Hugendubel.info - Die B2B Online-Buchhandlung 

Merkliste
Die Merkliste ist leer.
Bitte warten - die Druckansicht der Seite wird vorbereitet.
Der Druckdialog öffnet sich, sobald die Seite vollständig geladen wurde.
Sollte die Druckvorschau unvollständig sein, bitte schliessen und "Erneut drucken" wählen.

How the West Lost the Peace

E-BookEPUB2 - DRM Adobe / EPUBE-Book
304 Seiten
Englisch
John Wiley & Sonserschienen am25.04.20231. Auflage
When the Berlin Wall was stormed and the Soviet Union fell apart, the West and above all the United States looked like the sole victors of history. Three decades later, the spirit of triumph rings hollow. What went wrong?

In this sequel to his award-winning history of neoliberal Europe, the renowned historian Philipp Ther searches for an answer to this question. He argues that global capitalism created many losers, preparing the ground for the rise of right-wing populists and nationalists. He shows how the promise of prosperity and freedom did not catch on sufficiently in Eastern Europe despite material progress, and how the West lost Russia and alienated Turkey. Neoliberal capitalism also left the world poorly prepared to cope with Covid-19, and the pandemic further weakened the Western hegemony of the post-1989 period, which is now brutally contested by Russia's war against Ukraine. The double punch of the pandemic and the biggest war in Europe since 1945 has brought to a close the age of transformation that was inaugurated by the end of the Cold War. 
This penetrating analysis of the disarray of the post-1989 world will be of great interest to anyone who wishes to understand how we got to where we are today and the tremendous challenges we now face.

Philipp Ther is Professor of Central European History at the University of Vienna.mehr
Verfügbare Formate
BuchGebunden
EUR74,50
BuchKartoniert, Paperback
EUR23,00
E-BookEPUB2 - DRM Adobe / EPUBE-Book
EUR18,99

Produkt

KlappentextWhen the Berlin Wall was stormed and the Soviet Union fell apart, the West and above all the United States looked like the sole victors of history. Three decades later, the spirit of triumph rings hollow. What went wrong?

In this sequel to his award-winning history of neoliberal Europe, the renowned historian Philipp Ther searches for an answer to this question. He argues that global capitalism created many losers, preparing the ground for the rise of right-wing populists and nationalists. He shows how the promise of prosperity and freedom did not catch on sufficiently in Eastern Europe despite material progress, and how the West lost Russia and alienated Turkey. Neoliberal capitalism also left the world poorly prepared to cope with Covid-19, and the pandemic further weakened the Western hegemony of the post-1989 period, which is now brutally contested by Russia's war against Ukraine. The double punch of the pandemic and the biggest war in Europe since 1945 has brought to a close the age of transformation that was inaugurated by the end of the Cold War. 
This penetrating analysis of the disarray of the post-1989 world will be of great interest to anyone who wishes to understand how we got to where we are today and the tremendous challenges we now face.

Philipp Ther is Professor of Central European History at the University of Vienna.
Details
Weitere ISBN/GTIN9781509550616
ProduktartE-Book
EinbandartE-Book
FormatEPUB
Format Hinweis2 - DRM Adobe / EPUB
FormatFormat mit automatischem Seitenumbruch (reflowable)
Erscheinungsjahr2023
Erscheinungsdatum25.04.2023
Auflage1. Auflage
Seiten304 Seiten
SpracheEnglisch
Dateigrösse428 Kbytes
Artikel-Nr.11593600
Rubriken
Genre9201

Inhalt/Kritik

Inhaltsverzeichnis
Preface: The Great Transformation after 1989

1. From Neoliberalism to Antiliberalism: The Enduring Relevance of Karl Polanyi

2. Lost Social and Political Equilibrium: The USA after the Cold War

3. The Price of Unity: Germany's Shock Therapy in International Comparison

4. La Crisi: Italy's Decline as a Portent for Europe

5. The West, Turkey and Russia: A History of Estrangement

6. Eastern Europe as a Pioneer: Polanyi's Pendulum Swings to the Right

7. Systemic Competition during the Covid-19 Pandemic

Afterword: A Bad End: The War against Ukraine

Postscript and Acknowledgements

Notesmehr
Leseprobe

1
From Neoliberalism to Antiliberalism
The Enduring Relevance of Karl Polanyi

Presentism has become something of a trend in professional historiography. Switzerland has an online magazine called Geschichte der Gegenwart (History of the Present); a German contemporary historian brought out A Brief History of the Present with a well-known publisher in 2017; and textbook publishers try to make past eras more appealing to their young audience by drawing connections to the present day.1 In the USA, too, the best way to promote a book is to say that it covers a timely topic.

Referencing current academic debates is also more important than ever. Mentioning prominent colleagues is a good way to score points on social media because it increases the likelihood that they will recommend your own work on Twitter or Facebook in return. Presentism and discursivity attract a lot of public attention, but there are limits to what they can achieve. After all, even the most diligent students and political activists only have so much time for reading. Academics today live in an economy of overwhelming supply, where the growing abundance of information and texts bumps up against naturally limited capacity and demand. In other words, more and more information is being sent out into the world, but more and more cannot be received and read. This daily competition for our attention makes it easy to lose sight of more distant periods and older publications and sources. This is a great loss, especially for history as an academic discipline.

I always encourage my students to read older works - and not just history books. You can learn a tremendous amount, particularly about the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, from the social scientists who were writing at the time. Their studies are historical sources, but many also contain theories and models that help explain the problems of their time as well as our own. The epistemological value lies not in looking to history for answers to new questions and interpreting these findings in a presentistic way based on current needs, but rather in taking past approaches, theories and explanatory models and laying them like a matrix over the present.

The works of the historical sociologist Karl Polanyi are social scientific classics that are always worth revisiting.2 Polanyi s magnum opus, The Great Transformation, was published towards the end of the Second World War and reached a wide audience in the following thirty years. During Polanyi s lifetime (he died in 1964 in the USA), even the bastions of the liberal market economy - the USA and UK - thought that laissez-faire capitalism was outmoded. This attitude stemmed from their all-too-fresh memories of the stock market crash of 1929, the Great Depression in the 1930s and the rise of fascism.

As a result, even economists who embraced the concept of neoliberalism in the 1950s called for heavier regulation of the markets and legislation against cartels and monopolies.3 Most of society was in favour of taming the free market and creating an embedded capitalism, as Polanyi vividly put it. Polanyi fell out of fashion in the 1980s. No new editions of his book were published, and even the translations dried up.4 You were most likely to find his work in a library or second-hand bookshop, a sure sign that it had been relegated to history.

But then the crises of capitalism began to pile up at the end of the 1990s. The Asian financial crisis, which ultimately dragged down Russia and the rouble in 1998, was followed by the dot-com crisis. Polanyi was suddenly relevant again, and he experienced a renaissance. Beacon Press in Boston, which first published The Great Transformation in paperback, brought out a new edition in 2001 with a foreword by Joseph Stiglitz, an unwavering critic of neoliberalism and the Chicago Boys under Milton Friedman. Stiglitz received the Nobel Prize in Economics not long after, further boosting the popularity of The Great Transformation.

There were other, longer-term reasons for the renewed interest in Polanyi. It was clear by the turn of the millennium that only certain social classes, industries, countries and regions had profited from the great transformation after 1989. Post-communist Europe oscillated between optimistic awakening (Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary) and depression (Russia and other post-Soviet states). Political reformers in the East could fall back on an obvious excuse, however: the misery was the fault of the communists, state socialism, mismanagement prior to 1989, Homo sovieticus.

This Manichean view of history also fed into the post-transformation promise of modernization as it was envisioned after 1989. Once countries had made it through the long drought, or the vale of tears, or some other essentially Biblical trial, they were expected to achieve a state of developed capitalism and become as wealthy as the West.

But in the age of neoliberalism, this promise was on shaky ground from the start. Unlike their counterparts in the East, political elites in the USA and Germany did not have the option of badmouthing earlier economic and social developments or the social democratic welfare state. Moreover, it was not clear where the development of these countries was supposed to lead. The West, and especially the USA, had already reached the modern capitalist stage. Aside from increasing consumption or improving the efficiency of the system, there was no place to go from there.

This lack of direction made globalization a hot topic which sparked considerable opposition and resistance right from the start. How did it benefit factory workers, or even microelectronics experts, for cars to be made in Mexico and mobile phones in China? At best, consumers enjoyed cheaper prices for more and more imported goods, though they all too often had to go into debt to afford them. Old industrial regions had started to decline back in the 1970s, and now yet another generation was growing up in a state of late-capitalist or post-communist tristesse.

Globalization thus offered a second promise of modernization, one that was both economic and normative.5 Thanks to the global division of labour, workers in Guadalajara in Mexico or Shenzhen in China were expected to earn more. Outsourced industrial production jobs in these regions were supposed to lead to the creation of a thriving middle class, which would then step up in support of democracy. This optimistic vision of the future seemed to be borne out in Chile, where voters in the 1988 referendum refused to grant Pinochet another term in office. Wages in China, Mexico and the Global South were also expected to rise, thus easing competition for workers in the USA and Western Europe. The most pioneering modern industrialized states would continue to lead the development of new technologies, doing away with grimy old factory jobs and instead offering clean jobs in the service economy and high-tech sector. Globalization thus promised to modernize the whole world, but its universality made it difficult to grasp. The middle class in the West started to hear that life would not be as comfortable as before, and that you had to be flexible, efficient and willing to learn if you wanted to withstand the harsher winds of the free market economy.

Despite their different promises of modernization, the post-socialist transformation in the East and late-capitalist transformation in the West shared a framework: neoliberal globalization. This triggered rapid and profound economic and social changes across every sector. Harking back to Polanyi, we should note that these changes did not happen automatically; they were deliberately imposed from above by the respective political and economic elites.

Even if you agreed with the neoliberal progressive thinking of the 1990s, it was clear and deliberate from the start that the transformation would take a different course depending on your country, region, social class, occupation and individual resources. As mentioned earlier, not many people were reading Polanyi at the time, though it would have been worth their while to do so. He described how England s industrialization and global free trade impacted different population groups, and he turned an almost anthropological gaze on the social consequences of the great transformation . Together with his insights into the workings of global financial capitalism and his knack for coining new terms, this was the deeper reason Polanyi was rediscovered around the turn of the millennium.

His book was like a matrix for this new era, which is actually quite astonishing considering the vast distance between the present day and the environments that had shaped him and his work. Polanyi was born in what was then Austria-Hungary and studied law and economics in Budapest, where he came into contact with a circle of radical students at the university.6 Marxism was still a matter of faith at the time, not so much an academic method for analysing contemporary or historical problems, as it is today.

When Hungary began to hound communists and Jews after the conservative counter-revolution, Polanyi settled in Vienna, where he made a living as the editor of a business magazine. He emigrated again in 1934, this time to England, then worked as a visiting professor in the USA during the war and subsequently taught at Columbia University in New York. Looking at his oeuvre, it seems most accurate to classify him as a historical sociologist, though he was active in various...
mehr