(Re)Building connectivity. Statecraft, Marketcraft and the pursuit of Sustainable Capitalism

Start date: October 2022

Principal Investigator: Diana Schnelle

Overview:

After about two decades of neoliberal thought and globalist agenda dominating domestic and foreign policy making worldwide, the 2010s witnessed the return of geopolitics in international relations. With the decline of the US hegemony, new economic, political and ideological divides began to emerge. Against this background the prescriptions of the Washington Consensus have been repeatedly called into question. This trend has been further exacerbated in the wake of the global pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine earlier this year (2022). Energy and climate matters in particular are being increasingly securitised. At the same time, current leaders of the international order continue their efforts to uphold the liberal normative framework. This results in a growing gap between the narrative and the reality of global energy and climate governance.

In order to bridge this gap a reshaping of state-market relations through a carefully balanced deployment of state- and marketcraft appears to be necessary. This project investigates how different actors in East Asia and Europe tackle this issue. It traces and compares the development  of different approaches – from Japan’s “New Capitalism” under the Kishida administration to the REPower EU Strategy – and explores potential avenues for the (re)building of international connectivity in a sustainable way.