1st Edition

Disintegrative Tendencies in Global Political Economy Exits and Conflicts

By Heikki Patomaki Copyright 2018
    154 Pages 12 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    154 Pages 12 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    Whether we talk about human learning and unlearning, securitization, or political economy, the forces and mechanisms generating both globalization and disintegration are causally efficacious across the world. Thus, the processes that led to the victory of the ‘Leave’ campaign in the June 2016 referendum on UK European Union membership are not simply confined to the United Kingdom, or even Europe. Similarly, conflict in Ukraine and the presidency of Donald Trump hold implications for a stage much wider than EU-Russia or the United States alone.

    Patomäki explores the world-historical mechanisms and processes that have created the conditions for the world’s current predicaments and, arguably, involve potential for better futures. Operationally, he relies on the philosophy of dialectical critical realism and on the methods of contemporary social sciences, exploring how crises, learning and politics are interwoven through uneven wealth-accumulation and problematical growth-dynamics. Seeking to illuminate the causes of the currently prevailing tendencies towards disintegration, antagonism and – ultimately – war, he also shows how these developments are in fact embedded in deeper processes of human learning. The book embraces a Wellsian warning about the increasingly likely possibility of a military disaster, but its central objective is to further enlightenment and holoreflexivity within the current world-historical conjuncture.

    This work will be of interest to students and scholars of international relations, peace research, security studies and international political economy.

    1. Introduction: the world falling apart
    2. Brexit and the causes of European disintegration
    3. EU, Russia and the conflict in Ukraine
    4. Trumponomics and the dynamics of global disintegration
    5. Piketty’s fundamental inequality r > g: the key to understanding and overcoming the causes of disintegration
    6. Conclusion: holoreflexivity and the shape of things to come

    Biography

    Heikki Patomäki is Professor of World Politics at the University of Helsinki, Finland.

    Have we arrived to a New World Disorder? Well, the UK is not any more a stabilising power in Europe, and the US has stopped functioning as stabiliser in the global system. Behind these structural changes we find the manyfold failures of neoliberal economics. In the footsteps of Keynes, Polanyi and Habermas, Heikki Patomäki uncovers the causes and dynamics of these complex crises, but also identifies the keys of a progressive project that can save the legacy of enlightenment and democratic politics in Europe, as well as the world system, and help finding the way back to social progress.

    - László Andor, Former EU Commissionner for Employment, Social Affairs and Inclusion