The Commonalities of Global Crises

Markets, Communities and Nostalgia

Christian Karner, Bernhard Weicht, Christian Karner, Bernhard Weicht

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137502735
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Classi sociali e disparità economica

Bringing together contributions from an international group of social scientists, this collection examines diverse crises, both historical and contemporary, which implicate market forces, widening inequalities, social exclusion, forms of resistance, and ideological polarisation. The Commonalities of Global Crises offers carefully researched case studies which stretch across large geographical distances- from Egypt to the US and from northern, central, eastern and southern Europe to South America- and covers timely issues including human rights, slavery, care, migration, racism, and the far right. The volume demonstrates that such different settings and diverse concerns are characterized by a common tension in which the crises that unfold around pressures of widening marketization and commodification are met by the (re)building or re-assertion of various communities, and competing politics of solidarity and nostalgia.

Epilogue

Christian Karner and Bernhard Weicht

Abstract

We here further condense the central argument developed throughout this edited collection, namely, that at first sight, very different contemporary crisis settings are all shaped by the structural conditions and ideological reactions that emerge from each of our contributions: ie, ever-widening marketization and various politics of ‘community’ and nostalgia respectively. This is also related to other influential contributions to the social sciences made over recent years and to further reflections on the social and political effects of systemic and enduring crises.

Our era’s crises are ubiquitous and systemic. As we are writing these lines, new polarizations—or arguably merely revamped versions of older, albeit partly forgotten or conveniently overlooked schisms—are apparent across Europe and beyond. Questions concerning national sovereignty (such as in the case of the Russian annexation of Crimea) or the limits of trans national and international solidarity (such as in the European reactions to the increased numbers of refugees and asylum seekers) are reminiscent of the national struggles of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, which provided the historical starting point to Polanyi’s analyses. One recent conflict in particular symbolizes the ongoing friction between the state and the market, between local, political “communities” and international, economic interests. In the summer of 2015, the most recent “chapter” of the long-standing Greek debt and austerity crisis, which also crystallizes structural flaws implicating the Eurozone in its entirety (for example Heise 2014 ), saw an escalation of the clash between neoliberal austerity and left-wing politics that left no space for socio economically meaningful and mutually face-saving compromises. Greece, it seems, is given no choice but to implement additional, further impoverishing “reforms”, if the country is to avoid complete socio economic implosion. The capital controls forced onto Greek citizens in the context of their government’s stand-off with its international creditors left little doubt about how bad things had become, and how much worse they might yet get. Greeks’ ongoing nightmare can very plausibly be read as an example of the timeliness of (neo-)Polanyian categories: dis-embedding marketization , essentially what externally imposed austerity programmes and purported reforms have amounted to, clashing with “counter-moves” promising to socially re-embed economic relations—and hence, ultimately, people. Given that the far left and the far right have responded strongly to the Greek crisis, we undoubtedly here encounter corroboration of Polanyi’s ( 2001 ) “double movement” implicating socialist and fascist counter-reactions to supposedly “self-regulating markets” and their social and human costs. Yet more accurately, and like several other contexts examined in this book, Greece today, in her ongoing struggles with transnational market forces and her internal ideological tensions, conforms to Nancy Fraser’s depiction ( 2012 ) of a “triple movement” positing the mutually contradictory reactions of social protection and emancipation against ever-widening marketization.

In recent years, in both the academic realm and broader public discussion, the revived interest in Polanyi’s theoretically groundbreaking work coincided with the publication of two other major works that take a particular interest in the historically non-linear development of economic and social structures: Thomas Piketty’s ( 2014 ) seminal history of income and wealth ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• Markets, “Communities” and Nostalgia
• France in Times of the “Responsibility and Solidarity Pact”: “Neoliberal Normalization” or a Laboratory of New Resistance?
• Neoliberal Moral Economy: Migrant Workers’ Value Struggles Across Temporal and Spatial Dimensions
• Treble Troubles? Marketization, Social Protection and Emancipation Considered Through the Lens of Slavery
• State, Market, or Back to the Family? Nostalgic Struggles for Proper Elder Care
• Moral Economy Versus Political Economy: Provincializing Polanyi
• Collective Identity Under Reconstruction: The Case of West Piraeus (Greece)
• Austria Between “Social Protection” and “Emancipation”: Negotiating Global Flows, Marketization and Nostalgia
• Disembedding the Embedded/Disembedded Opposition
• The Politics of Nostalgia in Urban Redevelopment Projects: The Case of Antwerp-Dam
• Longing for Communal Purity: Countryside, (Far-Right) Nationalism and the (Im)possibility of Progressive Politics of Nostalgia
• “Varieties of Nostalgia” in Argentinean and Chilean Generations
• The Egyptian Economic Crisis: Insecurity, Affect, Nostalgia
• Erratum to: The Commonalities of Global Crises: Markets, Communities and Nostalgia
• Backmatter