Disintegrative Tendencies in Global Political Economy (Rethinking Globalizations) - Hardcover

Patomaki, Heikki

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1138065307 ISBN 13: 9781138065307

Publisher: Routledge, 2017

Synopsis

Whether we talk about human learning and unlearning, securitization, or political economy, the forces and mechanisms generating both globalization and disintegration are causally efficacious across the world. Thus, the processes that led to the victory of the ‘Leave’ campaign in the June 2016 referendum on UK European Union membership are not simply confined to the United Kingdom, or even Europe. Similarly, conflict in Ukraine and the presidency of Donald Trump hold implications for a stage much wider than EU-Russia or the United States alone.

Patomäki explores the world-historical mechanisms and processes that have created the conditions for the world’s current predicaments and, arguably, involve potential for better futures. Operationally, he relies on the philosophy of dialectical critical realism and on the methods of contemporary social sciences, exploring how crises, learning and politics are interwoven through uneven wealth-accumulation and problematical growth-dynamics. Seeking to illuminate the causes of the currently prevailing tendencies towards disintegration, antagonism and – ultimately – war, he also shows how these developments are in fact embedded in deeper processes of human learning. The book embraces a Wellsian warning about the increasingly likely possibility of a military disaster, but its central objective is to further enlightenment and holoreflexivity within the current world-historical conjuncture.

This work will be of interest to students and scholars of international relations, peace research, security studies and international political economy.

About this title

About the Author:

Heikki Patomäki is Professor of World Politics at the University of Helsinki, Finland.

Review:

Have we arrived to a New World Disorder? Well, the UK is not any more a stabilising power in Europe, and the US has stopped functioning as stabiliser in the global system. Behind these structural changes we find the manyfold failures of neoliberal economics. In the footsteps of Keynes, Polanyi and Habermas, Heikki Patomäki uncovers the causes and dynamics of these complex crises, but also identifies the keys of a progressive project that can save the legacy of enlightenment and democratic politics in Europe, as well as the world system, and help finding the way back to social progress.

- László Andor, Former EU Commissionner for Employment, Social Affairs and Inclusion

About this edition

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 1138065307
• ISBN 13: 9781138065307
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 154