Narratives of Crisis and Crisis Response: Perspectives from North and South

Abstract

This chapter explores attempts by different social forces to interpret the complex global financial and economic crisis as it unfolded from 2006 to the end of 2009. Much mainstream commentary has read the crisis from the viewpoints of capital accumulation rather than social reproduction, the global North rather than the global South and the best way for states to restore rather than constrain the dominance of market forces. Such commentaries reflect government responses to the crisis, especially in the global North. Executive authorities reacted quickly with emergency measures to safeguard the monetary, banking and credit systems to prevent large banks and firms going bankrupt, and to restore the conditions for capital accumulation. They have been slower to respond to the needs of `social reproduction' in daily, life course and intergenerational terms (see Chapter 3); and to take effective action on impending environmental, food and fuel crises. I will explicate these differences in terms of how competing narratives about the crisis framed policy responses, and how structures of economic, political and ideological domination enabled economic and political elites in key power centres to push the risks and costs of crisis-management onto subaltern groups and developing countries. Thus, besides identifying the key responses from the global North, I examine developing countries' engagement through, for example, the G-20, the so-called Stiglitz Commission established by the President of the 63rd General Assembly of the United Nations and the associated summit (United Nations General Assembly 2008; United Nations 2009a, 2009b), the G-77 and the People's Republic of China (hereafter China), and efforts at South---South cooperation.