Suchergebnisse

This article is about the institutional foundations of the globalization of finance. These institutional foundations are both informal & formal. Until the 1980s the formal rules of the international financial architecture -- most consequentially in the European Union (EU), Organization for Economic Cooperation & Development (OECD), & International Monetary Fund (IMF) -- condoned & privileged capital controls. The EU & OECD adopted new rules obliging members to liberalize capital in the late 1980s. During the middle of the 1990s the IMF debated new rules in favor of capital freedom, but the proposal was defeated. Three policy makers in the EU, OECD, & IMF played decisive roles in formulating these new rules in favor of capital freedom: respectively, Jacques Delors, Henri Chavranski, & Michel Camdessus -- all three French. This is a paradox because the French had done more than any other country to obstruct the creation of new rules in favor of capital mobility for more than three decades. In this article I offer three narratives of the institutional foundations of capital freedom that constitute this French paradox. Then I offer an explanation for the French paradox based on three ideas: the difference between French rule-based globalization & U.S. ad hoc globalization; the organization building imperatives of each episode for the French, particularly in the EU; & the embrace of the market by the French Left in order to alleviate the undesirable distributional consequences of circumvented financial regulation. Adapted from the source document.

The national identities of post-Soviet societies profoundly influenced the politics and economics of Eurasia during the 1990s. These identities varied along two distinct but related dimensions: their content and contestation. Nationalist movements throughout post-Soviet Eurasia invoked their nations in support of specific purposes, which frequently cast Russia as the nation's most important "other" and the state from which autonomy and security must be sought. Nationalists therefore offered specific proposals for the content of their societies' collective identities. But not everyone in these societies shared the priorities of their nationalist movements. Indeed, the international relations among post-Soviet states often revolved around one central question: did post-Soviet societies and politicians agree with their nationalists or not? The former Communists played a decisive role in contesting the content of national identity. One of the defining differences among post-Soviet states during the 1990s was the political and ideological relationship in each one between the formerly Communist elites and the nationalists—whether the former Communists marginalized the nationalists, arrested them, coopted them, bargained with them, or even tried to become like them. These different relationships revealed different degrees and kinds of societal consensus about national identity after Soviet rule.

Despite widespread scepticism, there is a fundamental continuity in the stability of the European Monetary System (EMS) before and after the 1992 crisis. Although speculative pressures provoked European leaders to widen the fluctuation bands of the Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM), thus altering substantially the official commitment of member governments to coordinate monetary policies and exchange rates, the values of currencies in the hardcore of the EMS have remained close to their pre-crisis parities with limited fluctuations. European monetary cooperation continues informally, achieving much more stability than the wide bands suggest. The task of the article is to explain the puzzling continued success of the EMS. First, this article re-specifies the problem of international monetary cooperation as a leader-follower interaction with inherently hierarchical attributes. Second, the article outlines the causes of exchange-rate stability in Europe. Finally, the article emphasizes that French monetary followership is the key to the stability of the post-crisis arrangement and offers a preliminary interpretation of the sources of French behaviour.