Re-routing Globalisation: Polycrisis, Europe’s Decline and the Crisis of Atlanticism

We argue in this chapter that a central feature of the polycrisis has been the acceleration of Europe’s decades-long relative economic decline and growing subordination to the United States, resulting in a deepening and potentially existential crisis for the European Union. Part I of this chapter documents the shifting tectonic plates of the global economy and their harsh impact on Europe following its incomplete recovery from the eurozone crisis and the lingering effects of the Covid 19 pandemic. In Part II, we assess the impact of U.S. predatory economic policies resulting from the war in Ukraine and the United States’ neo-mercantilist turn. These policies are fueling the growth of far-right movements and parties across the European continent even as the United States confronts its own, potentially cataclysmic, crisis in a second Trump administration. Part III throws a spotlight on the travails of Germany, epicentre of Europe’s contemporary crisis, which reverberate throughout the entire continent. The Federal Republic’s distinctive ordoliberal, export-led economic model was predicated on access to the U.S. and China markets as well as cheap Russian energy. Yet, the combination of U.S. protectionism, inflation, and the substantial cost of re-routing energy supplies is accelerating processes of deindustrialization and the loss of national and regional autonomy, further aggravated by competition from China. As we show in Part IV, policy processes and structural forces are shifting the imperialist centres of global capital accumulation away from Europe as global capital re-composes and reorganizes in the geography of North American and Chinese orbits.

This is a draft chapter/article. The final version will be available in Critical Political Economy of the European Polycrisis edited by Andreas Biller, to be published in 2025, Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd at [in press - insert DOI upon publication].

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