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Nationality is a crucial element of the regime governing international airlines, the industry which is a key means of economic globalization. I argue that economic nationalist motives drive states to harness international economic flows to support sovereignty and national identity. Economic nationalism is conceptualized as a performative phenomenon, describing how states make sovereignty and nations real by enabling and controlling economic practices. Using a mixed-methods approach, I statistically examine an observable implication that dyads which have greater cultural difference tend to have less liberal bilateral air services agreements. I then investigate through analytic narratives how Canada and the EU dealt with the rapid growth and ambitious expansion of the Gulf state airlines, which were themselves economic nationalist projects. Canada restricted traffic rights while the EU has exerted control by enforcing concepts of fair competition and publicizing its scrutiny of foreign ownership and control over EU airlines. A key contribution of this article is to explore how trade policy is driven by symbolic politics, and to raise the possibility that material gains are pursed to support performances of national identity and sovereignty. This has further applications to other sectors with perceived implications for sovereignty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Left-wing opposition to globalization lives, among voters and interest groups, both labor and progressive. But have left-wing opponents of trade successfully cultivated representation? Using the US Congress as a case, I show that two distinct groups of Democrats vote in characteristically progressive and protectionist ways on trade bills. These groups, especially progressives, are rewarded with excess campaign contributions from publicly anti-trade groups. A dyadic research design shows that interest group/representative relationships degrade noticeably when members of Congress vote for trade bills that interest groups have opposed. While recent events have highlighted business interests and right-wing economic populism, left-wing opposition to globalization remains a vibrant third face of contemporary domestic contestation over trade that will be especially important where populists fade. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many economies in the Western world have been through a regime shift towards fiscal austerity since the 1970s. Existing scholarship ascribes trends in austerity to globalisation or the influence of a new economic paradigm. This paper develops a different approach by stressing the strategic intervention of central banks in governments' fiscal decisions. It analyses archival documents from the German Federal Cabinet and the Bundesbank Council over more than two decades (1960–1981) and finds that the fiscal regime was shaped by changes in transnational institutions which the central bank used to strategically expand its institutional power within the larger macroeconomic framework. With the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system, the Bundesbank was able to greatly increase its power resources while the government's powers diminished. The Bundesbank used its new powers to strategically 'overreach' into the fiscal sphere and 'bargain' with the government to achieve fiscal reforms. By shedding light on the interactions of global legal and economic developments and the micro-level strategies of state actors, the paper proposes a more complex view of the role of the state and brings state-actor strategies into our understanding of the grand shifts in economic policymaking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After years of placing faith in the markets, we are seeing a revival of interest in statist economic policy across the world, particularly with regards to finance. How much policy space do previously liberalized developing countries still have to renationalize their financial sectors by exerting direct control over the process of credit allocation, despite the constraints posed by economic globalization? Under what conditions do they actually use this policy space? Bolivia is an especially important case because it is one of the few peripheral countries that implemented strongly interventionist financial reform in the 2010s. Using Bolivia as a least likely case, I argue that two factors, increased availability of external financing sources, and domestic popular mobilization, create favorable conditions for developmentalist financial reform because these make it possible to reduce external conditionalities and overcome opposition by the domestic financial sector. Popular mobilizations paved the way for reform by bringing developmentalist policymakers to power and exerting pressure on them to 1. Maximize policy space by diversifying into newly available alternative sources of foreign borrowing to reduce external conditionalities, and 2. Mitigate the importance of disinvestment threats by domestic economic elites by incrementally increasing public ownership and control of the economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Trade policies have been a contested aspect of economic globalization. Concerns arise over economic outcomes, political processes, and the balance of power between states and corporations. Religious actors are rarely studied in spite of their political discourse and engagement in trade policy debates. In this paper, I examine three faith communities in the Americas that have been engaged in debates over trade policies, specifically NAFTA, CAFTA and CA4FTA. I find that the Catholic Church in Costa Rica, the Presbyterian Church in the USA, and Kairos, an ecumenical justice coalition in Canada, have all been engaged in discussion and public action surrounding trade policies. Religious values of solidarity and community have been part of the discourse of these groups as they critique market foundations. However, the groups vary in the ways they understand their role in engaging the political economy. Options vary from 1) framing policy debates within key values, 2) providing a lens with which to evaluate policy decisions and 3) taking action on behalf of an alternative economic order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While extensive literature exists on how economic globalisation has limited developing countries' policy space for industrial policy, the literature on how it has affected advanced economies remains scant. We utilise original archival material to analyse the activities of the German public development bank, the Kreditantstalt für Wiederaufbau (KfW), in order to shed light on an important, but neglected aspect of German industrial policy. We analyse how the KfW responded to multiple challenges after the rise of economic globalisation, including a funding crisis, international agreements to limit export subsidies and Europeanisation. We argue that KfW successfully managed to navigate these challenges in order to retain, and even increase, its ability to conduct selective industrial policy in the post-1980s era. This was possible because of Germany's hard currency and low sovereign credit risk, large market size, which was augmented by membership in the European Union, and Germany's position as regional hegemon within Europe. More broadly, this shows how, conditional on domestic politics, advanced economies are able to shape and exploit the rules of the international economic system to implement industrial policies to their advantage, even as developing countries are given the opposite policy recommendations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article invokes Gramscian theory in an effort to better grasp the reorganization of social reproduction under neoliberal globalization. It argues that recent transformations in the world development order warrant a rethinking of the concept of social reproduction, towards acknowledging the increasingly apparent role of transnational governance institutions in organizing social reproduction processes, particularly in peripheral countries. To substantiate this argument, the article interrogates the Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper development approach, the most visible policy tool of the post-Washington Consensus. In the Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper process, the World Bank has started to link debt relief administered through the Enhanced Heavily Indebted Poor Country (HIPC II) initiative to the delivery of basic social services to the poor, and directly finances human capital investments through conditional cash transfer programs. While conditionalities attached to Bank funding continue to promote the privatization of various state functions associated with social reproduction, especially in the areas of health care and education, the Bank, at the same time, funds 'social inclusion' programs that directly absorb some of these functions. This signals the emergence of a new social reproduction regime of 'conditional inclusion' under World Bank leadership. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although a recurrent phenomenon, sovereign debt restructurings following defaults on debt obligations do not engender today the exact same dynamics they did in the past. On the one hand, prevalent reputational models have overestimated the costs of default in terms of access to new credit. On the other hand, debtors' restructuring strategies have been underestimated in the face of anticipated constraints on developing countries' policy autonomy believed to flow from financial globalization. By focusing on the latest Argentine debt restructuring (the largest and most complex in history to date), I find that the outcome of sovereign debt restructurings in terms of credit (re)access are much less contingent on market punishments based on reputations than on the short-term nature of financial incentives in the bond industry as well as on international lending cycles. Time horizons play a crucial role in how debtors take advantage of different creditors' incentives to participate in a restructuring. A critical implication is that governments have more room to maneuver in taking contentious policy stances (such as stringent debt restructuring deals) than the literature on economic globalization accounts for. Also, far from a zero-sum game, for both debtors and some of their creditors, debt restructurings can prove to be attractive deals for their specific purposes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates political-economic backlash to economic globalization in industrialized polities. It analyzes data on the content of party platforms to develop measures of party support for, or opposition to, political-economic closure, anti-democratic nationalism, and xenophobia in all party platforms of 23 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries for all national elections between 1960 and 2003. These allow broader judgments of trends in autarky and autarchy than focusing on electoral success of particular extreme-right parties. Based on these measures, the paper quantitatively analyzes how international trade and capital openness and flows, and immigration flows, all influence the embrace or rejection of political-economic backlash among parties. The main explanatory finding is that immigration and capital flows and openness tend to increase marginally such backlash when national welfare compensation is very modest, but to reduce it when national compensation is generous, cushioning citizens from globalization's economic risks. This finding provides evidence that the current wave of globalization only marginally resembles the dark politics ending its nineteenth-century predecessor, and that welfare protection may help make the difference between political-economic backlash and liberalism in contemporary globalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent scholarship on globalization and industrial relations supports the full gamut of possibilities: that globalization constrains, strengthens, or has nothing to do with industrialized-country bargaining institutions and outcomes. But most empirical work focuses on direct connections between outcomes and trade and/or direct investment flows, thus discounting the role of threatened exit and competition, or of indirect links involving employers and employer organization and strategy. This paper studies the 2003 campaign for the East–West equalization of conditions in the German metal industry, and finds that globalization has affected the bargaining outcome much more than standard accounts suggest. First, the Eastern EU-enlargement—an element of globalization—created a ‘now or never’ atmosphere that helped to spark the union's initiative. Employers' vehement opposition was frequently clothed in concerns about labor costs, emphasizing losses in international competitiveness and/or jobs to low-wage countries. And employers exercised frequent exit threats that were instrumental in splitting workforces by inducing fears and in instilling an anti-union mood. Finally, the bargaining round inspired large firms to question the central bargaining institution, thereby subordinating social peace to the goal of defeating IG Metall. This and subsequent developments in West Germany point to a transformation of German industrial relations as a partial consequence of economic globalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The central claim of Partisan Politics in the Global Economy is that social democracy continues to be both distinctive and successful in the global economy in cases where powerful left-of-center parties are allied with strong and centralized trade union movements. Hay asks whether this means that countries without entrenched corporatist institutions must give in to global market forces by shrinking state activism. The first part of this article demonstrates that there is scant evidence that the international integration of financial markets has been associated with a reduction in fiscal activism in the OECD. This is consistent with my partisan mediation thesis. Here, however, I wish to take up Hay's challenge of analyzing policy developments without recourse to my institutional typology. The second part of the article shows that fiscal policy in the OECD has been considerably more restrictive where governments have committed to fixed exchange rates. I argue that European countries have nonetheless chosen to fix their exchange rates as part of the broader regional integration project. The final part of the article suggests that the eurozone may well not be dominated by conservative fiscal policies. The European Central Bank is unlikely to be as conservative as the Bundesbank and the political and economic incentives for fiscal prudence in the eurozone are weaker than under the EMS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]