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The past two decades have seen a rapid rise in large-scale, state-led transnational investment from countries as different as China, Norway and Russia. By bundling economic resources, these countries have entered global markets through massive state-led investments. This transformation of states into global economic actors is historically unprecedented and presents a major challenge for how states relate to each other in the international system. Milan Babic examines how states have become major corporate owners in the global economy and unpacks the lasting effects of this on our understanding of the state and international politics. Drawing on research into the largest firm-level dataset on state ownership to date, in combination with in-depth historical and conceptual analysis, the book offers a comprehensive analysis of the rise of the state in the global economy and its present and future consequences for international relations.

The COVID-19 pandemic accelerates and exacerbates many preexisting tendencies in the global political economy. Consequently, the crisis of the liberal international order (LIO), which has been ongoing for several years, is also being affected by the pandemic. These effects are, however, not uniform: some aspects of the crisis of the LIO, as a multidimensional phenomenon, are under more pressure than others. In this article, I detail these varied effects with a specific focus on questions of geopolitics and hegemonic change. I argue that especially the societal level, where socioeconomic distortions and popular discontent are long-existing drivers of crisis, will be severely hit by the social and economic fallout of the pandemic. I conclude by suggesting a set of hypotheses regarding the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the crisis of the LIO that can be tested once more data becomes available.

Abstract
Chinese outward investment is increasing in its relevance for the global economy, and its effects on host states are increasingly being scrutinized globally. While European policy-making was ambiguous about the question of hosting Chinese state-led investment (CSLI) in the early 2010s, we can observe a recent surge of protectionist legal measures across Europe. What explains this trend among different European countries? Through the lens of incremental ideational change, we hypothesize that the rise of China as a global investor shifts the perceptions of policy-makers away from being a source of investment toward a potential threat to national security. We argue that this China effect affects advanced European economies similarly. We provide evidence by studying the shift in perceptions among policy-makers in a coordinated and a liberal market economy, Germany and the UK. By drawing on document analysis and expert interviews, we unpack the policy processes in both countries in the last decade. Despite being two dissimilar cases, both show a similar outcome in increasingly curbing CSLI on the grounds of national security reasons. Our results add important insights to recent International Political Economy discussions on the "geopoliticization" of European trade and investment rules in the face of a rising China.

Intro -- Acknowledgements -- Praise for The Political Economy of Geoeconomics: Europe in a Changing World -- Contents -- Notes on Contributors -- List of Figures -- List of Tables -- 1 Geoeconomics in a Changing Global Order -- Introduction -- Globalization and Change in Geoeconomic Times -- The 'Missing Third' Power: EU Strategic Autonomy and Beyond -- Europe in a Changing Global Order: The Plan of This Book -- References -- 2 Balancing Dependence: The Quest for Autonomy and the Rise of Corporate Geoeconomics -- Introduction -- The Quest for Autonomy: A Geoeconomic Framework -- Geoeconomic Balancing: Increasing State Control of Economic Interactions -- Corporate Geoeconomics: Market Reactions to Increased State Action -- Conclusion: Geoeconomics as a Multi-level Dynamic -- References -- 3 European Strategic Autonomy: New Agenda, Old Constraints -- Introduction -- European Strategic Autonomy: Development, Diffusion, Divergence -- Development: Strategic Autonomy in Europe's Defence, Technological and Industrial Base -- Diffusion: Industrial Strategy, Finance, the Euro and COVID-19 -- Divergence: Strategic Autonomy as a Contested Concept -- Europe Versus the Atlantic? -- A Geopolitical Europe? -- The Shocks of 2016 -- Push-back on Strategic Autonomy -- A Geoeconomic Europe? -- Neo-mercantilist Defence Procurement -- Trade and Industrial Strategy -- Pandemic Preparedness and Supply Chain Resilience -- Conclusion -- References -- 4 European Foreign Policy Think Tanks and 'Strategic Autonomy': Making Sense of the EU's Role in the World of Geoeconomics -- Introduction -- Theorising Geoeconomic Foreign Policy -- European Foreign Policy Think Tanks: Development, Functions and Significance -- Strategic Autonomy: From Subsidising the Defence Industry to Imagining a Geoeconomic EU -- Conclusion -- References.

This book brings together researchers from different analytical perspectives for the study of contemporary geoeconomics to create a broader and more useful catalogue of conceptual tools, empirical entry points, and case studies around the subject. The distinctive contribution this book offers is its firm rooting in International Political Economy and the hitherto under-researched geoeconomics dynamics of Europe. Many existing accounts of geoeconomics have been developed in International Relations and often reproduce some of the state-centric and static assumptions of the discipline. Recent scholarship furthermore tends to focus on the US-China rivalry, thus discounting the role of other global powers in shaping geoeconomics. As a first collective contribution to the topic in the field of International Political Economy, the book stands to become a major reference point in the field for the coming years. Interest in geoeconomics as well as in related concepts like weaponized interdependence or emerging new rivalries has been on the rise in recent years and will be one of the key research areas in the coming decade of transition and change in Europe and beyond. Chapters 1, 2, 5 and 7 are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com. Milan Babic is Assistant Professor of Global Political Economy at Roskilde University. Adam D. Dixon is Associate Professor of Globalization and Development at Maastricht University and Principal Investigator of the ERC-funded SWFsEUROPE project. Imogen T. Liu is a Ph.D. Candidate at Maastricht Universi.