Beyond ‘geo-economics’: advanced unevenness and the anatomy of German austerity

This article aims to shed new light on Germany’s domineering role in the eurocrisis. I argue that the realist-inspired depiction of Germany as a ‘geo-economic power’, locked into zero-sum competition with its European partners, is built around an empty core: unable to theorise how anarchy shapes the calculus of states where security competition has receded, it cannot explain why German state managers have insisted on an austerity response to the crisis despite its significant risks and costs even for Germany itself. To unlock this puzzle, this article outlines a version of uneven and combined development (UCD) that is better able to capture the international pressures and opportunities faced by policy elites in advanced capitalist states that no longer encounter one another as direct security rivals. Applied to Germany, this lens reveals a twofold unevenness in the historical structures and growth cycles of capitalist economies that shape its contradictory choice for austerity. In the long run, the reorientation of the export-dependent German economy from Europe towards Asian and Latin American late industrialisers renders the structural adjustment of the eurozone an opportunity—from the cost-saving view of German manufacturers producing in the European home market for export abroad, as well as for German state officials keen to sustain a crumbling class compromise centred on Germany’s world market success. In the short term, however, its exposed position between the divergent post-crisis trajectories of the US and Europe accelerates pressures for austerity beyond what German state and corporate elites would otherwise consider feasible

Die Zinslast des Bundes in der Schuldenkrise: Wie lukrativ ist der „sichere Hafen“?

In the aftermath of the Great Recession and during the debt crisis in the euro area yields on German federal bonds have been exceptionally low. This analysis tries to calculate the profits that the federal government makes due to the low yields. The interest payments that are due to emissions of bonds and bills made between 2009 and 2012 are approximated and compared to several benchmark scenarios. Compared to the mean yields of the years 1999-2008 profits of the federal government are quite high (68 billion euros). Application of yield curve models show that most of these profits are due to the macroeconomic conditions in the euro area and to low central bank rates. To a much smaller extend these profits are due to flight into safety, which, however, has become more relevant recently

cohesion and conflict in transnational merchant families

How do people negotiate the diversity of positionalities within kin groups? Through a diachronic approach, I investigate how Ali and Jalal, two merchants with Azeri and Gilaki ethnic identifications who came to Hamburg in the 1930s, mobilized kin to generate capital along the lines of generation, gender, and age. The reader simultaneously learns about the local history of Iranian immigration. Building on literature about historical merchant networks, the social organization of the Iranian marketplace (bazaar), the anthropology of kinship and transnational families, I question the social cohesion on which Aihwa Ong's study of flexible capital creation relies. The material suggests that the experience of family relations influences agents' positioning in the local Iranian social field

Understanding West German economic growth in the 1950s

We evaluate explanations for why Germany grew so quickly in the 1950s. The recent literature has emphasized convergence, structural change and institutional shake-up while minimizing the importance of the post-war shock. We show that this shock and its consequences were more important than neoclassical convergence and structural change in explaining the rapid growth of the West German economy in the 1950s. We find little support for the hypothesis of institutional shakeup. This suggests a different interpretation of post-World War II German economic growth than features in much of the literature