scholarly journals Political Potency and the Impotency of European Sovereignism: Pandemic and Technocracy

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 158-178
Author(s):  
Antonio Cantaro

Abstract The covid-19 pandemic and the parallel economic and social crisis mark both a decline of neoliberal globalisation and a return of public intervention. As many have stated, the economic policy triptych of the past decades – the opening of markets, withdrawal of the state and privatisation – has substantially disappeared from the agendas of governments around the world. The ‘political’, in a sense, is back. But in what sense? Can we talk about a real paradigm shift? The return of the political that we are witnessing manifests itself in the permanence and persistence of the neoliberal anthropology of the masses, which is the legacy of globalism, of the Maastricht order and of its idea of civilisation (even more than its political economy dogmas).

1989 ◽  
Vol 48 (4) ◽  
pp. 787-797 ◽  
Author(s):  
Akhil Gupta

Economists and political scientists have become increasingly interested in the political economy of India during the past decade and particularly during the past three or four years. The titles under review will be valuable not only to India specialists but also to comparative scholars because of the intriguing mix of conditions found in India. More like a continent than a country in its diversity, India is in some ways very similar to densely populated, predominantly rural and agricultural China, differing most perhaps in the obstinacy and depth of its poverty. In the predominant role played by the state within an essentially capitalist economy, it is closer to the model of Western social democracies than it is to either prominently ideological capitalist or socialist nation-states; like other countries in the “third world,” the state in India plays a highly interventionist developmental role. Finally, since Independence it has pursued, more successfully than most nation-states in Latin America and Asia, policies of importsubstituting industrialization and relative autarchy. In terms of its political structures, India differs from most newly industrialized countries (NICs) in that it generally continues to function as a parliamentary democracy. The federal political system creates an intriguing balance of forces between central and the regional state governments, which are often ruled by opposition parties with agendas, ideologies, and organizational structures quite different from those of the central government.


Mapping Power ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 1-27
Author(s):  
Sunila S. Kale ◽  
Navroz K. Dubash ◽  
Ranjit Bharvirkar

The introductory chapter lays out the rationale for the volume and provides a framework for analysing the political economy of Indian electricity. We first present a historically-rooted political economy analysis to understand the past and identify reforms for the future of electricity in India. We next outline an analytic framework to guide the empirical chapters of the book, which locates electricity outcomes in the larger political economy of electricity, the field of politics that are specific to each state, and each state’s broader political economy. The chapter ends by providing concise synopses of the state-level narratives of electricity in the fifteen states included in the volume.


Stanovnistvo ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-82
Author(s):  
Kosta Josifidis ◽  
Alpar Losonc ◽  
Novica Supic

The political economy approach that entails critical arguments in relation to the processes of migration in neoliberal terms is developed in the paper. Starting with the account that migration covers as broad issues as politics, economics and population dynamic, the authors address the issue of migration in the political economy circuits of neoliberalization. In fact, the main line of argument is connected to the political economy as the relevant discursive frame and explanatory principle for the articulation of the complexity of migration. Critical arguments relating to the processes of migration in the neoliberal context thematize the mechanism of implemented flexibilisation and deregulation of labor. Demographic dynamics is essential in this context, but the authors intend to identify those political economy processes that lead to high precariousness, to various forms of temporary labor which are closely associated with forced labor forms. The category of forced labor is emphasized in the contemporary forms of migration, because this mode of labor facilitates the migration throughout the world. Furthermore, the authors point out the contradictory position of the state in relation to the migration-processes and analyse the authoritarian statism. This argumentation leads to articulation of the contradictory position of neoliberalization. The neoliberal discourses bring out the critical stance concerning the supremacy of the state, but it plays a key role in the regulation of migration. The state exposed to migration is faced with the contradictory demands. The globalization indicates the world without borders but is faced with the same contradictions. It is no coincidence that the intention of the reconceptualizations of globalization are interested in promoting global public goods. The processes of privatization in the sphere of the regulation of migration sharpen the contradictions of migration in the context of neoliberalization. The political economy approach is faced with the tension between the two approaches. The first proposed regulation and workforce management at the supranational level. The other remains in the framework of ?methodological nationalism?: the appropriate starting point is the national state. Given the fact that structural inequalities should be recognized at a global level, and that processes of migration show that there is a certain hierarchical global flow in the context of the dynamics of workforce, the first approach proves to be inadequate. In other words, the second approach could not articulate the relevant tendencies. Accordingly, the political economy approach that intends to include complex determination regarding the migration should integrate the national trends in the supranational framework. But, proper research should take into account that globalization and its complex order consist of a number of interventions and interferences. This means that the aforementioned approach must develop sufficiently complex methodology in order to articulate its selected subject.


Author(s):  
Ayelet Shachar

“There are some things that money can’t buy.” Is citizenship among them? This chapter explores this question by highlighting the core legal and ethical puzzles associated with the surge in cash-for-passport programs. The spread of these new programs is one of the most significant developments in citizenship practice in the past few decades. It tests our deepest intuitions about the meaning and attributes of the relationship between the individual and the political community to which she belongs. This chapter identifies the main strategies employed by a growing number of states putting their visas and passports “for sale,” selectively opening their otherwise bolted gates of admission to the high-net-worth individuals of the world. Moving from the positive to the normative, the discussion then elaborates the main arguments in favor of, as well as against, citizenship-for-sale. The discussion draws attention to the distributive and political implications of these developments, both locally and globally, and identifies the deeper forces at work that contribute to the perpetual testing, blurring, and erosion of the state-market boundary regulating access to membership.


2017 ◽  
Vol 37 (4) ◽  
pp. 789-807 ◽  
Author(s):  
ELIAS JABBOUR ◽  
ALEXIS DANTAS

ABSTRACT The main aim of this paper is to demonstrate, through a review of China’s economic reforms, that the emergence of a large private sector and the increased sophistication and diversification of industry has required the continual reorganization of activities between the state and private sectors of the economy. We argue in this paper that the state began to play a major role in important industries and in big finance, as well as in the coordination and socialization of investment, such as economic policy (monetary and fiscal), foreign trade and, especially, the launch of new and higher forms of economic planning.


2009 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-57 ◽  
Author(s):  
PETER NEWELL

AbstractThis paper examines relations between the state and capital in Argentina with respect to agricultural biotechnology. Argentina is one of the world's leading exporters of genetically modified (GM) crops and is a key player in the global politics of biotechnology. Whereas in other parts of the world, including other countries in Latin America, active civil societies and some governments have rejected the technology, Argentina has adopted it as a central accumulation strategy. The desirability of this strategy has been secured in material, institutional and discursive arenas of power, producing a particular expression of ‘bio-hegemony’. Looking at the role of business in the political economy of agricultural biotechnology is revealing both of the extent and forms of corporate power and contributes to an understanding of hegemony in practice.


Author(s):  
Christine Regan

In v. ‘Tony Harrison’ explains his essential identity as an unlikely union of high cultural poet and dispossessed vandal, an idiosyncratic loner who finds his ghostly twin in a nineteenth-century French poet, Rimbaud. To understand the significance of Harrison’s claim that he is as one in spirit with Rimbaud, it is important to remember that the literary and political rebel was a poet of the Paris Commune, and v. is responsive to the literary and republican history Rimbaud lived in. In v. Harrison’s signature poetics of occupation engages with Parisian’s aesthetic and political occupation of their city in 1871 and 'artisanal' political poetry. As poet-mythologers, Harrison and Rimbaud champion traditions of resistance to the state and capital, illuminating the shared hopes uniting different struggles. The significance of the 1984 miners’ strike, Thatcher, Marx and Morris for Harrison’s state of the nation poem, and for the political sonnets, is discussed too. v. suggests alternative social models to Thatcher’s neoliberal revolution and late capitalism in England, and suggests the wish for fundamental change. The past is full of paths not taken, and v. suggests visiting Paris 1871, with Rimbaud as ‘the first poet of a civilization that has not yet appeared’, to illuminate utopian possibilities about transforming the world and ‘changer la vie’.


2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 45-69
Author(s):  
Benoit Challand ◽  
Joshua Rogers

This paper provides an historical exploration of local governance in Yemen across the past sixty years. It highlights the presence of a strong tradition of local self-rule, self-help, and participation “from below” as well as the presence of a rival, official, political culture upheld by central elites that celebrates centralization and the strong state. Shifts in the predominance of one or the other tendency have coincided with shifts in the political economy of the Yemeni state(s). When it favored the local, central rulers were compelled to give space to local initiatives and Yemen experienced moments of political participation and local development.


Author(s):  
Michael P. DeJonge

This chapter continues the examination of Bonhoeffer’s first phase of resistance through an exposition of “The Church and the Jewish Question,” turning now to the modes of resistance proper to the church’s preaching office. Because such resistance involves the church speaking against the state, it appears to stand in contradiction with Bonhoeffer’s suggestion earlier in the essay that the church should not speak out against the state. This is in fact not a contradiction but rather the coherent expression of the political vision as outlined in the first several chapters of this book, which requires that the church criticize the state under certain circumstances but not others. The specific form of word examined here is the indirectly political word (type 3 resistance) by which the church reminds the messianic state of its mandate to preserve the world with neither “too little” nor “too much” order.


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