New Books in European Politics

With the coronavirus pandemic, Modern Monetary Theory met its moment. A sudden and massive loss of output globally was met with an unprecedented response by governments and central banks and at least some official regret about excessive fiscal austerity after the 2008-09 crisis.Stephanie Kelton's The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of the People's Economy found a ready audience and remains in the New York Times Hardcover Nonfiction Best-Seller List six months after publication. Yet, one criticism of her book and of MMT generally is that its proponents, examples and policy proposals are overwhelmingly American and built on assumptions about having a sovereign and dominant global currency. Dirk Ehnts, a leading MMT proponent, seeks to address this criticism in  Modern Monetary Theory and European Macroeconomics (Routledge, 2016). In 2020, he published an updated edition in German as Money and Credit: A European Perspective (Metropolis, 2020).Dirk Ehnts earned his doctorate at the Carl von Ossietzky University in Oldenburg and has worked as an academic economist at the Berlin School of Economics and Law, the Free University Berlin, Bard College Berlin, the Technical University of Chemnitz and the University of Flensburg. In 2019, he organised the first European MMT conference and has scheduled the second for September 2021.*His own book recommendation is Reclaiming the State by William Mitchell and Thomas Fazi (Pluto Press, 2017).Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Global Advisors. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Adam Fabry's book The Political Economy of Hungary: From State Capitalism to Authoritarian Neoliberalism (Palgrave, 2019) explores the political economy of Hungary from the mid-1970s to the present. Widely considered a 'poster boy' of neoliberal transformation in post-communist Eastern Europe until the mid-2000s, Hungary has in recent years developed into a model 'illiberal' regime. Constitutional checks-and-balances are non-functioning; the independent media, trade unions, and civil society groups are constantly attacked by the authorities; there is widespread intolerance against minorities and refugees; and the governing FIDESZ party, led by Prime Minister Viktor Orban, controls all public institutions and increasingly large parts of the country's economy. To make sense of the politico-economical roller coaster that Hungary has experienced in the last four decades, Fabry employs a Marxian political economy approach, emphasising competitive accumulation, class struggle (both between capital and labour, as well as different 'fractions of capital'), and uneven and combined development. The author analyses the neoliberal transformation of the Hungarian political economy and argues that the drift to authoritarianism under the Orb n regime cannot be explained as a case of Hungarian exceptionalism, but rather represents an outcome of the inherent contradictions of the variety of neoliberalism that emerged in Hungary after 1989.Adam Fabry is a lecturer of Political Economy at the National University of Chilecito (UNdeC), Argentina. He received his PhD from Brunel University under the supervision of Gareth Dale. Adam’s research interests include: international political economy, uneven and combined development, neoliberalism, and the history and politics of the far-right, with a regional focus on Central Eastern Europe and Latin America. His work has been published in international journals, such as Capital & Class, Competition & Change, Historical Materialism. The Political Economy of Hungary: From State Capitalism to Authoritarian Neoliberalism (Palgrave, 2019) is his first monograph. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sacrificial Limbs: Masculinity, Disability, and Political Violence in Turkey (University of California Press, 2020) is an exploration of “the ways in which . . .veterans’ gendered and classed experiences of warfare and disability are hardened into politics . . .how self, community, and the world-making practices of disabled veterans get tangled up with ultranationalist politics in contemporary Turkey.” Drawing on extensive interviews and participant observations, anthropologist Salih Can Açıksöz traces the experiences of veterans of Turkey’s ongoing counter-guerilla warfare in the country’s predominantly Kurdish eastern region. In Turkey, military service is mandatory, part of a “heteropatriarchal contract” between men and the state. Injury in wartime confers on veterans the status of gazi, meaning both “wounded soldier” and “holy warrior.” Yet military “operations” in southeast Turkey are not officially recognized as war, and disabling injuries in Turkey’s “deeply ableist society” deny veterans the implicit rewards of their gendered contract with the state. Therefore, since the 1990s, disabled veterans have organized to demand the state honor its debts. In his book, Professor Açıksöz shows the different forms these organizations take, as well as the ways in which veterans' groups became drawn into far-right political movements during the early 2000s.Reuben Silverman is a PhD candidate at University of California, San Diego Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Project Europe made waves when it was published in German in 2018 (CH Beck) and was soon translated into English as Project Europe: A History (Cambridge UP, 2020).A clue to its crossover appeal can be found in its original subtitle: "A Critical History." Avoiding the traps of euro-'Whig' or eurosceptical histories, Patel rethinks the development of the European Communities and the European Union from first principles.He concludes that they were just one model among many postwar associations but proved the most evolutionarily fit; that they benefited from peace more than they contributed to it; and that "disintegration and dysfunctionality" were embedded in their design.Having taught at Maastricht University and at the European University Institute in Florence, Kiran Klaus Patel is now professor of European history at Ludwig Maximilian University Munich.*Patel's book recommendation is The Capital by Robert Menasse (MacLehose Press, 2019).Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Global Advisors. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Every day, TARGET - Europe's cross-border payments system - processes transactions worth €2.5 trillion. Under its decentralised model, TARGET generates balances between the national central banks.These were tiny at its creation but today – after a decade spanning the financial crisis, the sovereign-debt crisis and now the pandemic recession – Germany’s TARGET balance exceeds €1 trillion.In his The Economics of Target Balances: From Lehman to Corona (Palgrave Macmillan), Hans-Werner Sinn says these balances are a “fever thermometer” for the health of the financial system. The system as it is designed, he argues, is unsustainable.Hans-Werner Sinn is Emeritus Professor of Economics and Public Finance at the University of Munich and was president of the Ifo Institute for Economic Research from 1999 until 2016.Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Global Advisors. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Consumers may love their products and services but, among politicians and activists, the big-technology companies are fast developing a reputation as the Robber Barons of the 21st century.Google recently joined Apple, Amazon and Microsoft as a so-called “tera-cap” – companies valued at more than a trillion dollars. Add Facebook and the five tech giants alone account for a quarter of the S&P500. How have they managed this in such a short timeframe? Their critics claim that Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai, Satya Nadella and Tim Cook are just digital versions of Henry Ford, Andrew Carnegie, Andrew Mellon, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and John D. Rockefeller – monopolists who control entry nto their markets.Not so simple, claims Nicolas Petit in Big Tech and the Digital Economy: The Moligopoly Scenario (Oxford University Press, 2020). Concerns about privacy or the dissemination of “fake news” are valid but “looking at these predicaments through monopoly lenses is like using Facebook to get your news. It seems to do the job. But it might well be fake”.“The picture of big tech firms as monopolists is intuitively attractive but analytically wrong,” he writes. “A better picture is one of big tech firms as moligopolists, that is firms that coexist as monopolists and oligopolists”.Nicolas Petit is the Joint Chair in Competition Law at the European University Institute and the Robert Schuman Center for Advanced Studies in Florence.Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Global Advisors. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In his new book Empire of Law: Nazi Germany, Exile Scholars, and the Battle for the Future of Europe (Cambridge UP, 2020), Kaius Tuori examines the inherent unity of European legal traditions that extend to ancient Rome. This book explores the invention of this tradition, tracing it to a group of legal scholars divided by the onslaught of Nazi terror and totalitarianism in Europe. As exiles in Britain and the US, its formulators worked to build bridges between the Continental and the Atlantic legal traditions, incorporating ideas such as rule of law, liberty, and equality to the European heritage. Others joined the Nazi revolution, which promoted its own idea of European unity. At the end of World War Two, natural law and human rights were incorporated into the European project. The resulting narrative of Europe, one that outlined human rights, rule of law, and equality, became consequently a unifying factor during the Cold War as the self-definition against the challenge of communism.Kaius Tuori is Professor of European Intellectual History at the Centre for European Studies at the University of Helsinki. Craig Sorvillo is a PhD candidate in modern European history at the University of Florida. He specializes in Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. He can be reached at craig.sorvillo@gmail.com or on Twitter @craig_sorvillo. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“Awareness of the EU's undeniable past and present importance can - and has - led to complacency and hubris. There is nothing inevitable about European integration".So writes Mark Gilbert in European Integration: A Political History (Rowman and Littlefield, 2020), a compact, narrative history of the European Communities and the European Union pitched at both political-science students and the general reader.Sympathetic to the integration process but critical of “Whig” histories of unstoppable federal progress, Gilbert makes a case for traditional “villains” – Charles De Gaulle and Margaret Thatcher – as simply advocates of alternative models of governance.Mark Gilbert is resident professor of international history at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in Bologna and Associate Editor of the Journal of Modern Italian Studies.Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Global Advisors. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In September 2008, Ewald Nowotny joined the governing council of the European Central Bank. Just two weeks later, Lehman Brothers filed the largest bankruptcy in US history - so triggering a global financial crisis and recession. In September 2019, he retired just before the coronavirus pandemic struck.This book charts the political and literary development of a young Social Democrat economist in postwar Vienna, his education in Austria and the US, and his experience in banking in the pre-Lehman stage of the crisis.For "ECB-watchers", Geld und Leben (Braumüller Verlag, 2020) provides a fascinating insight into the contrasting presidencies of Jean-Claude Trichet and Mario Draghi, into how council meetings are conducted, and the ruses used by members to influence the markets.Now a self-styled "independent economist", Ewald Nowotny was a professor of economics at Vienna and Linz universities, a member of Austria's parliament, a vice-president of the European Investment Bank, and governor of the Austrian National Bank.Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Global Advisors. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hate crimes. Misinformation and conspiracy theories. Foiled white-supremacist plots. The signs of growing far-right extremism are all around us, and communities across America and around the globe are struggling to understand how so many people are being radicalized and why they are increasingly attracted to violent movements.Hate in the Homeland: The New Global Far Right (Princeton University Press, 2020) shows how tomorrow's far-right nationalists are being recruited in surprising places, from college campuses and mixed martial arts gyms to clothing stores, online gaming chat rooms, and YouTube cooking channels.Instead of focusing on the how and why of far-right radicalization, Cynthia Miller-Idriss seeks answers in the physical and virtual spaces where hate is cultivated. Where does the far right do its recruiting? When do young people encounter extremist messaging in their everyday lives?Miller-Idriss shows how far-right groups are swelling their ranks and developing their cultural, intellectual, and financial capacities in a variety of mainstream settings. She demonstrates how young people on the margins of our communities are targeted in these settings, and how the path to radicalization is a nuanced process of moving in and out of far-right scenes throughout adolescence and adulthood.Hate in the Homeland is essential for understanding the tactics and underlying ideas of modern far-right extremism. This eye-opening book takes readers into the mainstream places and spaces where today's far right is engaging and ensnaring young people, and reveals innovative strategies we can use to combat extremist radicalization.Kirk Meighoo is a TV and podcast host, former university lecturer, author and former Senator in Trinidad and Tobago. He hosts his own podcast, Independent Thought & Freedom, where he interviews some of the most interesting people from around the world who are shaking up politics, economics, society and ideas. You can find it in the iTunes Store or any of your favorite podcast providers. You can also subscribe to his YouTube channel. If you are an academic who wants to get heard nationally, please check out his free training at becomeapublicintellectual.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices