Manikeismoa, autoritarismoa eta gauza bihurtzea

Keynesianism as a model of economic governance, achieved international outreach after World War II. The collapse of the global financial system in the wake of the Great Depression was seen as a leading cause of the rise of extremism in Europe, and this shaped the debate about the post war international order. One U.S delegate at the Bretton Woods conference soberly reflected on the alternative to a new financial order as “the spread of depression form country to country” and the return of the “twin evils of international economic aggression and monetary disorder.”⁹¹ To facilitate social stability and economic growth in Europe after the war, Keynesian economic principles were institutionalized into the international financial architecture in the Bretton Woods regime. Replacing laissez-faire globalization, Bretton Woods brought into the international system its self-reflexive social aim of full employment and welfare liberalism. In this regime, states were recognized as the chief actors and

90 Burgin, The Great Persuasion, 91

91 Eisner, The American Political Economy, 89

36

considerable economic powers were afforded international diplomacy and national

policymakers. Two new supranational bodies were created to facilitate this: The IMF and the World Bank. The Bretton Woods regime cushioned sovereign states against the economic pressures by regulating international capital flows and fixing exchange rates to the dollar. For the first time in economic history, transnational financial flows were thoroughly regulated by political diplomacy. This allowed states to strike a balance between “universal” demands of international capital, and particular domestic political objectives – allowing states to pursue a wide range of responses to international capitalism.⁹²

As a financial regime, the Bretton Woods system made room for national political decisions within the system and restrained the economic power of the USA. The defining feature of this economic order was stability. This stability was imagined in social terms first, and then put into practice in the economy.⁹³ Indeed, the system was underwritten by the hegemony of the USA as the postwar world’s only creditor nation. Also the attractiveness of American culture played a big part in advancing the American economic model as an object of emulation by other states. American life was by many Europeans seen as culturally

attractive and often superior to the traditionalism of European society.⁹⁴ An attractive postwar vision was created by the American “citizen-consumer” that enjoyed material wealth and social harmony.⁹⁵ The American political right in this period largely accepted the state as the foremost agent in the economy, and a bipartisan consensus of the active state and the active citizen became focused around the Keynesian framework. The enactment of welfare reforms, government entitlement programs and Keynesian fiscal policy all demanded a government that intervened in the economy, and all required bipartisanship to be able to pass through Congress.

In the book The Great Transformation (1944), political economist Karl Polyani held that no society prior to the age of laissez-faire had cultivated a form of market exchange that was not somehow grounded in, or responsible for, the social relations it sprang from. Laissez-faire´s ideal of the self-regulating was a utopian project that sought to govern society

according to economic logic alone. This economic logic sought to commodify “land, labor and money” in ways that pretended these were not the function of social life, and this had resulted in massive social and spatial dislocation. ⁹⁶ As scholar John Gerard Ruggie has

92 Eisner, The American Political Economy, 89

93 Georg Kell & John Gerard Ruggie, “Global markets and social legitimacy: the case for the ‘Global Compact’.”

94 Ruggie, “International Regimes, Transactions, and Change: Embedded Liberalism in the Postwar Economic Order”, 382

95 Best, “From the Top-Down”, 365.

96 Polanyi, The Great Transformation,104

37 subsequently added to Polyani’s insights, the New Deal and the post-war arrangements at Bretton Woods which developed therefrom, functioned to “re-embed” economic relations back in social relations – a term which Ruggie called “embedded liberalism”.⁹⁷ By defining domestic economic stability as a normative goal and allowing for continuous negotiations between states, the architects of this new order, Keynes and his American colleague Harry Dexter White had in fact created such an “embedded” order after the war. This new international regime was not just a set of technical negotiations, but had also articulated a distinct normative social purpose of compromise and restraint that moved beyond the mere task of ensuring economic stability. They had created a self-reflexive purpose in the global economy – a form of narrative the advocates of the self-regulated markets had not attempted to construct for laissez-faire.⁹⁸

At the center of these developments was Keynes, who provided the language and economic models of this new liberal order. Keynes had been convinced of the shortcomings of laissez-faire since he had attended the peace conferences at Versailles after World War I.

His objective was the formulation of a “middle way”, and as such he shared Polyani´s theory of laissez-faire´s tendency to cause social instability and protest. Through Keynes and his influence, the way in which the “economy” was viewed changed dramatically after World War II. The idea of a national macro economy, and that it could be managed to produce specific social outcomes had been one of the fundamental lessons after two wars the Depression. The post war order would thus be centered on the national economies.⁹⁹

Besides these cultural and structural arguments, many economic historians have pointed to more pragmatic reasons for the rise of the state in the economy. As the political and

economic foundations for the global economy had been shattered by two world wars, various forms of human association that had been transnational were reduced to the national scale.

Most major corporations became national in scope. The sheer destruction and breakdown own the international order made the state the “default” level of social, political and economic organization. ¹⁰⁰ In the U.S and elsewhere, as a product of the crises of the period the prevailing form of nationality became more civic in nature, and not ethnical. The Second World War had necessitated a bureaucratic and directed economy and a vast expansion of the state apparatus. These circumstances meant that the national state – by necessity – had to be

97 Ruggie, “International Regimes, Transactions, and Change: Embedded Liberalism in the Postwar Economic Order”, 381

98 Best, From the Top-Down, 368.

99 Ibid.

100 Kell & Ruggie, “Global markets and social legitimacy.”

38

the effective actor in the economy.This created a notion of accountability for a set of shared values represented in the national discourse that would later be severely challenged

disappeared under globalization´s separation of production and finance and these political institutions.