Prelude to America’s Downfall: The Stagflation of the 1970s

Since the end of the Bretton Woods system and the stagflation of the 1970s, the transatlantic core, under the leadership of the United States of America, has been trying to expand its model of free market capitalism embracing every part of the globe, while addressing its domestic overaccumulation crisis. This article follows a historical methodological perspective and draws from the concept of Uneven and Combined Development (UCD), which helps us consider the structural reasons behind the long and protracted decline of the American economic power. In this respect, according to the UCD concept, there is no global power that can enjoy the privilege for being at the top of the global capitalist system forever in a world which develops unevenly and in a combined way. Power shifts across the world and new powers come to challenge the current hegemonic power and its alliance systems. The novelty of the article is that it locates this decline in the 1970s and considers it as being consubstantial with the state economic policy of neo-liberalism and financialisation (supply-side economics). However the financialised capitalism of the transatlantic assemblage lack industrial base producing, reproducing and recycling real commodity values. Further, the article shows that this attempt to remain at the top of the global capitalist system forever has not been successful, not least because the regime which the recovery of the core had rested upon, that of neo-liberal financialisation represents a major vulnerability of the transatlantic assemblage eroding the primacy of the United States of America in it.

The Indigenous Dimension of the Intersocietal: Dussel, Exteriority and the Sámi People

Proponents of uneven and combined development (U&CD) as a theoretical approach to International Relations (IR) have presented it as providing the conceptual means for overcoming Eurocentrism. While the U&CD scholars have made valuable contributions to anti-Eurocentric IR scholarship, this article argues that U&CD has analytical limitations that impede its anti-Eurocentric potential. These limitations derive from U&CD’s reliance on the concepts of ‘development’ and the ‘whip of external necessity’, which require developmental ranking of societies and lock U&CD into a state-centric social ontology. To provide complementary conceptual resources to overcome U&CD’s analytical limitations, this article introduces Enrique Dussel’s liberation philosophy (LP), which can incorporate peoples other than states as agents and entities of global politics through its concept of ‘exteriority’. U&CD and LP are then jointly applied to analyse the relations between the Nordic states and the indigenous Sámi people to assess the approaches’ relative strengths and weaknesses and identify synergies between them. Based on this assessment, the article outlines the potential for synthesising a ‘thin’ version of U&CD with LP, by using the concept of ‘exteriority’ to reorient U&CD’s analytical focus towards people excluded by the states-system.