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A former banker and staff member of the International Monetary Fund, Louis W. Pauly explains why people are deeply concerned about the emergence of a global economy and the increasingly integrated capital markets at its heart. In nations as diverse as France, Canada, Russia, and Mexico, the lives of citizens are disrupted when national policy falls out of line with the expectations of international financiers. Such dilemmas, ever more conspicuous around the world, arise from the disjuncture between a rapidly changing international economic system and a political order still constituted by sovereign states. The evolution of global capital markets inspires an understandable fear among people that the governing authorities accountable to them are losing the power to make substantive decisions affecting their own material prospects and those of their children

Despite the fragility of authoritative governing institutions at the international level, the politi-cal capacity to deal with global risks is developing. The sense of legitimacy that will ultimately derive from a deeply transnational sense of shared fate continues to lag, but even in that regard a process of progressive development is underway. Such an argument becomes defensible after the relationship between risk and uncertainty is understood, after the dynamic interaction of political conflict and functional spillovers is examined, and especially after distinctions are made among the variegated politics of risk measurement and assessment, of compensation and prevention, and of management and resolution. After outlining such conceptual issues, the plausibility of the argument is probed here in a most sensitive arena of contemporary policy-making, namely in the political economy of well-functioning global financial markets. The experience of international crisis management around the year 2008 is especially illuminating. The building of global policy capacity in this arena is a reversible process, but the circumstances under which such a reversal might occur are becoming increasingly implausible. ; Trotz der Fragilität autoritativer Governance-Institutionen auf internationaler Ebene ist die Fähigkeit der Politik zum Umgang mit globalen Risiken in der Entwicklung begriffen. Der Glaube an die Legitimität dieser Institutionen, der sich letztlich aus einem zutiefst transnationalen Verständnis eines gemeinsamen Schicksals ableiten wird, bleibt bisher zwar hinter diesem Prozess zurück, befindet sich aber ebenfalls in einer fortschreitenden Entwicklung. Um dieses Argument überzeugend vertreten zu können, muss zunächst die Beziehung zwischen Risiko und Unsicherheit nachvollzogen sowie die dynamische Interaktion von politischem Konflikt und funktiona-lem Spill-Over untersucht werden. Zudem ist es erforderlich, die Unterschiede zwischen den vielfältigen Politiken der Risikomessung und -abschätzung, der Kompensation und Prävention sowie des Managements und der Problembewältigung herauszuarbeiten. Nach Skizzierung dieser konzeptionellen Fragen soll die Plausibilität des Arguments anhand eines der wohl sensibelsten Bereiche gegenwärtiger Politikgestaltung überprüft werden - der politischen Ökonomie gut funktionierender globaler Finanzmärkte. Dabei sind die Erfahrungen im Bereich des internationalen Krisenmanagements um das Jahr 2008 besonders aufschlussreich. Die Schaffung globaler politischer Kapazitäten in diesem Bereich stellt zwar einen reversiblen Prozess dar, aber die Umstände, unter denen eine derartige Umkehrung stattfinden könnte, erscheinen zunehmend unwahrscheinlich.

AbstractThe cross‐border financial crisis that began in the United States in the summer of 2007 tested a 30‐year experiment in international integration. In the background were expanding macroeconomic imbalances that leading states had neglected to address. Spawned by imprudence and regulatory failures, the crisis soon deepened and the collaborative impulse that might have prompted earlier and more fundamental macro‐policy action became focused on emergency management. Ad hoc policy co‐ordination ensued as liquidity was injected into turbulent markets and troubled financial intermediaries were recapitalized or reorganized. The collective performance was inelegant, not least inside the European Union. The crisis shed a harsh spotlight on the weak fiscal foundations of the Union and on the now‐pressing need for collaborative adjustments in national macroeconomic policies. Since overt political innovation on such matters remains difficult, both within Europe and globally, the crisis underlined the crucial importance of much better collaborative instruments for the oversight and stabilization of integrating financial markets.