Abstract
The global financial crisis of 2008 started in the USA, but its shock waves spread rapidly and relentlessly across the Atlantic, turning the “European dream” into a nightmare of stagnation and nationalism. Although US leadership averted a full-scale European meltdown (Tett 2010; Cafruny and Talani 2013) nevertheless conflicts and contradictions in the transatlantic area—the core of the US imperium since 1945—appear to have sharpened since the outbreak of the crisis. Amid accelerating uneven development and crippling austerity, European support for Washington’s confrontational policies towards Russia resulting from the civil war in Ukraine—expressed most clearly in sanctions that were first enacted in the spring of 2014—is fragile. The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), a key geopolitical and economic project designed to consolidate Atlanticism, has provoked massive opposition in Europe. In March 2015, the USA failed to prevent its closest European allies, including Britain, Germany, France, and Italy, from joining the Chinese-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, leading Lawrence Summers to conclude that this “may be remembered as the moment when the United States lost is role as the underwriter of the global economic system” (Summers 2015, p. 1).
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Cafruny, A. (2016). The Transatlantic Imperium After the Global Financial Crisis: Atlanticism Fractured or Consolidated?. In: Cafruny, A., Talani, L., Pozo Martin, G. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Critical International Political Economy. Palgrave Handbooks in IPE. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-50018-2_2
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