Amemasor, James. Rethinking the relationship of states and financial markets after the 2008 global credit crisis. Retrieved from https://doi.org/doi:10.7282/T3V69HQZ
DescriptionThis dissertation contends that an alternate conceptual framework—the "marketplace framework"—explains more clearly the nature of International Political Economy (IPE) as a field of study and as a set of global conditions and activities. It critiques the failure of the dominant IPE framework—what I call the "tension framework"—to effectively explain the process of evolution that led to the 2008 global credit crisis and the political reactions to the crisis itself. It argues that in order to understand those processes and reactions, we need to re-frame and re-analyze relationship of politics and finance in market framework terms. The marketplace framework focuses on relations of advanced liberal capitalist states and their financial markets (as the most elemental units of their respective realms), instead of the broader state-market relations. It argues that understanding these particular relations is critical to the total conception of IPE because advanced liberal capitalist states and their financial market institutions constitute the axis of the global political economy. The research draws upon the international capitalist experience in general and the development of financial capitalism in particular and investigates: 1.) why the advanced capitalist economy—finance and trade—is designated as a "self-regulating" realm detached from the state; 2.) why the financial realm is "divorced" from the physical economy. It concludes that finance is a complex legal mystery and it is separated from politics and the physical economy in order to give the advanced liberal capitalist system its distinctive governing principle. The principle is that regardless of the self-regulating 'designation,' advanced capitalist system of governance unnecessarily isolates finance from the state because the former, in Weberian thought, is the means specific to the latter. The dissertation is interdisciplinary and analytic in method as it is qualitatively historical and interpretive in approach. By analytic, I mean examining the relationship of "states" and "markets" at their most fundamental units. By interdisciplinary, I mean exactly what Robert Gilpin refers to as eclectic mixture of theoretical viewpoints and analytic methods. In brief, the dissertation seeks to provide an alternate framework for re-conceptualizing the multiple stories underway in contemporary IPE.