Introduction: Globalisation, the Diffusion of Power and the Post-Listian Developmentalist Turn - The Structural Parameters of Contemporary World Order Change

Abstract

The main argument of this book is that the contemporary global political economy is in a process of complex transition in which structural and agential power has become increasingly diffused (Cohen 2008). This diffusion of power has taken place within the overarching context of globalisation. The transition is from neoliberal forms of globalisation underpinned by US dominance, to a post-neoliberal and post-hegemonic world order. The diffusion of power and world order transition is most advanced at the structural level. With the relative ‘decline of the US and the rise of the rest’, the international political economy (IPE) has become multipolar (Bisley 2009; Ikenberry 2011; Layne 2012). This has challenged global neoliberalism since global neoliberalism was built on a unipolar-multilateral nexus fusing US leadership and dominance, through the Washington Consensus, with a form of multilateralism that, under US dominance, locked in market order globally, through what Stephen Gill (2008) calls ‘global new constitutionalism’. While the latter has survived US relative decline, and is now subject to important reforming influences, the former has been undermined by global power shifts (such as the rise of China, South America and the European Union (EU)) and by US focused global crises, specifically the global financial crisis (GFC) of the late 2000s. A world order shift may be occurring towards a new ‘multipolar-multilateral nexus’, but it is the structural component of this nexus — the new multipolar world — that is the pervasive and defining change thus far. Multilateralism is thus one of a number of competing forms in which multipolarity is currently articulated within globalisation.KeywordsEuropean UnionPolitical EconomyGlobal Financial CrisisEuropean Monetary UnionWorld OrderThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.