Global Reordering – serie

Presenting a critical overview of what 'emerging multipolarity' means for the world's foremost global trading bloc and economic power, the European Union, this book offers new insights into how the rise of the emerging economies has impacted the EU and its role within the World Trade Organization.

The author narrates the end of the European crisis from the June 2012 European Council summit through the bailout of Cyprus. Paying particular attention to political developments in Italy, the book shows the fragility of market confidence and the waving attitudes of political elites.

In this book,  Ferdi De Ville and Mattias Vermeiren examine the linkages between the economic crisis in the euro area and the rise of Brazil, India and China (BICs) in the global monetary and trading system.  Drawing on the insights of the comparative capitalism literature, the authors show that the latter development has been a key source of the escalation of trade imbalances in the euro area, which are widely seen as an important cause of the financial and economic crisis in the region. By pointing to the external source of these imbalances and the divergent institutional capacity of the euro area countries to deal with the intensified competition associated with the rise of the BICs, De Ville and Vermeiren go beyond the focus on the divergence in unit labor costs as the driving force of these imbalances. As such, this book provides a comprehensive policy critique of the EU’s export-led growth strategy based on declining unit labor costs.

This book critically examines the argument that the Global South has risen in recent years, that its rise has intensified since the 2008 financial crisis, and that this in turn has hastened the decline of the West and the US in particular. Drawing on critical theories of international relations and development, Kiely puts the rise into context and shows how the factors that aided the rise of the South have now given way to a less favourable international context. Indeed, economic problems in China and other leading countries, falling commodity prices and capital outflows point us in the direction of identifying a new phase of the 2008 financial crisis: an emerging markets crisis. Kiely argues that this is a crisis which demonstrates the continued dependent position of the South in the context of the uneven and combined development of international capitalism.

This book is open access under a CC BY license.This book explores if and how Russian policies towards the Far East region of the country – and East Asia more broadly – have changed since the onset of the Ukraine crisis and Russia’s annexation of Crimea. Following the 2014 annexation and the subsequent enactment of a sanctions regime against the country, the Kremlin has emphasized the eastern vector in its external relations. But to what extent has Russia’s 'pivot to the East' intensified or changed in nature – domestically and internationally – since the onset of the current crisis in relations with the West? Rather than taking the declared 'pivot' as a fact and exploring the consequences of it, the contributors to this volume explore whether a pivot has indeed happened or if what we see today is the continuation of longer-duration trends, concerns and ambitions.