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Summary of
Summary of
In this article Evstafiev and Meghevic lay out the conditions of what they purport
authors admit from the beginning that their analysis can only count as a preliminary
sketch of certain mega-trends that although carry consequences of universal scope and
that are seeming inevitable, are not yet developed for a more concrete and developed
discussion. Nonetheless their overall thesis seems to be that the world is undergoing
relations.
By the “westphalian world” they are referring to the world order established in
1648 after the thirty year world according to the principle “to whom belongs the land,
belongs the right to determine the faith”, that is, the full sovereignty of those who live
within the bounds of one’s own nation-state. This order has been sustained up to this
day they claim by several intermediary international organization ranging from the
Holy Alliance to the United Nations that to this day facilitate international
cooperation under the pretext that this is a cooperation between “sovereign equals”.
The reign of the principle of westphalian sovereignty has been coupled with the
seemingly inevitable process of globalization which has today come to its logical end.
As the authors confirm globalization has reached its peek in the 1980s and 90s
through three processes that they call the three D’s, citing a report from the World
Bank offered by the Nobel laureate Paul Krugman; that is, the increase of density of
urbanization, the shrinkage of distance between points of concentrated economic
wealth, and the qualitative development of interconnectivity between these points. All
This essay does not focus of the specifics of how and why we are transiting to a
“post-global” world order and rather take it as a given. The focus is on what are the
main characteristics and consequences of such a mega-trend. Here the authors point to
The main problems that will emerge revolve around the synergy between these
nations in a post-global world. The fact that the formation of regional blocks will be
institutions will render the concept of sovereignty unable to sustain such radical
changes. To facilitate these questions the author underscores the importance of the
politico-economic hybrid nature of the current times. This makes the concept of
sovereignty practical and not formal, until the boundaries that are at the moment being
redefined by the great powers have congealed into a more concrete setting.
Summary of “Polanyi’s ‘Double Movement’:The Belle Époques of British and
movement of the British and American empires by Silver and Arrighi through the lens
of Polanyi is a masterful work, all the more prescient in the demanding times we live
in today. This double movement refers to the “belle epoques” and eventual fall that
each empire faced and is facing in the turn of the 20 and 21st centuries. The crux of
their argument is that each hegemony was buttressed by a artificially sustained period
of liberalization, the unraveling of which led to the collapse of the hegemony itself.
The British period of liberalization was undoubtedly centered around the global
gold standard that was formally set in place through the Peel’s Act of 1844. Ironically
as the authors mentioned it is more accurate to call it the global sterling standard,
since current account deficits of gold were constantly compensated by trade surpluses
of imperial colonies, mainly India. This is the first revelation of the artificiality of the
seemingly automated smoothly flowing liberal order. The second would be the so-
called liberalization of the global trade through the Poor Law Amendment Act of
1834 and the Anti–Corn Law Bill of 1846. This was propounded as a favorable move,
due to the fact that indeed British manufacturers have gained the most by harnessing
new technologies of the scientific revolutions of the time. However especially after
the Crimean War and the deflationary crisis of the 1870s and 80s that sprung out of it
as wartime production caused a surplus and production glut in the transit to the
domestic economy, chauvinistic and mercantile tendencies took the upper hand
Similarly the “liberal” global order that the US established was as fraught with
competitive as was Britain’s, having to multiple times violate the very GATT
principles that they demanded of others; but they had to artificially rewrite the rules of
the game to increase their competitiveness on the world market in relation to Japan
and Germany, namely through the repeal of the gold exchange and the pegging and
situation where the oil price cap imposed on Russian oil or the ban on sales of
Chinese Huawei products betray the hypocrisy in the free trade ideology that stands at
the core of US hegemony. Silver and Arrighi go on to list other examples of such
“hypocrisy” from the times that they are writing in the beginning of the 21st century,
which goes to show the relatively short-lasting nature of the purported efficiency and
terms).
If from the point of view of geopolitics the main imperatives for each rising
power is the ability to control capital flows by right of the issuance of the world
currency, from an ideological point of view the task seems to be to convince all other
actors to accept this state of things as not only fair and sustainable, but also inevitable.
Once the former becomes no longer profitable for the reigning hegemony, the latter