not in vielen Landern ist grO\er als 1990. Nach dem Human Development Index (HDI)1 eines Landes, der die durchschnittliche Lebenserwartung, Gesundheit und Bildungsstand der BevOlkerung erfasst, ist seit 1990 weltweit in zwanzig Landern ein Entwicklungsruckschritt eingetreten. Beim derzeitigen Entwicklungstempo wird die Einhaltung der im Jahr 2000 von den 184 Staats- und Regierungschefs der damaligen Mitgliedsstaaten der Vereinten Nationen beschlossenen Milleniumsziele2 verfehlt. Das Ziel, die grundlegende Schulbildung fur alle Kinder bis 2015 zu ermOglichen, wird voraussichtlich erst im Jahr 2129 erreicht und die Senkung der Kindersterblichkeit um zwei Drittel im Jahr 2106 (UNDP-HDR 2004).