The International Political Economy of Food: A Global Crisis

1995 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 511-538 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harriet Friedmann

The largest gap between national regulation and transnational economic organization is in the agro-food sector. This gap is the legacy of the post-World War II food regime, whose implicit rules gave priority to national farm programs (including import controls and export subsidies); placed the United States at the center; generated chronic surpluses; and allowed international power to take the unusual form of subsidized exports of surplus commodities, particularly wheat. The author analyzes the emergence and contradictions of the postwar food regime as a tension between replication and integration of national agro-food sectors, often interpreted as “export of the U.S. model.” By the early 1970s, replication led to international economic conflict, while transnational corporations found national regulatory frameworks to be obstacles to further integration of a potentially global agro-food sector. A new axis between Asian import countries and new agricultural countries, such as Brazil, has destabilized the Atlantic-centered food regime, without creating a new regime. Alternative future regimes are identified, based on the shift from agriculture to food, employment, and land use as political issues: private global regulation or democratic regulation of nested, regional agro-food economies, federated at the international level.

Author(s):  
Carla Norrlof

Scholars of international political economy in the 1970s explored the relationship among a dominant power, leadership, and openness. The discussion soon centered on the concept of hegemony, meaning a situation in which a single state exercises leadership in creating and maintaining the fundamental rules of the international system. The scholarly arguments that ensued focused on the rationale for, and durability of, hegemony, and seemed relevant because of a shared assumption that U.S. dominance, so strong during the quarter-century after World War II, was declining. However, the debate was premised on a shared but incorrect empirical perception that American hegemony was declining. When similar questions arose again at the end of the 20th century, the terminology used was less that of hegemony than of unipolarity and hierarchy, and the key question was whether exercising continuing leadership would be so costly to the hegemon that its decline would be generated by its leadership. The issues of hegemony raised in this literature have taken on renewed relevance with the election of Donald J. Trump as President of the United States.


2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 320
Author(s):  
Yuzhou Lu

<p>The Bretton Woods System was formulated by Britain and the United States and other countries before the end of World War II, and it could keep the worldwide hegemony of the United States and was closely related to the economic development and post-war pattern of each country. However, in the 1960s, the weaknesses of this system were showed through the Triffin problem. Besides, there were obvious institutional defects as for this system. All of these led to the collapse of the system under the circumstance of uneven development of capitalism. Although the system has already got out of the stage of history, it still influences the economic recovery of various countries around the world, and it is significant to enhance the international power and change the post-war pattern.</p>


2019 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 231-254
Author(s):  
Andreu Espasa

De forma un tanto paradójica, a finales de los años treinta, las relaciones entre México y Estados Unidos sufrieron uno de los momentos de máxima tensión, para pasar, a continuación, a experimentar una notable mejoría, alcanzando el cénit en la alianza política y militar sellada durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial. El episodio catalizador de la tensión y posterior reconciliación fue, sin duda, el conflicto diplomático planteado tras la nacionalización petrolera de 1938. De entre los factores que propiciaron la solución pacífica y negociada al conflicto petrolero, el presente artículo se centra en analizar dos fenómenos del momento. En primer lugar, siguiendo un orden de relevancia, se examina el papel que tuvo la Guerra Civil Española. Aunque las posturas de ambos gobiernos ante el conflicto español fueron sustancialmente distintas, las interpretaciones y las lecciones sobre sus posibles consecuencias permitieron un mayor entendimiento entre los dos países vecinos. En segundo lugar, también se analizarán las afinidades ideológicas entre el New Deal y el cardenismo en el contexto de la crisis mundial económica y política de los años treinta, con el fin de entender su papel lubricante en las relaciones bilaterales de la época. Somewhat paradoxically, at the end of the 1930s, the relationship between Mexico and the United States experienced one of its tensest moments, after which it dramatically improved, reaching its zenith in the political and military alliance cemented during World War II. The catalyst for this tension and subsequent reconciliation was, without doubt, the diplomatic conflict that arose after the oil nationalization of 1938. Of the various factors that led to a peaceful negotiated solution to the oil conflict, this article focuses on analyzing two phenomena. Firstly—in order of importance—this article examines the role that the Spanish Civil War played. Although the positions of both governments in relation to the Spanish war were significantly different, the interpretations and lessons concerning potential consequences enabled a greater understanding between the two neighboring countries. Secondly, this article also analyzes the ideological affinities between the New Deal and Cardenismo in the context of the global economic and political crisis of the thirties, seeking to understand their role in facilitating bilateral relations during that period.


Author(s):  
Benjamin Tromly

During the height of the Cold War in the 1950s, the United States government unleashed covert operations intended to weaken the Soviet Union. As part of these efforts, the CIA undertook support of Russian exiles, populations uprooted either during World War II or by the Russian Revolution decades before. No one seemed better prepared to fight in the American secret war against communism than the uprooted Russians, whom the CIA directed to carry out propaganda, espionage, and subversion operations from their home base in West Germany. Yet the American engagement of Russian exiles had unpredictable outcomes. Drawing on recently declassified and previously untapped sources, Cold War Exiles and the CIA examines how the CIA’s Russian operations became entangled with the internal struggles of Russia abroad and also the espionage wars of the superpowers in divided Germany. What resulted was a transnational political sphere involving different groups of Russian exiles, American and German anti-communists, and spies operating on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Inadvertently, CIA’s patronage of Russian exiles forged a complex sub-front in the wider Cold War, demonstrating the ways in which the hostilities of the Cold War played out in ancillary conflicts involving proxies and non-state actors.


Volume Nine of this series traces the development of the ‘world novel’, that is, English-language novels written throughout the world, beyond Britain, Ireland, and the United States. Focusing on the period up to 1950, the volume contains survey chapters and chapters on major writers, as well as chapters on book history, publishing, and the critical contexts of the work discussed. The text covers periods from renaissance literary imaginings of exotic parts of the world like Oceania, through fiction embodying the ideology and conventions of empire, to the emergence of settler nationalist and Indigenous movements and, finally, the assimilations of modernism at the beginnings of the post-imperial world order. The book, then, contains chapters on the development of the non-metropolitan novel throughout the British world from the eighteenth to the mid twentieth centuries. This is the period of empire and resistance to empire, of settler confidence giving way to doubt, and of the rise of indigenous and post-colonial nationalisms that would shape the world after World War II.


2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 205630512110088
Author(s):  
Colin Agur ◽  
Lanhuizi Gan

Scholars have recognized emotion as an increasingly important element in the reception and retransmission of online information. In the United States, because of existing differences in ideology, among both audiences and producers of news stories, political issues are prone to spark considerable emotional responses online. While much research has explored emotional responses during election campaigns, this study focuses on the role of online emotion in social media posts related to day-to-day governance in between election periods. Specifically, this study takes the 2018–2019 government shutdown as its subject of investigation. The data set shows the prominence of journalistic and political figures in leading the discussion of news stories, the nuance of emotions employed in the news frames, and the choice of pro-attitudinal news sharing.


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