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The role of the European Union in global politics has been of growing interest over the past decade. The EU is a key player in global institutions such as the World Trade Organization (WTO) and NATO. It continues to construct an emerging identity and project its values and interests throughout contemporary international relations. The capacity of the EU to both formulate and realise its goals, however, remains contested. Some scholars claim the EU's 'soft power' attitude rivals that of the USA's 'hard power' approach to international relations. Others view the EU as insufficiently able to produce a co-ordinated position to project upon global politics. Regardless of the position taken within this debate, the EU's relationship with its external partners has an increasingly important impact upon economic, political and security concerns on an international level. Trade negotiations, military interventions, democracy promotion, international development and responses to the global economic crisis have all witnessed the EU playing a central role. This has seen the EU become both a major force in contemporary institutions of global governance and a template for supranational governance that might influence other attempts to construct regional and global institutions.

This article contests prevailing academic conceptions of the modernisation of parliamentary Left parties. According to these accounts, 'modernisation' is viewed either as a pragmatic adaptation to international socioeconomic change, or as a misguided accommodation of ascendant neoliberal values, norms and practices. In both of these accounts, Left parties are perceived as passively reacting to the structures that contextualise their actions. Developing a neo-Gramscian perspective and using the Chilean Socialist Party and the British Labour Party as examples, we argue that modernisation can be more adequately conceptualised as the process by which Left parties operate within the contemporary neoliberal historical bloc, actively contributing to the (re)production of neoliberal hegemony.

While there has been a turn towards incorporating examples of dissent, resistance and alternatives in the Global Political Economy literature, this article claims that there is still a considerable absence of analysis of dissent in and against the global political economy. The authors identify four frustrations (which can be easily turned into suggestions). First, that resistance, dissent and alternatives, continue to be marginal to most attempts at understanding the global political economy. Second, when resistance and dissent are considered, often they are presented as discrete episodes of 'protest'. The third 'frustration' points towards the types of questions the literature tends to ask of instances of resistance: why resist, and with what effect? This directly connects with the fourth frustration: effect is often seen narrowly, simply as 'impact'. The discussion of these frustrations concludes that dissent and resistance are ultimately central to the configurations of actors, institutions, ideas and their power relations that constitute the global political economy, and our understandings of it.

This article explores the terrain of social conflict as it developed across advanced capitalist democracies throughout the 'age of austerity' that followed the global economic crisis. It shows how a (broadly defined) working class mobilised in different ways in different capitalist contexts, contesting the institutional forms (and the crises that emerged from them) which constitute each particular model of capitalism. Considered this way, we are able to conceptualise and explain the forms of working-class mobilisation that have emerged in opposition to contemporary neoliberalism. In doing so, we go beyond a narrow focus on workplace-focused or trade-union-led forms of working-class mobilisation, highlighting the continuing contestation of neoliberal capitalism. Drawing on a protest event analysis of 1,167 protest events in five countries (Spain, Germany, Japan, the United States and the United Kingdom), and developing a Régulation Theory approach to the study of protest/social movements, we provide an overview of the most visible patterns of social contestation in each national neoliberal capitalist context, tracing links to the institutional configurations that constitute those national models of capitalism. While there exists no direct (linear) process of causality between the model of neoliberal capitalism and the forms of mobilised dissent witnessed, nevertheless we are able to clearly trace the different pressures of capital accumulation that have given rise to the protest/social movements identified in each case, thereby allowing us to gain a better insight into both each particular model of capitalism and the forms of dissent that constitute it.

How is progressive politics developing in the wake of the multiple global crises that we currently face? What does it mean to be politically progressive in contemporary politics? Is the electoral turn the only path for today's progressive politics? This special issue seeks to explore the current range of opportunities and obstacles facing advocates of progressive politics following more than a decade of eventful developments since the 2008 global economic crisis. It focuses especially on two core themes which we consider to be central to the journal Global Political Economy. First, we explore the nature of the current crisis/crises in the contemporary global political economy. Second, we highlight the forms of progressive politics that we consider to have the potential to respond to that crisis. In doing so, we seek to delineate the scope for resistance, dissent and emancipation in the contemporary global political economy; and, in doing so, focus our attention on the contested nature of that global political economy, and the trajectories for change which instances of contestation have the potential to produce.

This book takes as its point of departure the observation that much of the critical discussion of the European political economy and the Eurozone crisis has focused upon an impending sense that solidaristic achievements built up during the first thirty years of the post-war period are being continuously unravelled.Bailey et al argue thatwhilst there are clearly many reasons to lament, and be concerned about, the trajectory of change within Europe' s political economy, there are nevertheless also important developments, trends and processes

The anti-austerity movement that emerged in the wake of the 2008 global economic crisis and 2010 Eurozone crisis, and which forms part of the 'age of austerity' that came after those crises, was underpinned by a set of ideas and practices that we refer to here as 'pragmatic prefigurativism'. Whilst the anti-austerity movements typically rejected formal ideologies such as Marxism and anarchism, nevertheless pragmatic prefigurativism can be understood as a 'left convergence' of sorts. The paper explores the features of this pragmatic prefigurativism, comparing the anti-austerity movements in the UK and Spain. In particular, we note the role of unresponsive institutions of democracy in prompting the move towards pragmatic prefigurativism, the adoption of techniques of direct democracy and direct action as the means through which to express a voice and to refuse austerity, and the pragmatic nature of the subsequent (re)turn to political institutions when this became a possibility.