This interdisciplinary, international conference will advance the debate about the periodisation of global economic processes after 1945. For this, we will bring together researchers from the social sciences and the humanities whose recent work goes beyond the predominant notion of a radical, world-historical rupture driven by crises in industrially advanced nations in the 1970s. Instead, contributors to this conference highlight the analytical gains from research and theories with emphasis on historical trajectories in the Global South, on a broader period in world history, and on analytical models of change that consider radical rupture as much as continuities and consolidations.
Such a debate is badly needed because mainstream research in the social sciences and humanities has, for more than a decade, followed the assumption of a radical shift from Keynesianism and Fordism to neoliberalism and post-Fordism in the 1970s. In history, several widely received and debated recent publications, such as Lutz Raphael and Anselm Doering-Manteuffel's "Nach dem Boom", Daniel Rodgers’ "Age of Fracture" and Morten Reitmayers and Thomas Schlemmer’s "Die Anfänge der Gegenwart" established that notion, building largely on empirical research in industrially advanced countries. Likewise, for social anthropology, sociology, and human geography influential monographs such as David Harvey’s “The Condition of Postmodernity” have established a narrative that posits radical ruptures as the world-shaping experience of the 1970s, which scholars across these disciplines have followed often unequivocally.
Increasingly, the supposed watershed-like character of events and the associated notions of systemic rupture are questioned, particularly regarding the singularity of the post-1970s experience in the global economy. This concerns the two oil crises of the 1970s and the end of the Bretton Woods System of fixed currency exchange rates as well as foundational concepts in the social sciences and humanities such as that of a flexibilisation of labour and employment and the rise of a neoliberal geography of capitalism shaped by high capital mobility.
Importantly, new studies draw on global perspectives and reveal that the notion of a 1970s rupture is only partially sustainable. While it is viable for the analysis of particular regions in the industrial heartlands of advanced capitalist nations such as the US, West Germany, France, and the United Kingdom, it is less easily verified for the historical trajectories of developing nations.
Further, social anthropologists, historians and sociologists have begun to question a radical difference that has for long been posited as a defining feature of the capitalist and the socialist bloc economies, and instead look for the origins of neoliberal policies in socialist states since the 1950s. New studies reveal that there were indeed extended debates and collaborations between economists from both sides and historical research shows that the Soviet Union was an active and powerful agent in global (capitalist) trading, for example during the world food crisis in the early 1970s.
The conference therefore focuses on the continuities and interdependencies between different patterns of economic regulation, asking which shades of Fordism, Keynesianism, Neoliberalism, and so forth have emerged since 1945 and in what ways these have connected societies and economies worldwide. We intend to initiate a debate among scholars from different fields on similarities and differences among and across nations in the Global South and the North and how these continued, consolidated, and/or changed over the past seven decades.
Contributions to this conference will enquire the following, among other questions:
- Whether and to what extent did continuities of colonial and early post-colonial labour regimes and integration into global trading agreements prevail in the Global South?
- To what extent does the impact of strategic policy changes, such as moving from import-substitution to export-oriented development, justify analytical concepts of rupture?
- What role should we allocate to global policy projects, which conjured radical changes in global integration (i.e. for a new international economic order, for global socialism, for global neoliberalism) in periodising the era since 1945?
- How did (and how does) public and academic opinion across the globe reflect on notions of continuity, consolidation and rupture?
Robert Heinze and Patrick Neveling
