Kampfplatz-4 and the ‘European Factor’, 1974–89

Abstract

The stagflation that hit the Euro-Atlantic core in the 1970s can surely be seen as a peculiar crisis of over-accumulation, what Robert Brenner calls ‘overcapacity/overproduction’ caused, among others, by ‘uneven development’. Laggards, such as West Germany and Japan whose economies had been destroyed by World War II, managed not only to catch-up with the USA but also to out-compete it, the result being a fall in profitability from which the heartland has never managed to recover to date. But ‘uneven development’ alone cannot explain everything. The concept suffers from a certain reductionism — as it reduces everything to the economic sphere — and Euro-centrism, marginalizing developments and contradictions stemming from other parts of the world. For instance, the 1970s stagflation is linked to a number of structural and agential factors, including the power of Arab nationalism and anti-colonial movements that reverberated across the Euro-Atlantic centres of capital accumulation; the failure of the USA in Vietnam and the class struggles that occurred in the 1960s (May 1968 in France, the ‘Hot Autumn’ in Italy in 1969, etc.); and the policy of deténte, which was sourced not just from the first signs of economic decline of the US empire, but also from geo-political and security concerns. Thus, to the concept of ‘uneven development’ we proposed as supplementary the notion of ‘global faultlines’, a hermeneutic, all-encompassing term setting out a new research agenda in IR and IPE.1