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CALL FOR PAPERS  

Submission deadline extended to 28 February 2016

Special Section of

Revista de Economia Mundial (REM)/

Journal of World Economy

Topic: “Financialisation and crisis in the European Union”

 

Guest Editors

Jorge Garcia-Arias (Department of Economics, University of Leon, Spain)

Laura Horn (Department of Society and Globalisation, Roskilde University, Denmark)

Jan Toporowski (Department of Economics, SOAS, University of London, United Kingdom)

 

Structure of the Special Section and contact

Revista de Economia Mundial (REM)/Journal of World Economy (http://www.sem-wes.org/en/node/1261) is an academic Spanish journal edited by the Sociedad de Economia Mundial/World Economy Society indexed, among others, in the SSCI (2014 IF: 0.237; 300/333 –Economics–).

This Special Section will include up to 5-6 papers on the nexus between financialisation and the EU crisis.

Authors are strongly encouraged to read carefully the background and rationale included on this Call for Papers before considering submitting. For further information for this Special Section, please contact the Guest Editors: Jan Toporowski ([log in to unmask]), Laura Horn ([log in to unmask]), or Jorge Garcia-Arias ([log in to unmask]). For queries about REM or the submission process (see below) please contact Teresa Aceytuno, Managing Editor of REM, ([log in to unmask])

 

Background and rationale of the Special Section

The process(es) of financialisation have been identified as a crucial transformation in recent decades in the global capitalist system, a shift from a Fordist model to one in which the accumulation of profits through financial channels predominates over that obtained by the production of goods and services. The impacts of financialisation have been identified in virtually all areas of economic, political and social life, both in microeconomic activity (levels of households debt, privatization of the Welfare State and other public goods and services, changes in identity, daily life and patterns of individual political, social and cultural activities, ...), as well as from a more macro perspective (changes in financial markets, transnational corporations and international financial institutions, in the design of economic policy, in crucial aspects of international development, and so on).

The current economic crisis –the most severe faced by the developed economies in decades– has specific features for the whole of the EU, and particularly within the Eurozone. What started as a crisis of a financial nature has resulted in a deep economic, political and social crisis, not only due to the usual evolution of any financial cycle, but also because of the political and institutional design of the EU and the Eurozone, and the unusually strong link that has been forged between rebalancing public finances and the fetishism of austerity and low inflation.

Thus financialisation seems not only to be a context for the origin, evolution and possible outcomes of the EU crisis. There are also grounds for suspecting that financialisation has adopted specific forms in the EU, making the EU crisis a test bed for exploring its foreseeable future dynamics. In this Special Section of the REM we will analyse some of the links between financialisation and the crisis in the European Union.

More specifically, the Guest Editors welcome papers engaging with the following topics, as well as other topics providing particular insights into EU financialisation and its global significance:

•                     What are the key processes in financialisation in the EU? How does financialisation destabilise EU capitalism? What are the defining elements of financialisation in the economic and political integration model of the EU? Do they have distinctive characteristics compared to those of other developed economies? Do they have homogeneous or differential features across the whole EU? And across the Eurozone?

•                     The shift from public welfare to debt-financed welfare in the EU. In what ways is the modern state becoming dependent on financialisation across the EU? What are modern debt structures and how have they evolved in recent years in the EU?

•                     What is the relationship between the processes of financialisation and the current EU crisis? What are its implications? Are the crisis, the failed attempts to resolve it, and the processes of financialisation feeding off each other in the EU? If so, through what channels and with what consequences?

•                     What are the relations between financialisation and democracy in the EU, and more specifically, does the process of financialisation represent a threat to the democratic model in the EU (even a purely procedural democracy model such as the current one)? Does it have implications for an EU drift toward elites-bureaucrats dominated capitalism and/or toward authoritarian capitalism?

•                     Which social forces have been driving or contesting financialisation processes in the EU? Which new social and political strategies should be developed to cope with financialisation in the EU?

•                     What lessons can be drawn from the combination of financialisation and crisis for the process of EU integration? Which are the alternatives?

Although financialisation has developed in variegated ways in individual EU countries, and affected them in different ways, our objective is to overcome what has been called academic “methodological nationalism” (that is, considering countries as self-contained units of analysis); hence we are not in principle interested in receiving analyses of the process focusing on a single country, but rather studies focusing on broader areas such as the whole EU or Eurozone (highlighting, of course, its intrinsic elements of heterogeneity), or groups of countries considered as a whole (e.g. the European periphery, the Scandinavian economies, Central European countries, etc.), or on a comparative basis (i.e. the UK vs. Germany; Spain, Italy and Portugal, ...). We also seek papers in a broad spectrum of (International or European) Political Economy that do not overly limit their analysis to particular aspects of the relationship between financialisation and the EU crisis, or that focus on very specific areas (water, energy, housing, …), except when the authors are able to show a more general significance of their analysis.

We are interested in receiving original, not under evaluation elsewhere, and well-argued articles founded on a critical appreciation that may be multidisciplinary in their approaches to the phenomenon of financialisation and its impact on the EU crisis, as well as in the backgrounds of their authors. Articles from political economists but also sociologists and political scientists linked to critical areas of European Political Economy or Critical International Political Economy, are especially welcome.

 

Submissions

Papers must be written in English. The received full papers would be subject to previous editorial scrutiny and pre-selection, and to strict peer-review process before acceptance. Articles should be no more than 7,000 words in length, including all references, notes and tables. Articles must be accompanied by an abstract of no more than 200 words and up to five keywords. Submissions should be directed through the Revista de Economia Mundial(REM)/Journal of World Economy on-line submission system: http://www.sem-wes.org/en/node/84

For further guidelines on submissions to Revista de Economia Mundial (REM)/Journal of World Economy please visit out http://www.sem-wes.org/en/node/1261. If you have technical queries about the process, please contact Teresa Aceytuno, Managing Editor of REM, at[log in to unmask]

 

Timeline

Deadline for the submission of full papers: 28 February 2016

Expected publication of the Special Section in the Revista de Economia Mundial (REM)/Journal of World Economy: 2017.