The War in Ukraine and the End of the American Financial Order?

Pre-publication version of paper published in Review of Radical Political Economics

Abstract

The crises of 1997-98, 2008, and the pandemic accelerated contradictory changes in global financial governance. Taken together, the change and stasis propelled by these crises is coalescing around a fragmented “post-American financial order.” The war in Ukraine represents another inflection point. The war has facilitated the reassertion of American financial power and cooperation among rich nations. However, like previous crises, the war is creating fissures in financial governance. The landscape offers risks and opportunities against a backdrop of heightened financial fragilities, authoritarianism and fascism, inequalities, devastation associated with the pandemic and war, and climate crisis. In such moments Hirschman’s “possibilism” is both elusive and necessary. In this context, we might aspire to “permissive multilateralisms” rather than nostalgia for a new Bretton Woods.