Quinn Slobodian Research Articles

The Geneva connection, a liberal world order, and the Austrian economists

Quinn Slobodian’s Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (2018), attempts to draw a picture of the interwar and postwar periods of the 20th century that sees neoliberalism as a political and economic idea meant to preserve the power of private “capital” over democratic “labor” for the exploitation of the latter by the former. In doing so, he sees a group of economists associated with the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva, Switzerland as central players in designing a new order for capitalist oppression. This article challenges both the facts and the interpretation offered by Dr. Slobodian, by analyzing the purpose behind and the scholars associated with the Graduate Institute in, especially, the 1930s, with particular attention to his criticisms of the Austrian economists, Ludwig von Mises and F.A. Hayek. It is shown that his story is far more fiction than fact.

The Right to Sell and Leave

Quinn Slobodian claims in this bold book, written with brio and brilliance, that neoliberalism is misunderstood if it is seen merely as a reliance on markets to replace politics. Instead neoliberals seek a political order on a global scale strong enough to resist the democratic pressures for egalitarian economic redistribution that arise within nation-states. Underlying the doctrines that he traces from the 1920s through the 1970s and beyond is the abiding political effort to preserve the distinction between what Carl Schmitt labelled imperium and dominium, that is to keep separate the claims of states to govern and the sanctity of the economic order based on the rights of property. Yes, neoliberals believed that markets were essential for that effort, but markets had to be “encased” within a strong legal order that protected property, and this order had to encompass global regulation. Neoliberalism originated not with the economics of the Chicago School, nor the celebrated founding meeting of the Mont Pèlerin Society in 1947, but out of the ashes of empire and imperial organization: first from the wreckage of the Habsburg Empire after World War I—hence the role of Friedrich Hayek—then again from the debris of the European colonial empires after the Second World War and the need to find an adequate substitute for global economic discipline.

Democracy, Redistribution and the WTO: A Comment on Quinn Slobodian's book Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism Harvard University Press, 2018

Democracy, Redistribution and the WTO: A Comment on Quinn Slobodian's book <i>Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism</i> Harvard University Press, 2018

Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism by Quinn Slobodian

Reviewed by: Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism by Quinn Slobodian Or Rosenboim Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism. By Quinn Slobodian. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018. Pp. x + 381. Cloth. $35.00. ISBN 978-0674979529. In recent years, the intellectual foundation of neoliberalism has attracted the attention of historians and economists. Scholars like Angus Burgin and Dotan Leshem have looked to the past to define the meaning of neoliberalism and outline its future trajectories. Quinn Slobodian has made a significant contribution to this growing body of scholarship with his remarkable study of neoliberalism in the twentieth century, Globalists. Slobodian's main thesis in the book is that neoliberalism sought to adapt the liberal market-based global vision to the reality of the modern states-system in the postimperial world. The book's dramatis personae are a group of economists centered on what Slobodian calls the "Geneva School," which included Friedrich Hayek, Wilhelm Röpke, Ludwig von Mises, Michael Heilperin, Lionel Robbins, Gottfried Haberler, and Frieder Roessler. Thus, Slobodian argues that scholars who seek to understand the rise and the meaning of neoliberalism should shift their gaze away from the English-speaking intellectual sphere to the German-speaking one. In this narrative, the Swiss city by the lake becomes a hub of intellectual, political, and economic exchanges between mostly Central European economists—many of them refugees—concerned with the future of liberty after empire. The appropriation of their ideas by American economists in Chicago or by international organizations like the World Trade [End Page 385] Organization came at a later stage. The origins of the neoliberal global worldview were anchored in Europe, and in particular in the political and economic legacy of the Habsburg Empire and fin-de-siècle Vienna. The book's meticulously researched narrative unfolds over seven chapters, each dedicated to a different aspect of the globalists' vision of renewed economic liberalism: from tariffs to federations, from constitutions to new international organizations, the globalists explored a wide range of means to adapt the state to their liberal idea of absolute property rights, wholly integrated world economy, and individual liberty. Writing in the shadow of totalitarianism and fascism, these neoliberals advocated setting constraints to both democracy and nationalism, but they did not wish to abolish the state. But their critique of the ideology of nationalism did not translate into a call to abolish all states or to establish a supranational political system (although some, like Hayek, were at one time federalists). Instead, they sought a structural adjustment that could embed the postimperial world order within an integrated, liberal international institutional design. For them, "order was not a steady state, but an adjustment, an often painful process of learning" (262). The market could not function on its own; the globalists' role was to fine tune its mechanisms and ensure its smooth operation on a global scale. Thus, Slobodian argues that neoliberalism "is less a theory of the market or of economics than of law and the state" (268). The main contribution of this original and compelling study is outlining a new context for assessing and understanding neoliberalism in which the state plays a major role. Politics and the law are now seen to be much more significant in constructing the neoliberal worldview than previously assumed. Slobodian shows how the protagonists of globalist neoliberalism envisioned a range of legal, institutional, and political tools to ensure the integration of the world economy and the preservation of the unequal global power relations after the decline of the European empires. The book is framed as a contextual intellectual history of the economists who constituted the Geneva School, but the contextualization is inevitably partial. Most obviously, the reader lacks a clear view of the political and intellectual opposition to the neoliberal vision. Who was Hayek arguing against? What were the alternative visions and plans of a global order available after 1945? If the core of neoliberalism is to be found in Central Europe, it would be valuable to situate the proposals of the globalist neoliberals within the horizon of European postwar politics. In this sense, for example, the wartime federalist vision of Hayek and Robbins...

Quinn Slobodian. Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism.

Q<scp>uinn</scp> S<scp>lobodian</scp>. <i>Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism</i>.

Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism. By QUINN SLOBODIAN

Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism. By QUINN SLOBODIAN

Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism. By Quinn Slobodian. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018. 400p. $35.00 cloth.

Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism. By Quinn Slobodian. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018. 400p. $35.00 cloth.

The Geneva Men: A Book Review of Globalists by Quinn Slobodian

A book review of Quinn Slobodian's Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Harvard University Press, 2017). Slobodian examines the commensurate concepts of neoliberalism and globalism, in particular their relation to capitalism, democracy, and sovereignty.

Comrades of Color: East Germany in the Cold War World ed. by Quinn Slobodian

Reviewed by: Comrades of Color: East Germany in the Cold War World ed. by Quinn Slobodian Heide Fehrenbach Comrades of Color: East Germany in the Cold War World. Edited by Quinn Slobodian. New York: Berghahn, 2015. Pp. 325. Cloth $120.00. ISBN 978-1782387053. Paper $34.95. ISBN 978-1785337376. Contemporary Europeans continue to grapple with notions of identity and belonging and to debate proper policies of inclusion and exclusion toward ethnic minorities, refugees, and immigrants within and beyond their national borders. Over the past two decades, scholars of Britain, France, and Germany have trained their eyes on historical developments since 1945, examining these topics against the backdrop of postwar reconstruction and democratization, the emergence of the Cold War and its competing cultures, decolonization and postcolonial adjustments, and the challenges of multiculturalism—including claims about how it has been tried and failed, or as Rita Chin has recently argued in The Crisis of Multiculturalism in Europe (2017), was hardly tried in the first place. The bulk of this work has focused on Western Europe: NATO nations that, in their former political lives, lorded over far-flung empires within Europe (in the case of Germany) or beyond (in the case of the UK, France, and the Netherlands). By contrast, this important and deftly edited volume casts its critical eye on East Germany between the late 1940s and 1989 with the goal of exploring GDR internationalism and its "encounters across the borders of nation and bloc" (1). In a lucid introduction, Quinn Slobodian describes the volume as a response to the historiography on Cold War Germany that has tended to privilege the narratives of former SED functionaries and has focused on bipolar relations, whether national (German-German) or global (US-USSR). The essays in this volume, instead, plumb the archives to recapture the texture of East Germans' engagement with the third world and its inhabitants, both at home in the GDR and abroad. The authors approach their investigations as a "multipolar, transnational field," in the words of Young-Sun Hong, and explore how socialist solidarity was variously perceived, imaged, negotiated, and lived by East Germans and their various partners and beneficiaries from the global South (44). The volume is divided into five sections. The first, "Race without Racism," features an essay by Slobodian, a second introduction of sorts, that sets the stage by exploring the persistence of racial thinking and processes of racialization even as the East German officials renounced racism in favor of a socialist vision of a "politically unified humanity" (24). The essay provides an astute analysis of East Germany's "iconography of internationalism," which declared a break with Nazi-era racism yet peddled stereotypical representations of people of color by white Germans (33). Slobodian terms this continued reliance on skin color and phenotypical difference for new internationalist purposes "socialist chromatism" (24). This essay, and some that follow, introduce new theoretical concepts to help us make sense of the ambivalences, [End Page 652] tensions, accommodations, and blind spots in East Germany's approach to racial and ethnic "difference" in its construction of cross-cultural socialist solidarity. The second section, "Aid anders," features richly detailed essays by Young-Sun Hong on East German development aid to North Korea to build the industrial city Hamhung and by Bernd Schaefer on the pattern and range of East German aid to North Vietnam, including the import of contract workers to the GDR and the GDR's role in the Vietnamese coffee export industry. Both essays emphasize successes and failures; Hong's is especially good at uncovering the personal experiences and social interactions on the ground in North Korea, as well as such cultural contact's impact on East German participants' subsequent personal and political development. An essay by Gregory Witkowski offers an interesting reading comparing the rhetoric, images, and motivations structuring the philanthropic appeals by Christian churches and socialist organizations in East Germany. Oddly, no illustrations are included. The third section, "Ambivalent Solidarities," focuses on the mutual appraisals and expectations of Black Africans and African Americans, on the one hand, and East Germans and SED officials on the other. Simon Stevens traces Black South African writer William "Bloke" Modisane's visit to East Germany...

Quinn Slobodian (ed.), Comrades of Color: East Germany in the Cold War World

Quinn Slobodian (ed.), <i>Comrades of Color: East Germany in the Cold War World</i>

Quinn Slobodian, editor. Comrades of Color: East Germany in the Cold War World .

Journal Article Quinn Slobodian, editor. Comrades of Color: East Germany in the Cold War World. Get access Quinn Slobodian editor. Comrades of Color: East Germany in the Cold War World. (Protest, Culture and Society, no. 15.) New York: Berghahn Books, 2015. Pp. viii, 325. $120.00. The American Historical Review, Volume 121, Issue 5, December 2016, Pages 1797–1798, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/121.5.1797c Published: 05 December 2016

Slobodian, Quinn (ed.) Comrades of Color: East Germany in the Cold War World (review)

SEER, 94, 3, july 2016 572 multivalent than Hellbeck’s in analysing individual attitudes towards official ideology. For example, she posits a ‘vast’ (p. 133) range of motivations for participation in volunteer activities and speculates that petitioners’ evocations of the housewarming trope suggests ‘genuine faith’ or ‘clever manipulation’ or possibly both at once (p. 149). This book will be of great interest to scholars interested in the Khrushchev era and post-war Soviet society more generally. It is informative, well researched and much enlivened by vivid descriptions of everyday life. Adrian College, Michigan Deborah A. Field Slobodian, Quinn (ed.). Comrades of Color: East Germany in the Cold War World. Protest, Culture and Society. Berghahn Books, New York and Oxford, 2015. viii + 325 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliographies. Index. $120.00: £75.00. This edited volume focuses on encounters between the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and people of colour, taking the latter as its subjects. It contributes to a growing body of literature which examines the connections and identifications between the Second World and the Global South during the Cold War. The volume adds to this literature by providing a number of valuable case studies which explore the global significance of a state which retains a reputation for parochialism and insularity. More significantly, it attempts to challenge this ‘provincial myth’ (p. 3) of the GDR by focusing on the accounts of individuals from the Global South. This is a noble and original goal, and the volume is at its best when these accounts are at the fore. The inclusion of primary sources from South African, Chinese and Cuban authors toward this aim are illuminating. Challenging myths of East German provincialism does not necessarily mean accepting the GDR’s official claims to internationalism, and much of this volume is taken up with the limitations of such a claim. The first section of the volume, a chapter by editor Quinn Slobodian on race in the GDR, shows that despite the ruling Socialist Unity Party’s (SED) claims to have eliminated racism, it continued to produce stereotypical depictions of difference that privileged whiteness. In a similar vein, section three deals with what Slobodian calls ‘ambivalent solidarities’. Sara Pugach’s article on the politics of race and gender show that African students who came to study in the GDR were subject to racist stereotypes of ‘lasciviousness’, (p. 132) although she contrasts the stigma attached to Afro-German children in the West (where such children were often sent to orphanages) with their relative acceptance in the East. Katrina Hagen shows how campaigns in the GDR to free Angela Davis REVIEWS 573 mobilized citizens through exoticized and objectifying imagery, while Jason Verber’s contribution on the experience of Mozambican children who came to study in the GDR at the behest of the ruling Frelimo party suggests a clash between the values of the SED and Frelimo, which was nevertheless suppressed for the sake of solidarity. In between these two sections, the second section of the volume traces examples of ‘socialist aid’ carried out in the Global South in the name of the GDR. This is an area that remains largely unexamined, which is particularly notable considering that discernible differences are traceable between socialist aid programmes and liberal-capitalist variants. These accounts display a narrative of Utopieverlust (the loss of utopia) that is typical to many features of the GDR, as an early utopian idealism is replaced by political pragmatism. Young-Sun Hong shows how East German reconstruction projects after the Korean War saw led to the development of transnational identities and affinities between German aid workers and Koreans which were however ‘slowly eroded by official decree’ (p. 54) as the politics of the two nations diverged in the late 1950s. A similar narrative can be seen in Gregory Witkowski’s analysis of the imagery of solidarity in the GDR, which sought to transcend established visual conventions of Western charity, but often failed in this task. Likewise, Bernd Schaefer shows how aid programs between the GDR and Vietnam often provided important support, but culminated in the problematic employment of hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese workers in East Germany under exploitative conditions in the 1980s. Particular attention is devoted to...

Mao's Little red book: a global history

Preface 1. Introduction: the spiritual atom bomb and its global fallout Alexander C. Cook 2. A single spark: origins and spread of the Little Red Book in China Daniel Leese 3. Quotations songs: portable media and the Maoist pop song Andrew F. Jones 4. Mao quotations in factional battles and their afterlives: episodes from Chongqing Guobin Yang 5. Translation and internationalism Lanjun Xu 6. Maoism in Tanzania: material connections and shared imaginaries Priya Lal 7. Empty symbol: the Little Red Book in India Sreemati Chakrbarti 8. The influence of Maoism in Peru David Scott Palmer 9. The book that bombed: Mao's Little Red Thing in the Soviet Union Elizabeth McGuire 10. Mao and the Albanians Elidor Mehilli 11. Partisan legacies and anti-imperialist ambitions: the Little Red Book in Italy and Yugoslavia Dominique Kirchner Reill 12. Badge books and brand books: the Mao bible in East and West Germany Quinn Slobodian 13. Principally contradiction: the flourishing of French Maoism Julian Bourg 14. By the book: Quotations from Chairman Mao and the making of Afro-Asian Radicalism, 1966-75 Bill V. Mullen 15. Conclusion: in the beginning is the word - popular democracy and Mao's Little Red Book Ban Wang Index.

Quinn Slobodian, Foreign Front: Third World Politics in Sixties West Germany,

Quinn Slobodian, <i>Foreign Front: Third World Politics in Sixties West Germany,</i>

Quinn Slobodian, Foreign Front: Third World Politics in Sixties West Germany

Quinn Slobodian, <i>Foreign Front: Third World Politics in Sixties West Germany</i>

Imagining Germany imagining Asia: essays in Asian-German studies

The first collection of essays in the new field of Asian-German Studies, Imagining Germany Imagining Asia demonstrates that Germany and Asia have always shared cultural spaces. Indeed, since the time of the German Enlightenment, Asia served as the foil for fantasies of sexuality, escape, danger, competition, and racial and spiritual purity that were central to foundational ideas of a cohesive German national culture during crucial historical junctures such as fascism or reunification. By exploring the complex and varied phenomenon of German Orientalism, these essays argue that the relation between an imagined Germany and an imagined Asia defies the idea of a one-way influence, instead conceiving of their cultural transfers and synergies as multidirectional and mutually perpetuating. Examining literary and non-literary texts from the eighteenth century to the present, these essays cover a wide range of topics and genres in disciplines including philosophy, film and visual culture, theater, literary studies, and the history of science. Ideally positioned to shape further contributions, Imagining Germany Imagining Asia will attract a wide range of readers interested in German, Asian, colonial, postcolonial, and transnational studies. Contributors: Sai Bhatawadekar, Petra Fachinger, Randall Halle, Hoi-eun Kim, David Kim, Kamakshi Murti, Perry Myers, Qinna Shen, Quinn Slobodian, Chunjie Zhang. Veronika Fuechtner is Associate Professor of German at Dartmouth College. Mary Rhiel is Associate Professor of German at the University of New Hampshire.

Quinn Slobodian, Foreign Front: Third World Politics in Sixties West Germany

Quinn Slobodian, Foreign Front: Third World Politics in Sixties West Germany

Foreign Front: Third World Politics in Sixties West Germany by Quinn Slobodian (review)

Foreign Front: Third World Politics in Sixties West Germany by Quinn Slobodian (review)

QUINN SLOBODIAN. Foreign Front: Third World Politics in Sixties West Germany.

QUINN SLOBODIAN. Foreign Front: Third World Politics in Sixties West Germany.

Cold War cultures: perspectives on Eastern and Western European societies

List of Illustrations European Cold War Culture(s)? An Introduction Annette Vowinckel, Marcus M. Payk, Thomas Lindenberger Part I: Mediating the Cold Radio, Film, Television, and Literature Chapter 1. East European Cold War Culture(s)? Alterities, Commonalities, and Reflections Marsha Siefert Chapter 2.We Started the Cold War: A Message behind Stalin's Attack on Anna Akhmatova Olga Yurievna Voronina Chapter 3. Radio Reform in the 1980s: RIAS and DT-64 Respond to Private Radio Edward Larkey Chapter 4. The Enemy Within. (De-)Dramatizing the Cold War in U.S. and West German Spy TV of the 1960s Marcus M. Payk Chapter 5. Cold War Television: Olga Korbut and the Munich Olympics of 1972 Annette Vowinckel Part II: Constructing Identities: Representations of the Self Chapter 6. Catholic Piety in the Early Cold War Years or: How the Virgin Mary Protected the West from Communism Monique Scheer Chapter 7. The Road to Socialism Paved With Good Intentions. Automobile Culture in the Soviet Union, the GDR and Romania During Detente. Luminita Gatejel Chapter 8. Advertising, Emotions, and Hidden Persuaders: The Making of Cold-War Consumer Culture in Britain from the 1940s to the 1960s Stefan Schwarzkopf Chapter 9. Survivalism in the Welfare Cocoon: The Culture of Civil Defense in Cold War Sweden Marie Cronqvist Part III: Crossing the Border: Interactions with the Other Chapter 10. The Peace and the War Camps. The Dichotomous Cold War Culture in Czechoslovakia: 1948-1960 Roman Krakovsky Chapter 11. Artistic Style, Canonization, and Identity Politics in Cold War Germany, 1947-1960 Joes Segal Chapter 12. What Does Democracy Look Like? (And Why Would Anyone Want to Buy It?): Third World Demands and West German Responses at 1960s World Youth Festivals Quinn Slobodian Chapter 13. Drawing the East-West Border: Narratives of Modernity and Identity in the Julian Region (1947-1954) Sabina Mihelj Part IV: The Legacies of the Cold Remembrance and Historiography Chapter 14. A fifties revival? Cold War culture in re-unified Germany Andrew Beattie Chapter 15. The Mikson Case: War Crimes Memory, Estonian Identity. Reconstructions and the Transnational Politics of Justice Valur Ingimundarson Chapter 16. The First Cold War Memorial in Berlin. A Short Inquiry into Europe, the Cold War, and Memory Cultures Petra Henzler Notes on Contributors Bibliography Index