Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism

From a world history perspective, the most noticeable trend in the history of the late 19th century was the domination of Europeans over Non­Europeans. This domination took many forms ranging from economic penetration to outright annexation. No area of the globe, however remote from Europe, was free of European merchants, adventurers, explorers or western missionaries. Was colonialism good for either the imperialist or the peoples of the globe who found themselves subjects of one empire or another? A few decades ago, the answer would have been a resounding no. Now, in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the more or less widespread discrediting of Marxist and Leninist analysis, and the end of the Cold War, political scientists and historians seem willing to take a more positive look at Nineteenth Century Imperialism. One noted current historian, Niall Ferguson has argued that the British Empire probably accomplished more positive good for the world than the last generation of historians, poisoned by Marxism, could or would concede. Ferguson has argued that the British Empire was a \" liberal \" empire that upheld international law, kept the seas open and free, and ultimately benefited everyone by ensuring the free flow of trade. In other words, Ferguson would find little reason to contradict the young Winston Churchill's assertion that the aim of British imperialism was to: give peace to warring tribes, to administer justice where all was violence, to strike the chains off the slave, to draw the richness from the soil, to place the earliest seeds of commerce and learning, to increase in whole peoples their capacities for pleasure and diminish their chances of pain. It should come as no surprise that Ferguson regards the United States current position in the world as the natural successor to the British Empire and that the greatest danger the U.S. represents is that the world will not get enough American Imperialism because U.S. leaders often have short attention spans and tend to pull back troops when intervention becomes unpopular. It will be very interesting to check back into the debate on Imperialism about ten years from now and see how Niall Ferguson's point of view has fared! The other great school of thought about Imperialism is, of course, Marxist. For example, Marxist historians like E.J. Hobsbawm argue that if we look at the l9th century as a great competition for the world's wealth and …

The New Imperialism

The third way: the renewal of social democracy

dismantling the welfare state reagan thatcher and politics of retrenchment are a good way to achieve details about operating certainproducts. Many products that you buy can be obtained using instruction manuals. These user guides are clearlybuilt to give step-by-step information about how you ought to go ahead in operating certain equipments. Ahandbook is really a user's guide to operating the equipments. Should you loose your best guide or even the productwould not provide an instructions, you can easily obtain one on the net. You can search for the manual of yourchoice online. Here, it is possible to work with google to browse through the available user guide and find the mainone you'll need. On the net, you'll be able to discover the manual that you might want with great ease andsimplicity

Dismantling the Welfare State? Reagan, Thatcher, and the Politics of Retrenchment

The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future. Joseph E. Stiglitz, 414 pages, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2012.I LOVE THESE GUYS''(Joseph Stiglitz) is an insanely great economist,'' so writes Paul R. Krugman, who should know. These two like to write books for the populace at large on the topic of macroeconomics. Krugman also likes to spout offon Sunday news shows like ''Meet the Press,'' and on all the cable news programs. You can see Krugman arguing with Bill O'Reilly on Meet the Press. From YouTube: ''Don't call me a liar, pal, that's what you do all the time,'' says O'Reilly; ''This is not your show, so you can't cut offmy mic,'' says Krugman. Judging by their expressions, I was glad Tim Russert (6- 3-) was there in the studio at the time to protect Krugman (5- 7-) (O'Reilly stands 6- 4-). Conservative pundits dislike both economists, but pretty much leave Stiglitz alone.Krugman makes it a point to stay out of government affairs. Stiglitz does just the opposite, and he sometimes gets burned. Stiglitz was part of Bill Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers and was Chief Economist for the World Bank. After much criticism of the way the International Monetary Fund (IMF) conducted lending to developing countries, he was pretty much fired from the World Bank. Comparing the two, you would have to say that Stiglitz is more the bleeding heart, while Krugman says that what he dislikes most is the dishonesty he sees in political-economic discourse. Both are champions of the common man.Since Stiglitz can make the very valid claim for being ''an insanely great economist,'' most everything he says in his books should be taken seriously. There are some real gems in this book. I especially like the perspective he lends to some of the more peculiar things that happened before, during, and after the financial crisis. People hear about these things in the news from some announcer who makes them sound like just more news-bites, but they are, after all, unprecedented (and largely absurd). Take ''robo-signing'' for instance (page 198).WHAT GOES FOR NEWSRobo-signing was part of what happened during the foreclosure process after the massive numbers of defaults of subprime mortgages. Big banks intentionally did not follow mandated law. Apart from ignoring debtors' rights, an ensuing mess followed. Robo-signing was nothing less than a blatant attempt at rewriting property law, and resulted in lying to the courts about the state of each property's title, literally hundreds of times. No bank officer was charged with a crime. By contrast, the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s led to 829 individual convictions and 650 prison sentences. Nowadays the big banks just pay fines as part of settlements where they admit no guilt, and it's just part of doing business.Take algorithmic or ''flash'' trading in the stock exchanges (page 164). These are buys and sales made in nanoseconds on the basis of extracting information from the patterns of prices and trades. Nothing like real information gathered through market research on an industry, or on a firm in a certain industry, backs up these trades. But traders swear that ''price discovery'' is happening this way, and that all this backs up the efficient markets model. So on May 6, 2010 stock prices plummeted to a point where the Dow Jones temporarily lost 10% of its value. There are reasons to believe that these trades ''make markets not just more volatile but also less 'informative' '' (page 166). Still, the talk on the street is all about efficient markets (echoing Alan Greenspan's failures at the Federal Reserve).Take failed privatizations. When electric power in California was liberalized and Enron manipulated prices and public power to its advantage, this was a story about the company's accounting practices, not about privatizing something that had no business being privatized. …

The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future

1. Recent Discourse on the 'Third Way' 2. The Social Democratic Welfare State and the Political Economy of Capitalist Restructuring 3. The Formation and Consolidation of Social Democratic Hegemony in Sweden 4. Social Democratic Regulation: the Swedish Model 5. Neoliberal Globalization 6. The Organic Crisis of the Swedish Model 7. On Why Social Democrats Become Neo-Liberals: Lessons from the Swedish Case

Capitalist restructuring, globalisation and the third way : lessons from the Swedish model

Introduction: The Study of European Integration in the Neoliberal Era Alan W. Cafruny and Magnus Ryner Part I: The European Union and Neoliberal Hegemony Chapter 1: Theories of European Integration: A Critique Bastiaan van Appeldoorn, Henk Overbeek, and Magnus Ryner Chapter 2: A Neo-Gramscian Approach to European Integration Stephen Gill Chapter 3: Structure and Process in Transnational European Business Otto Holman and Kees van der Pijl Chapter 4: The Geopolitics of U.S. Hegemony in Europe: From the Breakup of Yugoslavia to the War in Iraq Alan W. Cafruny Part II: Neoliberal Hegemony and the State Chapter 5: The Political Economy of Exchange Rate Commitments: Italy, the United Kingdom, and the Process of European Monetary Integration Leila Simona Talani Chapter 6: Diminishing Expectations: The Strategic Discourse of Globalization in the Political Economy of New Labour Colin Hay and Matthew Watson Chapter 7: The Changing Political Economy of France: Dirigisme Under Duress Ben Clift Chapter 8: Disciplinary Neoliberalism, Regionalization, and the Social Market in German Restructuring Magnus Ryner Part III: The European Union beyond Neoliberalism? Chapter 9: "Competitive Restructuring" and Industrial Relations within the European Union: Corporatist Involvement and Beyond Hans-Jurgen Bieling and Thorsten Schulten Chapter 10: Cultural Policy and Citizenship in the European Union: An Answer to the Legitimation Problem? Giles Scott-Smith Chapter 11: Europe, the United States, and Neoliberal (Dis)Order: Is There a Coming Crisis of the Euro? Alan W. Cafruny

A Ruined Fortress?: Neoliberal Hegemony and Transformation in Europe

Orthodox integration scholarship failed to identify the factors leading to the euro area (EA) economic and financial crisis because of weaknesses that Horkheimer identified in ‘traditional’ theory: disciplinary splits and a tendency to idealize from particular instrumental perspectives. By contrast, critical political economy offered a plausible and coherent elucidation of the emergent properties and limits of finance-led capitalism and their concrete manifestation in the EA. This contribution both reviews state-of-the-art critical political economy research on the EA crisis and makes a distinct contribution to it. In addressing the puzzle of why not only the Economic and Monetary Union persists despite morbid symptoms but why crisis management is extending and deepening a discredited finance-led capitalism, the contribution synthesizes theories of transnational class formation and inter-state relations, and proposes that Europe is caught in an ordoliberal iron cage.

Europe's ordoliberal iron cage: critical political economy, the euro area crisis and its management

This article analyses the crisis of the Swedish Model from a transnational perspective. An introductory section defines and gives analytical meaning to the term 'neoliberal globalization'. The article then specifies the relationship between domestic and international, as well as necessitarian and contingent, determinants in the crisis of Swedish social democracy.

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Magnus Ryner

Papers

Capitalist restructuring, globalisation and the third way : lessons from the Swedish model

A Ruined Fortress?: Neoliberal Hegemony and Transformation in Europe

Europe's ordoliberal iron cage: critical political economy, the euro area crisis and its management

Neoliberal Globalization and the Crisis of Swedish Social Democracy

Critical Political Economy