Judith Dellheim, Frieder Otto Wolf: On Industrial Policy

In addition to the posts from April 23th, April 30th, June 2nd, June 22th we publish two texts for the discussion on production and consumption structures and on conclusions for a socio-ecological transformation. Both texts were written for the EuroMemo Group meetings in 2013 and 2014.

Kees van der Pijl: The Financial Crisis and the War for Global Governance

This paper argues that in the transition from corporate liberalism to neoliberalism, the projection of global governance by the West replaces the previous recognition of bloc formation of non-Western states. The military build-up and counterrevolutionary interventions  under Reagan, and the revolt of the capital markets against Keynesianism coupled with unregulated finance, were the relays in this projection. In the same period the Israeli Far Right and their supporters in the United States re-baptised national liberation as terrorism. This made it possible to continue with record defence outlays and arms exports to Middle East and Asian clients. In the early nineties the US military-industrial complex  More

Kees van der Pijl: 1984 All Over Again. The Snowden NSA Revelations in Perspective

In the discussion concerning the Snowden NSA revelations many have referred to Orwell’s 1984. This paper highlights that Orwell identified two components–total surveillance and permanent war. The paper then looks at the actual year 1984 and argues that in that year was significant after all because both elements of today’s War on Terror (surveillance and war) were being prepared. One was the Washington conference on the War on Terror, the third in a series initiated from Israel; the other, the preparation of a Continuity of Government (COG) programme by the Reagan administration, more

Etienne Balibar: The Rise and Fall of the European Union: Temporalities and Teleologies

Historians and philosophers have been discussing the extent to which specific ideologies regarding the understanding of time and space are involved in the writing of history, as a consequence of the “central” place that Europe had attributed itself in Modern history. The idea of “Europe” itself, whether perceived from inside or outside, is by definition ideological or it is a teleological “discourse”, which performs epistemological and political functions at the same time. Whether we consider ourselves More

Stefanie Hürtgen: Some Reflections on Transnational Corporations and Labour in Europe

Since the beginning of the debate about Europeanization and Globalization we experience an overweight of analyses in Political Economy and about transnational corporations in particular, without paying the same categorical attention to understand processes and dynamic’s on the side of labour. Concerning Europe, some authors even state that we experience the development of a transnational European capitalist class. More

 

Fotis Mavromatidis and Jeremy Leaman: German Influence in the Western Balkans: Hegemony by Design or by Default?

The politico-economic relationship between Germany and the Balkan states was, from the end of the nineteenth century, one of unequal interdependence. The strategic value of the Balkan states for an export-dependent and resourcedependent industrial state like Germany was manifest in the Berlin–Bagdhad railway project, two world wars and the close relationship with the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The region’s value to Germany’s economic and political elites has been manifest more recently in the wake of Yugoslavia’s disintegration More