This article aims to shed new light on Germany's domineering role in the eurocrisis.
President Xi Jinping has made clear that the 'Great Rejuvenation of the Chinese Nation' will involve world-leading competitiveness: his 'Made in China 2025' plan identifies 10 core sectors of advanced technology. This article investigates how elites in the United States and Germany have responded to this 'China challenge', a burgeoning 'techno-nationalist' phase of globalization. First, the article explores the divergent state responses of the USA and Germany: while both national elites are concerned, the reaction of the US has been far more confrontational. It then tries to explain this striking contrast in terms of the disparate domestic constituents. The US since Trump has aligned electoral grievances around manufacturing job losses with the interests of the national security establishment. In contrast, German labour has fared better in globalization, and the German state has not been able to override the interests of German capital in the way that the US has. Thus, the authors offer an account of how Germany and the US have responded differently to the China challenge, as well as explaining why with reference to the divergent structural conditions and class interests. The article ends by speculating that 'techno-nationalism' will only accelerate in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic.This article is partly based upon work conducted in association with COST Action CA18215 -China in Europe Research Network (CHERN) -supported by COST (European Union Cooperation in Science and Technology). We would like to thank the participants of the CHERN inaugural workshop, including our discussant Jeffrey Henderson, as well as three anonymous reviewers, for their constructive feedback. Sean is also grateful to Peter Beattie, Daniel Lynch, Denise van der Kamp, Nikki Westwood and Steve Wright for stimulating debates on American power, the rise of China and world order. The authors contributed equally to the development of this article, and take responsibility for all faults.
Lacher, Hannes, and Julian Germann. (2012) Before Hegemony: Britain, Free Trade, and Nineteenth‐Century World Order Revisited. International Studies Review, doi: 10.1111/j.1468‐2486.2012.01100.x This article argues that neo‐Gramscian theorizations of “hegemony” have failed to illuminate the role of nineteenth‐century Britain in the rise of a liberal world economy in three respects. First, they have provided mutually exclusive accounts of the social forces underpinning domestic and international hegemony. Second, they have failed to show Britain’s agency in the making of a liberal world order. Third, they have posited a uniformity of social forces and liberal state forms that elides the differences between British and continental societies, thereby obscuring the real reasons for the general shift to liberal internationalism. We argue that it was the structural differences in the economic, social, and political organization of Britain and continental Europe that made free trade without a hegemon possible. Neo‐Gramscian theorists of hegemony—just like their mainstream peers—have unduly generalized from the unique structures of American hegemony after 1945. Instead of serving as a master concept to organize the history of international relations, hegemony itself needs to be historicized: as a singular and temporally limited possibility of societal and international rule, preceded and succeeded by other forms.
This article examines the central role of the West German state in the transition from the golden to the global age of capitalism in the crisis decade of the 1970s. I argue that in order to keep the world economy open for its exports and shore up its competitive position, German crisis managers pursued a grand economic strategy that sought to defeat the interventionist and expansionary responses of the European left and to commit the United States to monetary discipline. The success of this strategy had contradictory consequences: It stabilized the social consensus inside Germany but undermined it in states whose economies did not stand to benefit from austerity measures. Germany's particularistic way of coping with the crisis thus contributed decisively, though not deliberately, to the “disembedding” of the liberal international economic order. This argument challenges existing explanations of neoliberalism as an Anglo‐American imposition on a passive Western Europe and Japan or as an ideological conversion of policymakers. I conclude with an alternative interpretation that highlights the interplay of divergent and opposing strategies of crisis management as the principal driver of social and world order change in the 1970s and potentially today.
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