Globalization And The Crisis Of Embedded Liberalism

As the world economy slides into the worst recession since the 1930s, there is fear that hard times will ignite a backlash against free trade policies and globalization more generally. This book explores the political and economic institutional foundations of the bargain of embedded liberalism and the ways domestic institutions shape how governments redistribute the risks and benefits of economic globalization. The author identifies the Anglo-American democracies, because of their majoritarian polities combined with decentralized, competitive economies, as uniquely vulnerable to the contemporary challenges of globalization and the most susceptible to a backlash against it.

As the world economy slides into the worst recession since the 1930s, there is fear that hard times will ignite a backlash against free trade policies and globalization more generally. This book explores the political and economic institutional foundations of the bargain of embedded liberalism and the ways domestic institutions shape how governments redistribute the risks and benefits of economic globalization. The author identifies the Anglo-American democracies, because of their majoritarian polities combined with decentralized, competitive economies, as uniquely vulnerable to the contemporary challenges of globalization and the most susceptible to a backlash against it.

John Ruggie introduced the concept of embedded liberalism in a 1982 article that has become one of the most frequently cited sources in the study of international political economy. The concept was intended to convey the manner by which capitalist countries learned to combine the efficiency of markets with the broader values of the community that socially sustainable markets themselves require in order to survive and thrive. Examining the concept and the institutionalized practice of embedded liberalism, this collection provides a survey of the macro patterns in industrialized countries. Leading scholars combine to demonstrate the benefits of embedded liberalism in practice as well as its gradual erosion at national levels, and to analyze public opinion. They provide a better understanding of what embedded liberalism means, why it matters and how to reconstitute it in the context of the global economy. The contributors contextualize the current challenge historically and theoretically so that students, scholars and policy makers alike are reminded of what is at stake and what is required.

Looming trade wars and rising nationalism have stirred troubling memories of the 1930s. Will history repeat itself? Do we face the chaotic breakdown of the global economic system in the face of stagnation, protectionism and political tumult? Jeremy Green argues that, although we face grave problems, globalization is not about to end. Setting today’s challenges within a longer historical context, he demonstrates that the global economy is more interconnected than ever before and the costs of undoing it high enough to make a complete breakdown unlikely. Popular analogies between the 1930s and today are misleading. But the governing liberal ideology of globalisation is changing. It is mutating into a hard-edged nationalism that defends free markets while reasserting sovereignty and strengthening borders. This ‘national liberalism’ threatens a much more dangerous disintegration, fuelled by inequality and ecological crisis, unless we radically rethink the international status quo. This brilliantly original account of the discontents of globalization is a must-read both for concerned citizens and students of global political economy.

Research Paper (postgraduate) from the year 2019 in the subject Politics - International Politics - Topic: Globalization, Political Economics, grade: 100, , course: Political Economics, language: English, abstract: This article made comparison between ‘embedded liberalism' and ‘neoliberalism'. The article also traced the basis for the shift from ‘embedded liberalism' to the emergence of ‘neoliberalism'. In order for the government to intervene in economic policies matters; democracy was the driving force for the spread of embedded liberalism. Macroeconomics was introduced by the government of advanced economies to address three critical areas of the economic policies, namely: inflation, market output, and unemployment. The other aspect of this period was to win the cold war and to empower the United States as the global hegemon. The departure from embedded liberalism to neoliberalism in 1971 was due to domestic economic pressure of the US. President Nixon’s administration ended the ‘convertibility of the dollar into gold' policy regime. The government had to float the dollar in the international market allowing market forces to determine the value of the dollar currency. The administration of Reagan and Thatcher institutionalised ‘neoliberalism' as an alternative to ‘embedded liberalism'. The adoption of ‘neoliberalism' led both administrations to implement monetary policies which led to stripping labour from further threatening the economies of the United States and the United Kingdom with inflation. The overall implications were increased profits for capitalists or entrepreneurs as against employees of the labour market. The analysis revealed that there was an increased unemployment rate due to high-interest rates and deliberate policies to encourage recession in order to forestall inflation.

Focusing on the development of justificatory discourse on global governance, Steffek examines how differing conceptions of distributive and social justice have played a role in negotiations in the domains of security, economics, and protecting the environment.

Many years ago, John Gerard Ruggie coined the phrase "embedded liberalism" to describe the grand post-1945 political compromise between free-market liberalism and domestic political interventionism that stabilized the multilateral economic order. In Global Liberalism and Political Order, leading scholars of political economy and international relations assess the challenges facing today's increasingly interdependent world as globalization redefines the old political order. They address the unraveling and/or reinvention of a grand compromise in global governance from a variety of theoretical perspectives and issue areas, including trade, finance, networked governance, North-South relations, and the environment. Focusing on the foundations of political authority at the global level, the contributors imagine the implications of success or failure for international economic order and political stability. Ruggie, whose work inspired many of this book's scholars, contributes a chapter on the prospects for a new global—as opposed to international—grand bargain.

For a century, economists have driven forward the cause of globalization in financial institutions, labour markets, and trade. Yet there have been consistent warning signs that a global economy and free trade might not always be advantageous. Where are the pressure points? What could be done about them? Dani Rodrik examines the back-story from its seventeenth-century origins through the milestones of the gold standard, the Bretton Woods Agreement, and the Washington Consensus, to the present day. Although economic globalization has enabled unprecedented levels of prosperity in advanced countries and has been a boon to hundreds of millions of poor workers in China and elsewhere in Asia, it is a concept that rests on shaky pillars, he contends. Its long-term sustainability is not a given. The heart of Rodrik’s argument is a fundamental 'trilemma': that we cannot simultaneously pursue democracy, national self-determination, and economic globalization. Give too much power to governments, and you have protectionism. Give markets too much freedom, and you have an unstable world economy with little social and political support from those it is supposed to help. Rodrik argues for smart globalization, not maximum globalization.