After the collapse of Soviet communism and the demise of the Eastern Bloc, the onward march of liberal capitalism – grounded in the trifecta of free trade, privatisation, and untrammelled capital flows – seemed irresistible. In the decades following the watershed of 1989, globalisation took on all the trappings of a force of nature: an impersonal process to be harnessed for the greater good rather than the contested outcome of politics.

Such complacency was bound to end in a rude awakening. The recent US tariff offensive is only the latest indicator that the global trade architecture as we knew it is being upended. Economic policy, far from merely channelling the precepts of commercial reason, has become a domain of raw power in which geopolitical antagonisms play out and zero-sum thinking predominates.

The world, however, has not so much abandoned the virtuous path of sound economic policymaking as reverted to a historical mean. This is the conviction animating the bracing new book by French economic historian Arnaud Orain, presented for the first time to a German audience at the KWI. In Le Monde confisqué, Orain, a professor at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) in Paris, shows that once we shed our neoliberal myopia and take in the broader historical picture, the economic pax Americana of the late twentieth century appears as little more than a fleeting moment.

Now the pendulum is swinging back towards a more mercantilist outlook: barriers are going up, states are re-emerging as economic actors in their own right, trade has become an arena of power rivalry, and the scramble for scarce mineral resources is well underway. With this book, Orain provides an indispensable historical guide to the turbulences of our economic present.

The event will be held in english.

Speaker
Arnaud Orain, EHESS Paris

Moderation
Danilo Scholz, KWI

Participation
This is a public event and participation is free of charge. There is no registration necessary.

Organizer
Organized by the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities (KWI).