Suchergebnisse

In response to the discussants this essay placesWages of Destructionin its historiographical context. In dialogue with Riley's call for a reading of Nazi Germany in terms of a theory of imperialism, it calls for an account of the 'variable geometry' of regime-business relations. In conclusion, however, we must insist on the 'vacuum' of causal logic that is a defining characteristic of the history of the Nazi regime.

"Die gegenwärtige ökonomische Krise ist ein Ereignis von historischer Bedeutung. Aber was bedeutet das? In Europa ist die Krise vor allem vor dem Hintergrund der europäischen Integration und der damit verbundenen Spannungen zu sehen. In den Vereinigten Staaten wird sie als nationales Narrativ erzählt. Dieser Aufsatz erörtert eine Reihe von zentralen Beiträgen zu der Debatte in den USA - von Carmen Reinhart und Kenneth Rogoff, George Akerlof und Robert Shiller und von Raghuram Govind Rajan - um das Koordinatensystem an Möglichkeiten freizulegen, innerhalb dessen die Krise historisiert worden ist. Man betrachtet die Krise als lediglich eine weitere typische Offenbarung der perversen menschlichen Natur. Sie wird als ein Moment der Keynesschen Offenbarung aufgefasst. Oder sie wird als Teil eines strukturierten Entwicklungsprozesses gesehen, der den amerikanischen Traum in Frage stellt. Der Text zeigt dann, wie Paul Krugman, einer der einflussreichsten Kommentatoren der Krise, alle drei Möglichkeiten eingesetzt hat, um seine Intervention aufzuladen. Diese Flexibilität verleiht Krugman eine enorme rhetorische Kraft. Die daraus resultierenden Aporien werden jedoch von Krugman dadurch aufgelöst, dass er regelmäßig in einen alarmierenden ökonomischen Nationalismus verfällt. Angesichts des Aufstiegs Chinas ist es fraglich, ob diese Art der Historisierung der Krise im 21. Jahrhundert lange überleben kann." (Autorenreferat)

Germany seems like Europe's lone island of fiscal stability, but trouble lurks under its impressive export-fueled growth. An obsession with debt and austerity has blocked domestic investment as the country has ignored problems such as a shrinking work force and outdated infrastructure. Germany needs to borrow and spend more or face the end of its economic miracle. Adapted from the source document.

The most powerful military alliance in history, NATO shaped the geopolitical contours of the Cold War and continues to structure the contemporary international system. The NATO agreement is reprinted here with speeches and essential historical documents concerning the alliance's founding and subsequent evolution. Accompanying essays by major scholars discuss debates about NATO's evolving governance, its role in nuclear politics, and its appropriate mission during and since the Cold War.

Using the example of Bulgaria, we argue that familiar models of international political economy fail to capture the tension between national sovereignty and access to capital markets experienced by peripheral debtors in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Existing accounts exaggerate the significance of the gold standard as a good housekeeping seal of approval and underestimate the role of direct financial controls. Furthermore, they underestimate the linkage in zones of inter‐imperial rivalry, such as the Balkans, between foreign borrowing and strategic alignment. We show how Bulgaria found its politics destabilized prior to 1914 by the demands of its creditors. After defeat in the First World War, Bulgaria was forced to submit to an even tighter system of creditor control. Though it obtained substantial debt relief during the 1930s, these concessions were gained not through an assertion of national sovereignty and default, but at the price of even closer supervision. This in turn casts new light on the conventional view of Bulgaria as a victim of Nazi 'informal imperialism'. In light of Bulgaria's previous experience, the more striking feature of its trade relations with Hitler's Germany is that they were conducted on a basis of sovereign equality.

The literature currently offers no consistent narrative about economic development on Europe's southeastern periphery prior to 1945. Did per capita GNP in the Balkans converge with the rest of Europe? We present new GNP estimates for Bulgaria for 1892–1911 and link these with a new degree of precision to the data available for the 1920s. Our data reveal stagnation in per capita GNP from 1879 to the 1930s. But within agriculture we find evidence for a new phase of intensification from the 1920s onwards. The preconditions for growth, sometimes attributed to Communism, were in place well before 1945.