Germany and the Eurozone Crisis: Between Hegemony and Domestic Politics

This paper explores Germany’s centrality to the outcome of the eurozone crisis. It argues that the eurozone crisis has led Germany’s ordo-liberal principles to trump its other longstanding commitment – i.e. to European integration. These two principles are explored in order then to shed light on how they have played out during the crisis. German centrality has created high expectations for it to provide leadership. Exploring hegemony conceptually and in practice, it is argued that international legitimacy and increasing domestic constraints have limited a leadership role. Indeed, it is argued that it is the domestic political situation that explains why ordo-liberalism has trumped pro-Europeanism. Ordo-liberal emphasis on stability culture has provided a valuable strategic resource for securing German objectives within the eurozone while satisfying the requirements of domestic politics.     

Tracing leadership: the ECB’s ‘whatever it takes’ and Germany in the Ukraine crisis

Abstract

Political scientists face problems when assessing a leader’s impact: how can we know that a policy outcome or institutional change is caused by leadership? This article argues that in addition to relying on comparisons and counterfactuals, we need to trace the causal mechanisms by which leadership affects outcomes. Therefore, the article proposes a way to trace leadership and applies it to two cases of EU crisis management: the European Central Bank’s role in announcing Outright Monetary Transactions in the eurozone crisis, and Germany’s role in shaping the EU’s response to the Ukraine crisis. Systematic process-tracing shows that both actors provided leadership ‘by default’. However, while the ECB had to combine the provision of knowledge with unilateral action in order to overcome the eurozone crisis, Germany could use manifold bargaining-based strategies and thus became the EU’s de facto agenda setter and main representative in managing the Ukraine crisis.     

The euro for China: too important to fail and too difficult to rescue

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to analyze China's strategy in relation to the euro. The first section summarizes China's active support to the single currency since its creation up to the first phase of the current Eurozone debt crisis. It shows how China has used a two-pronged approach. It has developed a public campaign in favor of the euro, especially when the market sentiment has been bearish on the single currency, and it has continued to be an active player in the European sovereign debt markets. The second part explains why China has been so supportive. Beijing wants to move away from dollar hegemony and thus it favors a tripolar monetary system based on the US dollar, the euro and the Chinese renminbi (RMB). With this aim, and despite the crisis, China has continued to diversify its foreign reserves into the euro making it by now ‘too important to fail’, not only because China holds roughly $1 trillion in euro-denominated assets, but also because for China the Eurozone is a crucial market and an important strategic counterweight to US dominance in world affairs. Finally, the third part focuses on how by the end of 2011 China switches to a more cautious approach due to the difficulty involved in rescuing the Eurozone. Domestic pressures, public outcry in Europe against being saved by China, the unwillingness of the European leaders to enter into strategic bargaining and Germany's strategy to use sovereign bond spreads as a market mechanism to create ‘more Europe’ have convinced policy-makers in Beijing to keep a lower profile while making sure the value of the euro remains stable.     

How did the euro area survive the crisis?

Six recent books differ in their explanations as to how the euro area survived the crisis. In this review it is concluded that strong supranational institutions rather than German or Franco-German leadership, shared identity or the popular legitimacy of central institutions have been the crucial condition. Popular support for the euro has remained relatively high in many member states. While the crisis led to some expansion of the intergovernmental method, survival of the euro area required a great expansion in the powers of supranational institutions.     

‘Everybody else just living their lives’: 9/11, race and the new postglobal literature

ABSTRACT

López's essay focuses on three questions or concerns: globalization, its aftermath and how those on the bottom survive it. During globalization's rise through the 1990s even the most virulent critics treated its eventual hegemony over the planet as a fait accompli; the only relevant questions were how it would change us, and whether those changes were desirable. Today the question is how to live now that globalization has failed us. As the aftermath of each of the global cataclysms of the last decade have amply demonstrated, it is the poor, the disenfranchised and marginalized who bear the brunt of the suffering and anxiety set in motion by the economic, political and cultural changes unleashed by globalization at the level of neighbourhoods and communities. What López calls the ‘postglobal’ emerges precisely at those moments when globalization as a hegemonic discourse stumbles, when it experiences a crisis or setback. The first section of his essay consists of a detailed exposition of the term ‘postglobal’ and its efficacy for the study of contemporary literature and culture. The rest focuses on Monica Ali's novel Brick Lane as an exemplar of what he calls the new postglobal literature.     

North Korea's hegemonic rule and its collapse

Ideological leadership through the Party was at the core of the North Korean leaders’ hegemonic rule over the people, which resulted in the great popularity of Kim Il-sung. Marketisation in the wake of the economic crisis, however, significantly impaired the mechanism for rule by consent, especially by triggering the influx of outside information and undermining the Party's ideological education activities. The economic crisis led the state to adjust the mechanism of consent and coercion in such a way that the state's control over society could be restored by relying more on rule by force, which was demonstrated by the much stricter penal system, bloody purges and, most of all, military-first politics. This, nonetheless, was a temporary measure because, in Guha's terms, ‘dominance without hegemony’ would not be durable in the long term. The regime can sustain itself in the long-term only through the reinstatement of the consent mechanism, which disintegrated owing to the marketisation. However, as the marketisation, being beneficial to those who have power as well as ordinary people, is irreversible in North Korea today, the reestablishment of hegemonic rule would not be attainable.     

Constructions of the opposition to ‘structural adjustment reforms’ in the German mass-media

This article analyses Germany’s Der Spiegel weekly journal, and its discursive constructions of the oppositional voices against the so-called structural reforms imposed on Greece in the context of the Eurozone crisis. The analysis is focused on relevant articles published by Der Spiegel between late 2009 and early 2015, during important, crisis-related socio-political events. Drawing on discourse theory and critical discourse analysis, the article concludes that Der Spiegel (along with other mainstream media in Germany and elsewhere) publicly legitimizes the elites’ hegemonic crisis-narratives and -policies, while discrediting oppositional voices. The study further foregrounds the ways Der Spiegel and other German mainstream-media reproduce a nationalistic ‘victimization’ of Germany, which advances Germany’s own national branding-strategy of positive self-representation in the EU and in the world.     

China in the era of globalization: the emergence of the discourse on economic security

Abstract

This article looks at the Chinese debate on economic security during the period between 1997 and 2004. The contemporary concept of economic security (jingji anquan, 经济安全) was first raised in the Chinese academic literature in 1997, partly as a reaction to the Asian financial crisis and partly due to the increasing role China began to play in globalization, the effects of which it increasingly felt as its economy became more integrated with that of the world. This article examines the emergence of the discourse on economic security within Chinese academic circles, and identifies the development of this concept in China between 1997 and 2004 prior to the ascendancy of the ‘fourth-generation’ leadership.     

Hegemony and Autonomy

This article analyzes the concept of hegemony and examines its relationship to power and autonomy. Refuting the conventional belief that it is ideology that distinguishes hegemony, the article argues that it is autonomy that constitutes the distinguishing characteristic. Although hegemons tend to evolve into imperialists, hegemony involves leadership of an alliance, not domination by coercion. It is impossible to conceptualize hegemony without also including autonomy. In this conceptualization, the primary source of autonomy lies in a specific hegemonic system of domination that itself embodies the notion of autonomy for both the polity and its citizenry, a limiting construction that hinders the tendency toward imperialism. Such a system includes one type of autonomy that can be designated as autonomy within hegemony. In addition, the article discusses two other types of autonomy: counterhegemony and a largely power-based opposed hegemony. Thus, the article concludes, hegemony is a complex concept, with several types of manifestation, that can more usefully be understood in connection with autonomy and power than as a stand-alone concept.     

Suchen wir immer an der richtigen Stelle? Einige Bemerkungen zur politikwissenschaftlichen Forschung nach dem Ende des Kalten Krieges

The essay discusses three research perspectives in the post Cold War era, namely the prospects of European Integration, the future of the Constitutional State and the stability of both international and domestic political institutions. Geopolitical issues of hegemony and hegemonic stability in Europe, the erosion of the state as the sole legitimate coercive power, public awareness of constitutional values and related ethics, the contingencies of institutional behaviour and related prerequisites of political leadership are presented as relevant though currently under-researched topics.     

The contested nature of political leadership in the European Union: conceptual and methodological cross-fertilisation

Abstract

European leaders have struggled to find common responses to the polycrisis the EU is facing. This crisis of leadership makes it urgent that scholars provide a better understanding of the role and impact of leadership in EU politics and policy making. This article prepares the ground for a collection of contributions that addresses this need by strengthening old and building new bridges between the academic domains of European studies and leadership studies. It opens with a discussion of the contested concept of leadership in the context of the European polity and politics, challenging the conventional view that leadership is necessarily a matter of hierarchy. Moreover, it argues that rather than leaderless, the EU is an intensely ‘leaderful’ polity. Subsequently, this introduction identifies four key debates in contemporary EU leadership research and discusses the value and insights the contributions in this special issue bring to these debates.     

The charismatic leadership of the ECB presidency: A language-based analysis

There is little doubt that the European Central Bank (ECB), and in particular its presidency, has taken the lead in tackling the euro crisis. But can this leadership be also characterised as charismatic? This article answers the question by focusing on language – a key component as well as a reliable indicator of charisma. By means of a software-assisted content analysis of the entire corpus of ECB presidential speeches, it is found that the crisis has indeed led to the emergence of the Bank's presidency as a charismatic euro leader. This in turn confirms the recent politicisation of the ECB, but at the same time might be seen as mitigating the problems related to the Bank's democratic deficit, to the extent that charisma can be seen, from a Weberian standpoint, as an alternative source of political legitimacy.     

Political secrecy in Europe: crisis management and crisis exploitation

Abstract

This article theorises the relationship of crisis and political secrecy in European public policy. Combining the literatures on crisis management and securitisation, it introduces two distinct types of crisis-related secrecy. (1) Reactive secrecy denotes the deliberate concealment of information from the public with the aim of reducing immediate negative crisis consequences. It presents itself as a functional necessity of crisis management. (2) Active secrecy is about substantive or procedural secrecy employed by authority-holders to implement their interests with fewer restraints. Here, secrecy is an instrument of crisis exploitation, reducing obstacles to extraordinary measures. This distinction is based on an understanding of authority-holders as simultaneous legitimacy- and discretion-seekers whose secrecy politics depend on the constraints and opportunities presented by crises. In order to illustrate active and reactive secrecy, the article uses examples from the euro crisis (Eurogroup summitry, ECB sovereign bond purchases) and the security crisis after 9/11 (terror lists).     

Leviathans unbound: irrationalist political thought in interwar United States and Germany

ABSTRACT

This comparative ideological history considers why interwar America produced less prominent thought threatening parliamentarism and the rule of law than Germany. Despite different traditions, thinkers in Progressive Era America and Weimar Germany shared two commitments. Both scorned political parties and yearned for national unity. Both were also hostile to the restraints of legal formalism. Both efforts to deploy unbounded states to realize unity failed, but differently. Progressivism’s eclipse by World War I tempered confidence in democratic fulfilment and experts’ moral leadership. By contrast, appeals in post-war Weimar to national unity and the reliance on state authority – both integral to the search for constitutional legitimacy – radicalized amidst crisis thinking. Exemplary thinkers Carl Schmitt and Thurman Arnold agreed that crisis demanded transformative action based on unifying myths and administrations liberated from legal rationalism. Anti-liberal Schmitt aimed to destroy political heterogeneity and unshackle decree from statutory legality. Writing after Progressivism’s disillusionment, the New Dealer Arnold sought to use myth to conceal endemic plurality and employ law’s own irrationality to deliver to ‘technicians’ the discretion necessary for haphazard economic experimentation. Difference in timing helped make similar commitments develop differently in interaction with crisis thinking, and helps explain Arnold’s irrationalist defence of liberal democracy.     

Defection of North Korea's ideologist a sign of regime crisis

Abstract

The defection of Hwang Jang‐yop, one of North Korea's major ideological authorities and a senior member of the leadership, is a clear indication of regime crisis in Pyongyang. Hwang's assessment of the nature of the Kim Jong‐il regime, which he regards as incapable of reform and committed to war with South Korea, will strengthen those in Seoul who argue for a tough approach to be taken in negotiations on security issues with North Korea. At the same time, his remarks on the extent of communist influence in South Korean politics may influence the outcome of the 1997 presidential elections.     

Charismatic female leadership and gender: Pia Kjærsgaard and the Danish People's Party

ABSTRACT

Research on the leaderships and electorates of populist right-wing parties emphasizes that most of these parties are charismatic and male-dominated, both as regards their leaderships and their voters. However, while studies about the gender gap focus mainly on demand-side factors, such as electoral support, socio-economic characteristics and the voters’ attitudes towards issues such as immigration, those that analyse the role and position of gender issues are still rare. Similarly, or even more, overlooked is an analysis of the rhetoric, style, charisma and discourse of populist female leaders, such as those representative of two now well-established Scandinavian populist right-wing parties: the Dansk Folkeparti (DF, Danish People’s Party) and Norway’s Fremskrittspartiet (FrP, Progress Party). Both parties have long been led by women although Pia Kjærsgaard of the DF recently stepped down, leaving the party leadership to Kristian Thulesen Dahl, a man of the younger generation of party members; Siv Jensen in Norway smoothly followed the long-term and charismatic leadership of Carl I. Hagen in 2006. The main focus of the paper, however, is on Pia Kjærsgaard, discussing the role gender plays in relation to her style, rhetoric and/or discursive strategies, but also in the gendered constructions featured in the Danish mainstream media. In the article, Meret also refers to the case of Marine Le Pen and the Front national (FN) in order to consider whether the Nordic cases represent a specific framework for female leadership, highly influenced by context and opportunity.     

Crisis leadership styles—Bligh versus Gillard: a content analysis of Twitter posts on the Queensland floods

This paper presents a quantitative and qualitative content analysis of Twitter posts mentioning Queensland Premier Anna Bligh and Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard during the 2011 Queensland flood crisis. The contrast in the perceived styles of the two leaders is analysed using the theory of transformational leadership as a framework. The implications for effective leadership communication in a crisis are discussed, notably, strategies for instilling pride and gaining respect and trust. The study also highlights the emerging role of Twitter in setting the media agenda at times of fast‐breaking news. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Elections of the Great Recession in Portugal: Performance Voting under a Blurred Responsibility for the Economy

Abstract

This article discusses the basic patterns of voting behaviour in the most recent elections in Portugal. These elections were fought under one of the most profound economic crises in the country's four decades of democracy, after a bailout agreement with the EU and the IMF, and under an unusually high level of campaign polarization around the issues of economic austerity and liberalization. First, the article examines whether this context ended up being favourable to “performance” voting or, instead, to an enhanced importance of position issues, particularly those related to the role of the state in the economy and welfare provision. Second, it examines how the context of the Great Recession and the European sovereign debt crisis created opportunities for incumbents to use blame-shifting and blame-sharing strategies, and the extent to which voters' ambivalence about who to hold responsible for the sorry state of the economy was consequential for vote choices, either by directly affecting them or by moderating the relationship between economic perceptions and the vote.     

Podemos: the ambiguous promises of left-wing populism in contemporary Spain

The paper inquires critically into Podemos as an instance of left-wing populism in contemporary European politics, putting forward four claims and a major thesis. First, Podemos was started as an original endeavour to ally in a hybrid mix two divergent approaches to democratic politics: the horizontal, open and networked mobilizations of the multitude, and the vertical, hierarchical, formal and representative structures of party formations, on the other. Such an amalgam might serve to combine the virtues of different models of democracy. Second, Podemos’ populism exemplifies a creative version of a ‘politics of the common’, but the terms of the ‘common sense’ are inflected in the direction of social rights, inclusion and egalitarian democracy. Third, Podemos illustrates a unique ‘reflexivity’ in the pursuit of populism. The party leadership has taken its cues from E. Laclau’s hegemonic theory of populism and implements it in its political strategy. Fourth, since the autumn of 2014, Podemos has arguably seen the gradual preponderance of a vertical, ‘hegemonic’ logic, reflecting a particular reading of populist theory which is prevalent among the party’s leadership. The broader thesis is that a dualist politics, which welds together horizontalism and verticalism in a conflictual bind, is a prima facie plausible strategy for renewing democracy in the present critical context. But a political organization like Podemos will be able to redeem its democratic promises as long as it maintains a constructive balance between these two political logics, avoiding the reassertion of centralized leadership and the suppression of pluralism which are typical of the populist tradition.     

A cultural political economy of crisis recovery: (trans-)national imaginaries of ‘BRIC’ and subaltern groups in China

Abstract

This paper explores crisis recovery from a cultural political economy (CPE) perspective. It examines the role of (trans-)national forces in constructing BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) as drivers for recovery. First, it comments on some ‘cultural economy’ studies and indicates the value of a CPE approach. Second, it examines the ‘BRIC’ as a symbolic condensation of ‘hope’ knowledge and shows how this signifier evolved in three overlapping moments referring to its role as investor, consumer and lender. Third, it considers the material basis of the appeal of BRIC discourses, especially the credibility acquired through BRIC stimulus packages in the global financial crisis. Fourth, it indicates how China's ‘gold standard’ stimulus package has intensified some deep-rooted political tensions and harmed subaltern groups. Finally, it reflects on how CPE can contribute to studies of crisis and recovery.