Description
The 2008 global financial crisis generated a number of marked geo-political and economic shifts within global capitalism. In the aftermath of the crash, international capital flows, trade and investment collapsed and have yet to recover to their pre-crisis levels. Beijing is now increasingly projecting its geo-political and economic power onto the world stage. While the United States played a critical role in stabilising global capitalism in the wake of the crisis, there are signs that its leadership role is diminishing, as the Trump presidency withdraws from multi-lateral agreements and embraces a protectionist trade policy. Together, these shifts are reflective of an emerging reconfiguration in global capitalism – what we term the new post-crisis ‘global disorder’. The question we seek to answer in this paper is how might we theorise the relation between these reconfigurations in global capitalism and the future of European integration? To answer this, we identify four key shifts in the post-crisis global conjuncture which break with the prevailing consensus on world politics in which the field of EU studies was formed. These are the fracturing of US hegemony; the deglobalisation of the world economy; the politicisation of international monetary policy; and the rise of populism and novel forms of democratic politics. We then argue that each of these transformations presents a new set of challenges for European integration, presenting themselves as a tension between the pressure for alignment with the new realities of global capitalism and the search for a position of relative autonomy within it.
