Comparativ (E-Journal)

Bernhold, Christin

Rezensionen | Reviews | 661
Überlieferung, aber sicherlich nicht nur. 
Bei einem etwas anderen strukturellen 
Aufbau hätte es sich vielleicht vermeiden 
lassen, dass gegen Ende vermehrt inhaltli-
che Wiederholungen auftauchen und die 
mitunter geringe Anzahl der verwendeten 
Quellen stärker auffällt als zu Beginn. In 
gewisser Weise verschießt der Verfasser 
also sein Pulver etwas zu früh. Dennoch 
muss betont werden, dass ein inhaltlich 
wie methodisch ausgereiftes Buch vorliegt, 
dass für die Erforschung der „Auslandspo-
len“ einen Meilenstein darstellt, ein Buch, 
dass unser Wissen über koloniale Formate 
und Praktiken punktuell deutlich erwei-
tert und den ehrenwerten Versuch unter-
nimmt, die Positionen der subalternen 
Schwarzen trotz aller Schwierigkeiten eini-
germaßen adäquat darzustellen. Alle drei 
Punkte sind keine Selbstverständlichkeit.
Karin Fischer / Christian Reiner /
Cornelia Staritz (Hrsg.): Globale 
Warenketten und ungleiche Entwick­
lung. Arbeit, Kapital, Konsum, Natur 
(Mattersburger Kreis für Entwick­
lungspolitik, Reihe Gesellschaft – 
Entwicklung – Politik, Bd. 20), Wien: 
Mandelbaum Verlag, 2021, 414 S.
Rezensiert von
Christin Bernhold, Hamburg
Globale Warenketten (GWK) sind zu 
einer zentralen Organisationsform der 
Produktion und Zirkulation des Kapitals 
geworden. Nach Angaben der Weltbank 
findet heute etwa 50 Prozent des Welthan-
dels mit Waren statt, die im Rahmen ihrer 
Fertigung mindestens zweimal eine Gren-
ze überschritten haben. Laut der Interna-
tionalen Arbeitsorganisation (ILO) ist die 
Zahl der in GWK beschäftigten Menschen 
zwischen 1995 und 2013 von 296 auf 453 
Millionen gestiegen. Die große Frage, wer 
wo von der geographisch verstreuten Wa-
renproduktion profitiert, wer nicht und 
warum,[1] wird von Forscher:innen je 
nach wissenschaftlich-theoretischer Positi-
on unterschiedlich beantwortet.
Der von Karin Fischer, Christian Rei-
ner und Cornelia Staritz herausgegebene 
Sammelband beabsichtigt, „den aktuellen 
Forschungsstand in systematischer Form 
in deutscher Sprache zusammenzutragen, 
kritisch zu reflektieren und für ein breites, 
interessiertes Publikum aufzuarbeiten“ (S. 
28). Die 16 Buchkapitel sind jeweils ei-
nem der Abschnitte Grundlegungen, Ge-
schichte, Arbeit, Kapital, Natur, Konsum 
und Entwicklung zugeordnet. In ihnen 
stellen die überwiegend an österreichi-
schen Wissenschaftseinrichtungen tätigen 
Autor:innen Kernkonzepte und Methoden 
der GWK-Forschung vor, beschäftigen 
sich mit Organisations- und Machtstruk-
turen und fragen nach Implikationen unter 
anderem für Arbeiter:nnen und die Natur 
sowie nach Möglichkeiten, etwa für bessere 
Löhne zu kämpfen. Am Ende jedes Textes 
finden sich Lernfragen. Ergänzt werden 
die Kapitel durch 15 Exkurse, die einzel-
ne Aspekte anhand von Fallbeispielen ver-
deutlichen und so das empirische Material 
des Sammelbandes ergänzen. Dabei geht 
es unter anderem um Sonderwirtschafts-
zonen (S. 51ff.), die fragliche Rolle von 
Nachhaltigkeitszertifikaten (S. 143ff.)[2] 
und Arbeitskämpfe bei Amazon (S. 189ff.).
662 | Rezensionen | Reviews
In Kapitel 2 (S. 33–50) stellen die 
Herausgeber:innen theoretische Zugänge 
und Konzepte vor, die GWK-Analysen in 
den vergangenen Jahrzehnten maßgeblich 
geprägt haben. Während der Ursprung des 
Ansatzes in der Kritik der globalen poli-
tischen Ökonomie in der Tradition der 
Weltsystemanalyse liegt, hat das Gros der 
Forschung insbesondere in den 2000er 
Jahren das Anliegen aufgegeben, die Re-
produktion ungleicher Entwicklung als 
ein dem Kapitalismus inhärentes Merkmal 
zu verstehen. Bereits in den 1990er Jahren 
wurde der Fokus von systemischer Un-
gleichheit auf Governance-Strukturen in 
GWK verschoben, die seither den Kern des 
„kohärente[n] und operationalisierbare[n] 
Forschungsparadigma[s]“ (S. 34) bilden. 
Heute konzentriert sich die Mainstream-
wissenschaft auf Möglichkeiten für Firmen 
und Regionen, sich vorteilhaft in GWK zu 
integrieren und upzugraden. Upgrading 
wird dabei meist als Prozess des Aufstiegs 
hin zu höherwertigen Tätigkeiten ver-
standen. Gleichzeitig existieren aber auch 
Stränge kritischer GWK-Forschung (wei-
ter), die ausgehend von verschiedenen the-
oretischen Grundannahmen ihren Blick 
auf Ausbeutungs- und Machtverhältnisse 
richten.
Während es Ausbeutung in und durch 
GWK schon seit Beginn des Kapitalis-
mus gibt, wie Andrea Komlosy in Kapitel 
4 argumentiert (S. 99–117), hat ihre Be-
deutung seit den 1970er Jahren deutlich 
zugenommen. Befeuert durch Bestrebun-
gen, die Profitkrise in Westeuropa und den 
USA zu überwinden (S. 14), und ermög-
licht durch die Produktivkraftentwicklung 
in der Logistik und Informationstech-
nologie sowie durch neoliberale Struk-
turanpassungsmaßnahmen, wurden Teile 
der Produktion vermehrt räumlich und 
organisatorisch ausgelagert (offshoring 
und outsourcing, vgl. S. 10) – dorthin, 
wo niedrige Löhne, Arbeits-, Sozial- und 
Umweltstandards vorzufinden sind und 
voraussichtlich nicht so bald durch organi-
sierte Arbeiter:innen in Frage gestellt wer-
den. Inwiefern sich GWK heute im Zuge 
geoökonomischer Verschiebungen, des 
Klimawandels oder der Covid-19-Pande-
mie verändern, wird in dem Sammelband 
lediglich kurz angesprochen (S. 25ff.). In 
seinem Exkurs wirft Florian Butollo einen 
Blick auf die digitale Transformation der 
Fertigung und ihre Effekte. Er hält einen 
neuen „Mix aus ‚Hightech und Niedrig-
lohn‘, jener Kombination, die schon seit 
Jahren z. B. die […] Computerproduktion 
prägt“ (S. 169), für wahrscheinlicher als 
eine Rückverlagerung der Fertigung in die 
kapitalistischen Zentren.
Weitgehend einig sind sich die Autor:innen 
des Bandes, dass GWK heute maßgeblich 
von „Lead Firms“ gesteuert werden, die 
die ungleiche Verteilung entlang der Ket-
ten organisieren. Sie sind zu kontrollieren 
imstande was, wo, wann und unter wel-
chen Bedingungen hergestellt wird, und 
sie eignen sich große Teile des (andern-
orts) produzierten Mehrwerts an. So ana-
lysieren etwa Jakob Kapeller und Claudius 
Gräbner in ihrem Beitrag (S. 195–213) die 
Macht von Konzernen, welche als „globale 
Arbitrageure“ (S. 207) ihre Verhandlungs-
positionen unter anderem gegenüber Staa-
ten gestärkt haben und Standortvorteile 
ausnutzen. „Produktionsländer“ hingegen 
müssten die „Umwelt- und Sozialkos-
ten“ tragen, bilanziert Karin Fischer in 
ihrem Exkurs zu den „Globalen Reich-
tumsketten von Apple und Glencore“ (S. 
214–219, hier S. 218). Der Umstand, dass 
Rezensionen | Reviews | 663
heute auch „anspruchsvolle und kapitalin-
tensive Prozesse“ (S. 10) ausgelagert wer-
den, ändere nicht grundsätzlich etwas an 
derartigen Ungleichheitsverhältnissen, so 
die Herausgeber:innen. Auch in hochpro-
duktiven Industrien basieren Profite auf 
niedrigen Löhnen und werden zu einem 
großen Teil von „Lead Firms“ angeeignet 
(S. 38).[3]
Jörg Flecker (Kapitel 6, S. 149–166) hinter-
fragt unter Bezugnahme auf Beispiele aus 
der Bekleidungs- und der Softwareindust-
rie die Annahme, ökonomisches Upgrading 
führe automatisch zu sozialen Verbesserun-
gen. Firmen könnten auch dadurch ihre 
Position in GWK verbessern, dass sie an-
dere in puncto Löhne und Arbeitsbedin-
gungen unterbieten (S. 162). Zulieferer wie 
Foxconn verfügten zwar über hohe Kom-
petenzen, zugleich stünden sie jedoch unter 
einem hohen Kosten- und Zeitdruck, der 
an die Arbeiter:innen weitergegeben werde. 
Upgrading schlüge sich nur dann „in einer 
Verbesserung der Arbeits- und Beschäfti-
gungsbedingungen nieder“, wenn es „mit 
einem größeren ökonomischen Spielraum 
verbunden ist“ und die Arbeiter:innen die 
ihnen „latent zukommende Macht durch 
gewerkschaftliche Organisierung und in-
ternationale Solidarität in einen Einfluss 
auf ihre Löhne und Arbeitsbedingungen 
ummünzen können“ (S. 152). Auch öko-
logische Folgen der globalisierten Waren-
produktion müssten stärker in den Fokus 
gerückt werden, argumentieren Julian 
Stenmanns und Stefan Ouma, die sich in 
ihrem Beitrag eingehend mit der mariti-
men Logistik und den Konsequenzen etwa 
im Hinblick auf Treibhausgasemissionen 
oder auf maritime Lebenswelten und Bio-
diversität befassen (S. 266–283).
Mit diesen und weiteren empirischen Be-
standsaufnahmen stellt das Buch nützliche 
Beiträge zur GWK-Debatte zusammen. Es 
trägt insbesondere zu einer wachsenden 
Literatur bei, die die Annahme in Frage 
stellt, GWK-upgrading sei a) innerhalb 
des kapitalistischen Weltsystems generell 
möglich und gereiche b) allen zum Vorteil. 
Zugleich enthält es aber einige Widersprü-
che, die nicht offengelegt werden. Hinwei-
se darauf, dass der Kapitalismus schon im-
mer auf ungleicher Entwicklung beruhte 
(S. 101), stehen in dem Band zum Beispiel 
neben der zumindest impliziten Annahme, 
eine vernünftige staatliche Industriepolitik 
könne „den entwicklungspolitischen Bei-
trag von globalen Warenketten“ stärken 
– vorausgesetzt, asymmetrische Macht- 
und Abhängigkeitsverhältnisse könnten 
reduziert und lokale Ökonomien zum 
Teil auch durch Abkopplung diversifiziert 
werden (S. 383f.). Ein anderes Beispiel ist 
der Verweis der Herausgeber:innen auf 
die „antagonistische Beziehung zwischen 
Kapital und Arbeit“ (S. 43). Klassenana-
lysen spielen in weiten Teilen des Buches 
jedoch keine Rolle für die Bestimmung 
des Motors kapitalistischer Geschichte, 
für die Interpretation geographisch un-
gleicher Entwicklung oder für die Unter-
suchung kapitalistischer Naturzerstörung. 
An einigen Textstellen werden Kapital und 
Arbeit gar bloß als Produktionsfaktoren 
begriffen (vgl. S. 82). Die im Buch pro-
minente Analyse von Machtbeziehungen 
und Governance-Strukturen geht mit gut 
zugänglichen und empirisch reichhaltigen 
Studien einher. Die Macht, die im Rah-
men einer sozial-relationalen Kapitalis-
mustheorie erklärt werden müsste, wird 
jedoch weitgehend vorausgesetzt. Wün-
schenswert und fruchtbar für die kritische 
664 | Rezensionen | Reviews
GWK-Debatte wäre, Unterschiede zwi-
schen marxistischen, weltsystemanalyti-
schen und anderen im Buch verwendeten 
theoretischen Ansätzen, wie zum Beispiel 
der „imperialen Lebensweise“ (S. 266ff.), 
offen zu diskutieren.[4] Dann hätte das 
Buch – auch für Einsteiger:innen, denen 
derartige Unterschiede nicht ins Auge fal-
len – einen noch größeren Beitrag dazu ge-
leistet, das Feld der theoretischen und em-
pirischen GWK-Debatten aufzubereiten. 
Anmerkungen:
1 Vgl. B. Selwyn/D. Leyden, World Develop-
ment under Monopoly Capitalism, in: Month-
ly Review (2021), https://monthlyreview.
org/2021/11/01/world-development-under-
monopoly-capitalism/ (Zugriff 11.11.2021).
2 Siehe auch den Beitrag von M. Wenner (S. 
318–335), die sich mit der Rolle von „Fairem 
Handel“ auseinandersetzt. Der Befund, Fair-
trade wirke sich positiv auf Produzent:innen 
aus, müsse relativiert werden – auch, weil höhere 
Preise nicht unbedingt an Arbeiter:innen weit-
ergegeben würden.
3 Siehe hierzu I. Suwandi, Value Chains: The New 
Economic Imperialism, New York 2019.
4 Thomas Sablowski hat beispielsweise gegenüber 
dem Konzept „imperiale Lebensweise“ einge-
wendet, Klassen müssten in ihrem Verhältnis 
zueinander untersucht werden, um die Dyna-
mik des Zusammenspiels von Produktivkraft-
entwicklung, Ausbeutung und Klassenkämpfen 
zu verstehen. Was dies für Analysen des globalen 
Kapitalismus bedeutet, wäre allerdings einge-
hend zu diskutieren. Vgl. T. Sablowski, Warum 
die imperiale Lebensweise die Klassenfrage aus-
blenden muss, in: LuXemburg (2018), https://
www.zeitschrift-luxemburg.de/warum-die-im-
periale-lebensweise-die-klassenfrage-ausblen-
den-muss/ (Zugriff 11.11.2021). 
Adam Crymble: Technology and 
the Historian. Transformation in the 
Digital Age, Champaign: University of 
Illinois Press, 2021, 258 S.
Rezensiert von
Stefan Zahlmann, Wien
Die Digitalisierung, wie wir sie heute 
wahrnehmen, ist die bedeutendste kultu-
relle Zäsur seit der Erfindung der Schrift-
lichkeit. In allen Lebensbereichen ist sie 
präsent und beeinflusst direkt und indi-
rekt neben den Menschen, die sich aus 
unterschiedlichen Gründen ihrer Nutzung 
verschrieben haben auch diejenigen, die 
sich aus einer Vielzahl denkbarer Gründe 
von ihr abzuwenden versuchen oder ver-
sucht haben. Die historischen Disziplinen 
sind Teil der Lebenswelten von Menschen 
und zeigen einen durchaus kontrovers 
diskutierbaren Umgang mit den Transfor-
mationsprozessen der Digitalisierung seit 
wenigstens dreißig Jahren. Adam Crymble 
macht in seinem Buch deutlich, dass in 
den frühen Jahrzehnten der akademischen 
Digitalisierung, also ab den 1970er Jah-
ren bis zur Jahrtausendwende, die damit 
einhergehenden Veränderungen eher den 
Charakter eines Zusatzes, einer Ergänzung 
des Bestehenden erhielten, (noch) nicht 
aber in ihrer grundsätzlichen Bedeutung 
erfasst wurden. In dieser Zeit war die Di-
gitalisierung gleichsam ein Thema neben 
anderen, man belächelte Nutzer von Com-
putern oft noch bis in die 1980er Jahren 
(S. 6) und stellte sich jedoch vornehmlich 
den radikalen theoretischen Entwick-


German

Karin Fischer / Christian Reiner / Cornelia Staritz (Hrsg.): Globale Warenketten und ungleiche Entwicklung. Arbeit, Kapital, Konsum, Natur (Mattersburger Kreis für Entwicklungspolitik, Reihe Gesellschaft – Entwicklung – Politik, Bd. 20), Wien: Mandelbaum

Ruvituso, Clara

Rezensionen | Reviews | 783
Christy Thornton: Revolution in  
Development: Mexico and the 
Governance of the Global Economy, 
Oakland: University of California 
Press, 2021, 301 pp.
Reviewed by 
Clara Ruvituso, Berlin
Within global economic governance, the 
agency of the Latin American peripheries 
appears mostly reduced, on the one hand, 
to reproducing the prescriptions of he-
gemonic countries or, on the other hand, 
to combating their demands – mostly un-
successfully – through systemic ruptures. 
Thus, in the twentieth century, the im-
age of Latin America as a “backyard” was 
challenged by that of heroic emancipatory 
struggles. However, there were other ways 
by which Latin Americans established 
their positions, negotiated sovereignty, 
and disputed power within international 
society, and that is where Christy Thorn-
ton’s book comes in, focusing on Mexico’s 
“Revolution in Development”. Thornton 
analyses Mexico’s long and tumultuous 
post-revolution period of more than six 
decades, showing how Mexican politi-
cians, officials, and experts negotiated rep-
resentation and redistribution in the inter-
national arena. Maintaining intense ties 
with the United States while at the same 
time seeking alliances with other peripher-
ies, they have attempted to establish their 
own agenda for development. The Mexi-
can “Revolution in Development” implies 
complex balances between undertaking 
nationalization, dealing with debt nego-
tiations and default, obtaining reaccess to 
credit and investments, achieving industri-
alization, and attempting regional leader-
ship. The author focuses on strategies of 
how these activities were contested within 
the major organizations of pre- and post-
war international society. In eight chap-
ters, arranged chronologically, Thornton 
presents different scenarios, arguments, 
and struggles, showing Mexico’s agency, 
with some successes and many failures, 
which has until now been little analysed 
in the historiography of global economic 
governance. 
The first chapter, “Recognition and Rep-
resentation”, covers the period between 
1918 and 1923 and the construction of 
the League of Nations and the Pan-Amer-
ican Union around the disputes for the 
recognition of Mexico and equal condi-
tions among member countries. Thornton 
shows how Mexican officials managed to 
negotiate in their favour with other Latin 
American delegations regarding the voice 
and vote of the Latin American countries. 
The second chapter focuses on the contro-
versies around debt in the framework of 
the Great Depression and the struggles for 
redistribution, analysing the emergence 
of a theoretical framework for Mexican 
demands regarding a new international 
system of credit. The crucial setting is the 
inter-American conference in Montevideo 
in 1933 and the pioneering interventions 
of José Manuel Puig, to which Thornton 
returns in other chapters. “A Solidarity of 
Interests”, the third chapter, focuses on 
the Mexican advocacy, along with other 
Latin American countries, for the creation 
of an inter-American bank that should be 
able to solve the serious credit, imbalance, 
784 | Rezensionen | Reviews
and investment problems of small coun-
tries. Thornton documents the projects, 
discussions, and arguments of Mexican 
officials and economists that, even though 
they were not able to be immediately im-
plemented, configured agendas and influ-
enced subsequent decisions.
The fourth chapter, “Voice and Vote”, is 
centred around Bretton Woods and shows 
the accumulation of negotiations and ar-
guments that resulted in the Mexico’s 
hitherto little-known leadership in the re-
organization of the post-war world order. 
Thornton looks at the personal and public 
negotiations between the American, Brit-
ish, and Mexican officials in prior meet-
ings, as well as the importance of Mexico’s 
leadership within the commission on in-
ternational financial cooperation, led by 
the Mexican minister Eduardo Suárez, 
who argued for the reciprocal nature of 
international financial transactions and 
the shared responsibility in the creation of 
economic imbalance. Based on arguments 
about the sovereignty of small countries, 
Mexico fought for equal treatment and 
fair representation as well as economic de-
velopment of the less industrialized coun-
tries, attaching the development agenda to 
the agenda of reconstruction.
The fifth chapter focuses on the 1945 
Chapultepec conference, where Mexico 
managed to position the agenda around 
development and industrialization within 
the framework of the creation of the Unit-
ed Nations. The sixth chapter focuses on 
the negotiations around the International 
Trade Organization and the attempts to 
modify a charter designed by the centres 
of international trade based on universal 
free trade rules. The introduction of nu-
merous amendments by Mexico, as well 
as other Third World countries, reveals 
the attempts, most of them unsuccessful, 
to resist the proposals of the United States 
and Central Europe.
The seventh chapter describes the ambi-
guities of Mexico’s relationship with the 
United States and the non-aligned coun-
tries during the Cold War, marked by some 
attempted rapprochements but without 
putting into play the source of credits that 
had made the country’s “economic mira-
cle” possible. The author argues that dur-
ing the 1950s and 1960s Mexico became a 
“follower rather than a leader”. Even in the 
negotiations for the creation of the Inter-
American Development Bank, an idea that 
Mexicans had previously embraced, Mexi-
can officials were not involved. Likewise, 
they maintained a tense relationship with 
the leaders of the United Nations Eco-
nomic Commission for Latin America and 
the Caribbean and other new institutions 
led by Latin American peers. The Mexican 
officials sought to defend the advantages 
they saw in access to credit, without the 
accompanying initiatives for which they 
had previously fought.
The final chapter describes the double po-
sition of Mexico under the presidency of 
Luis Echeverría Álvarez regarding the crea-
tion of a Charter of Economic Rights and 
Duties of States, announced in Santiago de 
Chile in 1972 and negotiated by the Mexi-
cans for three consecutive years, while at 
the same time maintaining an anti-com-
munist agenda and an alternative leader-
ship to the most radicalized countries of 
the Third World. The Mexican interven-
tions contained crucial points around per-
manent sovereignty over natural resources, 
nationalization, and the regulation of 
multinational corporations. Despite the 
Rezensionen | Reviews | 785
opposition of the central industrial coun-
tries, 120 countries voted in favour of the 
“Mexican” charter. 
In well-articulated and concise chapters 
and drawing on meticulous archival work, 
Thornton manages to relate the different 
levels of negotiation and agency of Mexi-
can officials in the international arena, 
from the most local and personal instances 
to the changing national and geopolitical 
contexts. This book also explores Mexico’s 
difficult position in assuming a develop-
mentalist strategy, with attempts to pro-
vide leadership for the Global South, while 
at the same time maintaining US support 
in the form of credit. The arguments of 
the Mexican officials in some scenarios are 
surprising, predefining what was later in-
stitutionalized as the theory of the unequal 
terms of trade and dependency and show-
ing the plural genesis of counter-hegem-
onic narratives and practices. According to 
Thornton, the post-revolutionary Mexican 
position was not a radical one, but rather 
an attempt to rewrite the rules of the game. 
However, this strategy was abandoned by 
Mexico and other actors in the 1980s. In 
her conclusion, Thornton correctly warns 
that it is very possible that a similar story 
can be described for other peripheral elites 
in the same period. This innovative mag-
nifying glass focuses on the arguments and 
negotiations of global peripheral actors, 
many of which failed and with victories 
little recognized by historiography. The 
implications of this perspective are related 
to the current attempts of the academic 
community in the Global North to pro-
vincialize and decentralize the narratives of 
globalization processes, while at the same 
time opening interesting bridges with cur-
rent affairs. As Thornton points out in the 
introduction to the book, the echoes of 
these less-known Mexican struggles and 
arguments on debt, credit, redistribution, 
sovereignty, and unequal representation 
and recognition can still be heard today. 
Lucy Delap: Feminisms: A Global  
History, Chicago: University of  
Chicago Press, 2020, 379 pp.
Reviewed by 
Bonnie S. Anderson, Brooklyn
This magnificent history widens the en-
tire field of feminist studies and employs 
a uniquely creative format to do so. Lucy 
Delap, eager to overcome the exclusively 
white and Euro-American sources of previ-
ous accounts, has used persons and sources 
from throughout the world to narrate this 
saga. Employing a thematic approach 
rather than a chronological one, she is able 
to overcome the limitations and biases of 
past histories. This tactic also enables her 
to show the connections and influences 
among both disparate regions and time 
periods. She accurately surveys the last 
250 years of women’s activism. Feminisms: 
A Global History successfully remakes an 
entire field of study.
The range of Delap’s scholarship is aston-
ishing. She begins by citing an unnamed 
“lady of Africa” claiming feminism in 
1886. In her first few chapters, she goes 
on to portray feminists from India, Brazil, 
China, Algeria, Trinidad, Japan, Burma, 
and Nigeria. And she does not just men-


English

Christy Thornton: Revolution in Development: Mexico and the Governance of the Global Economy, Oakland: University of California Press, 2021, 301 pp.

Middell, Matthias

Inhaltsverzeichnis | Contents
Editorial 7
Aufsätze | Articles
Ulf Engel 
Introduction, or: On the Genre of OAU/AU Anniversary Publications,  
1963–2023 9
Geert Castryck 
Imagining African Unity: From an Inter-Imperial Spatial Order to an  
International Organization 19
Tim Murithi  
The AU at Twenty Years: Institutional Changes, Contestation, and Consolidation 32
Gilbert Khadiagala 
The African Union Peace and Security Architecture (APSA) in the Search  
for Peace and Security: The Record over the Past Twenty Years  53
Jens Herpolsheimer 
AU-REC Relations: The Practices of Inter-Regionalism Between ECOWAS  
and the African Union 70
Forum
Eva Bischoff 
An Elm Tree at the Yarra River? Batman’s Treaty as a Nexus of Settler-Colonial 
Space|Time  89
6 | Inhalt | Contents
Rezensionen | Reviews
Jenifer L. Barclay: The Mark of Slavery: Disability, Race, and Gender in  
Antebellum America, Champaign 2021; Stefanie Hunt-Kennedy: Between  
Fitness and Death: Disability and Slavery in the Caribbean, Champaign 2020 
Melina Teubner 109
Duncan Bell: Dreamworlds of Race: Empire and the Utopian Destiny  
of Anglo-America, Princeton 2021 
Timothy Bowers Vasko 113
Jan Bemann / Dittmar Dahlmann / Detlev Taranczewski (Hrsg.): Core, Periphery,  
Frontier: Spatial Patterns of Power, Göttingen 2021 
Klemens Kaps 115
Nikolay Kamenov: Global Temperance and the Balkans: American Missionaries,  
Swiss Scientists, and Bulgarian Socialists, London 2020  
Christofer Scarboro 118
Gero Fedtke: Roter Orient. Muslimkommunisten und Bolschewiki in  
Turkestan, Köln u. a. 2020  
Stephan Rindlisbacher 120
Bernd Lemke (Hrsg.): Ewald Banse und der Orient, Bremen 2021 
Uwe Pfullmann 123
Thomas Adam: Deutschland in der Welt. Gesellschaft, Kultur und Politik seit 1815,  
Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2021  
Frank Bösch 126
Eleni Braat / Pepijn Corduwener (eds.): 1989 and the West: Western Europe  
Since the End of the Cold War, London/New York 2020  
Christoph Lorke 128
Paul S. Landau: Spear: Mandela and the Revolutionaries, Athens 2022 
Ulf Engel 131
Robert Mayhew / Charles Withers (eds.): Geographies of Knowledge: Science,  
Scale, and Spatiality in the Nineteenth Century, Baltimore 2020 
Alessandro Stanziani 132
Claude Mazauric: D’Histoire et d’Historiens. Préface de Pascal Dupuy et  
Isabelle Laboulais, Paris 2021 
Matthias Middell 135
Raquel Varela: A People’s History of Europe: From World War I to Today,  
London 2021 
Matthias Middell 137
Autorinnen und Autoren | Authors  140


Inhaltsverzeichnis | Contents

Akami, Tomoko

262 | Rezensionen | Reviews
post-war “national refugees” (the expellees 
from the east) mirrors the Italian situa-
tion. Another entanglement with German 
history is the massive labour migration 
of Italians to Germany in the 1950s and 
1960s (the so-called guest workers [Gas-
tarbeiter]). Ballinger hints at the economic 
boom in Italy at the same time, implicitly 
arguing that Italy could have been more 
open to immigration (p. 207). I am just 
puzzled why this massive outflow of la-
bour migrants – mainly from the poorer 
south – occurred at the same time. 
Ethiopia is another essential actor through-
out the book but could be dealt with more 
comprehensively. As an internationally 
recognized nation-state and member of 
the League of Nations and during the 
Paris Peace Conference, Ethiopia often ap-
peared to be an antagonist against the Ital-
ians. Ballinger shows, however, the limited 
power Ethiopia could wield there. Ethio-
pian plans to persecute Italian perpetrators 
of war crimes eventually failed (p. 123). 
Moreover, only after the Ethiopian protest 
over UNRRA’s support for Italy did Ethio-
pia receive some limited assistance from 
the organization.
These suggestions for comparisons do not 
present criticism of Ballinger’s book but 
rather attest to its quality and importance 
beyond the Italian context. It is an essen-
tial contribution for years to come and 
rests on a solid empirical foundation. Ball-
inger’s book will be of interest not only to 
historians of the Italian post-war era but 
to historians of refugees, international or-
ganizations, and decolonization in many 
places.
Alexander E. Davis / Vineet Thakur /
Peter Vale: The Imperial Discipline: 
Race and the Founding of  
International Relations, London: 
Pluto Press, 2020, 197 pp.
Reviewed by
Tomoko Akami, Canberra
A conversion of IR, history, and area stud-
ies is occurring at least among some. In the 
discipline of IR, this is a part of a broader 
response to the criticism of the nature of 
the disciplinary knowledge as being Eu-
rocentric, colonial, masculine, and racist 
(summarized in pp. 7–10). More IR schol-
ars are turning to history to explore a new 
framework and/or to scrutinize the gene-
alogies of the discipline to understand how 
it was shaped and search for its alternative 
paths. Historians and scholars of area 
studies need to be engaged in this devel-
opment in IR because how we understand 
the world order influences how we see in-
terconnected “histories” and “areas” and 
because IR’s disciplinary histories should 
reflect accumulated and new scholarship 
in history and area studies.
The Imperial Discipline: Race and the 
Founding of International Relations is a re-
cent contribution to such critical historical 
works in IR. 
While various genealogies of the disci-
pline of IR have already been identified, 
this book, written by Alexander E. Davis, 
Vineet Thakur, and Peter Vale, sees the or-
ganization, the Round Table (since 1909), 
as the significant institutional and intellec-
Rezensionen | Reviews | 263
tual founding of the discipline of IR in a 
large part of the British Empire. It argues, 
“the ‘science’ of studying international 
politics, the method of doing it, and the 
implacable belief that knowledge created, 
not just explained, reality came from initi-
atives undertaken by the group of people” 
of this organization, and “these initiatives 
were key to the founding of IR” (pp. 3–4). 
The Round Table movement, founded in 
1909 in South Africa for exploring the 
new British imperial cohesion, published 
its first journal in 1910, established its 
headquarters in London, and expanded its 
branches to several British colonies. Many 
of its members later became members of 
the Royal Institute of International Af-
fairs (RIIA, London) and its “branches” 
in these colonies in the 1920s and 1930s. 
Chapter 1 elaborates the founding ideas of 
this “science” and the belief of the central 
character of this project, Lionel Curtis, in 
the context of South Africa. The following 
five chapters examine how they developed 
(or were resisted or rejected) in Canada, 
Australia, South Africa, New Zealand, and 
India. This concise analysis across the five 
colonies is based on extensive archival and 
other primary sources and was possible 
because of the respective expertise of the 
three authors and their collaboration. It is 
an ideal, yet not an easy task.
The book makes a few (among many) 
significant points. First, it reinforces the 
point that IR had an imperial origin and 
intent, which became invisible in current 
IR. The book’s method of decolonizing the 
discipline is to reveal this hidden origin, 
and it argues: “IR began partly as an im-
perial ‘science’, which emerged out of the 
racial anxieties of South Africa and the set-
tler colonies and was exported around the 
world” (p. 11). Through the Round Table 
(and its succeeding institutions), Curtis 
wanted to create the science (knowledge 
and methods) and the world order to man-
age international affairs and secure peace, 
centred on the British Empire but assum-
ing close cooperation with the USA. 
Second, while the book builds on the 
existing critical works by scholars, such 
as Schmidt, Hobson, and Vitalis, its em-
phasis is on “the centrality of the empire’s 
frontiers to the emergence of IR” (p. 5). 
Hence, it argues that this imperial science 
was shaped not at the imperial metropoles 
of the UK and the USA but out of racial 
tensions at the colonial frontlines. Four 
chapters highlight the different main con-
cerns for white settlers in Australia, Cana-
da, South Africa, and New Zealand, which 
defined the respective developments. De-
spite the significant difference in these de-
velopments, the basic nature of this impe-
rial science was defined by racial hierarchy: 
it was to control and manage, not eman-
cipate, non-whites, and only whites could 
think the international, while “race” and 
“empire” disappeared in “the formal study 
of the International”. 
Third, the chapter on India reveals an al-
ternative path for this otherwise imperial 
and white discipline. India occupied the 
central place for the new British imperial 
cohesion for Curtis and the Round Table. 
Not surprisingly, however, Curtis’s vision 
of the white British world order did not 
work in India and faced two fundamental 
questions: Could a non-white population 
think and discuss the international, and if 
so, what international did they envisage? 
The issue manifested in the fierce contest 
among the different voices and institu-
tions wanting to represent “India” at in-
264 | Rezensionen | Reviews
ternational conferences in the late 1930s 
and early 1940s. This revealed complex 
power dynamics involving politics, ideol-
ogy, and religion in India, compounded by 
the interventions from London and North 
America in the last days of British imperial 
rule while shaping the disciplinary foun-
dations of IR in India and Pakistan. 
The book nonetheless raises two inter-
twined big questions: Was Curtis really 
central in this story, and is his centrality 
right for the purposes of this book? It sug-
gests that Curtis’s method of gathering 
and analysing empirical data and using 
this analysis for improving world affairs 
and for securing peace permeated the ef-
forts of establishing the science of interna-
tional relations in these British colonies. 
Was this method, however, original to 
Curtis, or did he reflect a general trend 
of social science thinking of the time? A 
similar idea was evident in the founding 
intents of the Journal of Race Relations, the 
Williamstown Institute, the Rockefeller 
Foundation, the Carnegie Endowment for 
International Peace, the “Inquiry” at the 
YMCA in New York, and the Institute of 
Pacific Relations (IPR).
The assumed centrality of Curtis is further 
problematic. No doubt, he was a strong 
character and was seen as a “prophet”, but 
other scholars stress the limits, not influ-
ence, of him and his vision, especially in 
the context of South Africa.[1] Moreover, 
quite a few leading figures at the organi-
zations, even those close to him and who 
Curtis hoped would promote his vision 
beyond the British Empire, strongly disa-
greed with his views. This was evident with 
members of the Council on Foreign Rela-
tions (CFR) and national council members 
in the USA and Australia of the IPR.[2] 
Attributing the emergence of an epistemic 
community of experts of imperial and 
international relations in the British Em-
pire largely to Curtis’s thoughts and ac-
tions may also miss other critical factors. 
It undermines alternative intellectual and 
institutional forces at the colonial front-
lines, especially those within the national 
councils of the IPR in Canada, Australia, 
and New Zealand. The chapters on India, 
and to an extent the one on Canada, dem-
onstrate that such contention, rather than 
the Curtis’s vision, was crucial in shaping 
the nature of the IR strands. Lastly, a more 
rigorous definition of “IR scholars” may 
have been useful, as the term presupposes 
the established discipline of IR throughout 
the period of its examination. 
These questions nonetheless suggest that 
the book deepens critical reassessments 
of the disciplinary knowledge of IR and 
inspires new debates. The book takes us 
beyond Anglo-American imperial metro-
poles but still remains within a part of the 
British Empire, and I join these three au-
thors’ call for further diverse histories for 
decolonizing our understanding of the 
world order and world affairs. Historians 
and scholars of area studies have much 
work to do with these IR scholars.
Notes:
1 J. Cotton, Chatham House and Africa c1920–
1960: The Limitations of the Curtis Vision, in: 
South African Historical Journal 68 (2016) 2, 
pp. 147–162.
2 T. Akami, Internationalizing the Pacific: The 
United States, Japan and the Institute of Pacific 
Relations in War and Peace, 1919–45, London 
2002, pp. 42–44, 124–128, 130–133, 141, 187.


Alexander E. Davis / Vineet Thakur / Peter Vale: The Imperial Discipline: Race and the Founding of International Relations, London: Pluto Press, 2020, 197 pp.

Doroshenko, Ihor

272 | Rezensionen | Reviews
To conclude, Büscher’s book on the digi-
talization of conservation efforts offers 
fascinating insights into the challenges 
and pitfalls of engaging with the con-
temporary crisis of environmentalism in 
Southern Africa and beyond. He dissects 
the mechanisms of how this form of activ-
ism, on the one hand, is producing narra-
tives to counter post-truth politics but, on 
the other hand, also is strengthening new 
forms of platform capitalism. The repeated 
emphasis of the latter is owed to Büscher’s 
own normative positionality (“structural 
change is necessary”, p. 169). Neverthe-
less, he certainly has developed a critical 
argument about the embeddedness of con-
servation politics in Southern Africa in a 
very particular history and context. The 
way in which he relates these dynamics to 
a discussion of Foucauldian truth, power, 
and change policies certainly makes it 
worth reading this book. 
Notes:
1 N. Srnicek, Platform Capitalism, London 2016. 
2 Sh. Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: 
The Fight for a Human Future at the New Fron-
tier of Power, London 2019. 
3 In der anglophonen Rezeption meist mit Bezug 
auf Hannah Arendt (H. Arendt, Essays in Un-
derstanding 1930–1954, New York 1994). 
Richard Němec (ed.):  Raumkon-
struktionen: Digital Humanities und 
die “Messbarkeit” des NS-Regimes, 
Berlin: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2021, 
175 pp. 
Reviewed by
Ihor Doroshenko, Leipzig
Eastern Europe always held a special place 
in Nazi ideology. It was an arena for im-
plementation of different crucial Nazi 
policies such as Lebensraum, Generalplan 
Ost, Blood and Soil, and so on. An es-
sential role in all these plans and policies 
was dedicated to the spatial practices that 
were used to measure, to describe, and in 
the end to colonize the new occupied ter-
ritories. The book Spatial Constructions: 
The Digital Humanities and the “Measur-
ability” of the Nazi Regime demonstrates 
how modern interdisciplinary methods of 
digital humanities can offer new perspec-
tives and bring new insights into the ques-
tion of, basically, how the Nazis dealt with 
space in Eastern Europe. 
The book consists of seven chapters, each 
dealing with different aspect of the spatial 
constructions of the Nazi regime. For in-
stance, in the introduction, “The Digital 
Humanities and the ‘Measurability’ of 
the Nazi Regime”, the author, Richard 
Němec, describes the challenges of trac-
ing Nazi history through architecture. He 
argues that standardized planning data 
for different regions can be traced within 
the extensive territory of the National 
Socialist sphere of rule – from occupied 
Rezensionen | Reviews | 273
territories in the East to those in Luxem-
bourg. One of the studies he proposes is 
the usage of machine learning techniques 
to extract particular patterns in the Nazi 
architecture to answer the question about 
the meaning of certain terms in art at a 
certain time. In the chapter “The Digital 
Historiography of the NS regime”, the 
authors, Frederike Buda, Julia Timpe, 
and Christiane Charlotte Weber, explain 
how the historians can work with digital 
and digitized data sources in research on 
National Socialism; what the new per-
spectives are in relation to analogue data; 
what new methods emerge from using-
digital and digitized sources; and, finally, 
how these sources in libraries, memorials, 
and museums can be used. In the chapter 
“All Quiet on the Western Front”, Stefan 
Heinz demonstrates through the example 
of the project Luxatlas the possibilities and 
risks of including Nazi city maps and plans 
– some of which were never implemented 
– into a digital city atlas. Miloš Hořejš has 
a similar purpose but different realization, 
in this case through specialized maps, in 
his research “Relics of Nazi Architecture 
in the Czech Republic”. He uncovers 
through geographical information system 
(GIS) and three-dimensional (3D) model-
ling the spatial concepts and ideas imple-
mented by the Nazis on the Czech lands. 
Katharina Steudtner covers the topic of 
data-based modelling in National Socialist 
research in her chapter “Survey? Sondage? 
Excavation?” She describes which methods 
are used to collect historical data sources in 
form of photographs; how they and their 
metadata can be stored in a database; and, 
in the end, how they can be evaluated in-
terdisciplinarily, that is to say from differ-
ent perspectives. 
On the one hand, the book demonstrates 
the use of various types of sources in re-
lation to the shift from traditional hu-
manities to modern digital humanities, 
beginning with historical acts, documents, 
plans, and maps and ending with mod-
ern statistics such as the Google Ngram 
Viewer. On the other hand, it intersects 
different disciplines such as history, archi-
tecture, geography, and informatics. Of 
course, there have been other interdisci-
plinary works exploring geospatial digital 
methods in the humanities and also re-
search about the Third Reich.[1] However, 
this volume provides a completely new 
look at the question of how the Nazis dealt 
with space, exploring not only the urban 
and spatial plans that were realized but 
also those that were not. Furthermore, the 
volume provides the opportunity to com-
pare the plans by the Nazis for various oc-
cupied territories multitemporally – that is 
to say, for different areas at different times.
In addition, the volume provides multiple 
application examples of the digital meth-
ods discussed, such as artificial intelligence 
(AI), 3D modelling, GIS, and so on; how-
ever, descriptions are only abstract and 
do not go into detail how to specifically 
implement such models. There is no pro-
vision of specific workflows with detailed 
explanations to follow or descriptions of 
the usage of software or programming lan-
guage, resulting in additional challenges 
for those who would implement the sug-
gested methods in practice, for example 
with deep learning in “Introduction: The 
Digital Humanities and the ‘Measur-
ability’ of the Nazi Regime” and GIS in 
“Relics of Nazi Architecture in the Czech 
Republic”.
274 | Rezensionen | Reviews
It should be mentioned that it is typical for 
interdisciplinary works to provide an over-
view and explain the design possibilities, 
while staying on the surface of implemen-
tation. Despite that, proceeding not only 
interdisciplinarily and digitally but also 
spatiotemporally, the work offers new per-
spectives and results as well as opens a new 
chapter in the spatial research on the Nazi 
regime. The second criticism is the slight 
bias towards Central European sources 
while neglecting spatial historians who 
have worked on the history of the Nazi re-
gime – such as Anne Kelly Knowles, Tim 
Cole, Paul Jaskot, Alberto Giordano, Todd 
Presner, and so on[2] – who are mentioned 
only peripherally, if at all, even though 
they have (probably) provided some of the 
most important contributions and foun-
dations for digital collaborative geospatial 
research on the Nazi regime.
This work would be interesting for both 
beginner and advanced researchers and stu-
dents, as well as everyone who is interested 
in an interdisciplinary historical study that 
goes far beyond traditional historiogra-
phy. Despite the lacking step-by-step de-
scriptions of method implementation and 
references to the world-famous historical 
geographers dealing with the Nazi regime, 
I would definitely recommend the work 
as it reveals new paths in historiographical 
research that help to create new knowledge 
by using the same sources but a different 
set of methods. Although the idea itself 
to use such technologies in historical re-
search is not new, I definitely consider the 
questions and answers the work provides 
as remarkable because it is often difficult 
in the digital humanities research not to 
find a tool but to find a right question and, 
consequently, to answer it.
Notes:
1 K. A. Knowles/T. Cole/A. Giordano (eds.), Ge-
ographies of the Holocaust, Bloomington 2014; 
P. Giaccaria/C. Minca (eds.), Hitler’s Geogra-
phies: The Spatialities of the Third Reich, Chi-
cago 2016; R. Bavaj/K. Lawson/B. Struck (eds.), 
Doing Spatial History, Abingdon 2021.
2 T. Cole, Holocaust Landscapes, London 2016; 
C. Fogu/W. Kansteiner/T. Presner (eds.), Prob-
ing the Ethics of Holocaust Culture: The Roots 
of Militarism, 1866–1945, Stanford 2016; A. 
Garbarini/P. B. Jaskot (eds.). Lessons and Lega-
cies XIII: New Approaches to an Integrated His-
tory of the Holocaust: Social History, Represen-
tation, Theory, Evanston 2018.
Jörg Goldberg: Ein neuer  
Kapitalismus. Grundlagen  
historischer Kapitalismusanalyse, 
Köln: Papyrossa, 2021, 199 pp.
Reviewed by
Hartmut Elsenhans, Leipzig
This is an excellent overview surrounding 
the history of capitalism since the mid-
nineteenth century. It centres upon great 
crises that have led to structural changes 
and new phases of capitalist accumulation. 
As the title indicates, the book is written 
in order to better evaluate the capacity for 
surmounting the contemporary crisis of 
capitalism. The author concludes that an 
overcoming of capitalism itself is improb-
able given the flexibility of capitalism in 
facing new challenges. 
The book is organized around the classical 
argument on the contradictions between 
relations of production and forces of pro-
duction. Capitalism is always embedded 


Richard Němec (ed.): Raumkonstruktionen: Digital Humanities und die “Messbarkeit” des NS-Regimes, Berlin: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2021, 175 pp.

Elsenhans, Hartmut

274 | Rezensionen | Reviews
It should be mentioned that it is typical for 
interdisciplinary works to provide an over-
view and explain the design possibilities, 
while staying on the surface of implemen-
tation. Despite that, proceeding not only 
interdisciplinarily and digitally but also 
spatiotemporally, the work offers new per-
spectives and results as well as opens a new 
chapter in the spatial research on the Nazi 
regime. The second criticism is the slight 
bias towards Central European sources 
while neglecting spatial historians who 
have worked on the history of the Nazi re-
gime – such as Anne Kelly Knowles, Tim 
Cole, Paul Jaskot, Alberto Giordano, Todd 
Presner, and so on[2] – who are mentioned 
only peripherally, if at all, even though 
they have (probably) provided some of the 
most important contributions and foun-
dations for digital collaborative geospatial 
research on the Nazi regime.
This work would be interesting for both 
beginner and advanced researchers and stu-
dents, as well as everyone who is interested 
in an interdisciplinary historical study that 
goes far beyond traditional historiogra-
phy. Despite the lacking step-by-step de-
scriptions of method implementation and 
references to the world-famous historical 
geographers dealing with the Nazi regime, 
I would definitely recommend the work 
as it reveals new paths in historiographical 
research that help to create new knowledge 
by using the same sources but a different 
set of methods. Although the idea itself 
to use such technologies in historical re-
search is not new, I definitely consider the 
questions and answers the work provides 
as remarkable because it is often difficult 
in the digital humanities research not to 
find a tool but to find a right question and, 
consequently, to answer it.
Notes:
1 K. A. Knowles/T. Cole/A. Giordano (eds.), Ge-
ographies of the Holocaust, Bloomington 2014; 
P. Giaccaria/C. Minca (eds.), Hitler’s Geogra-
phies: The Spatialities of the Third Reich, Chi-
cago 2016; R. Bavaj/K. Lawson/B. Struck (eds.), 
Doing Spatial History, Abingdon 2021.
2 T. Cole, Holocaust Landscapes, London 2016; 
C. Fogu/W. Kansteiner/T. Presner (eds.), Prob-
ing the Ethics of Holocaust Culture: The Roots 
of Militarism, 1866–1945, Stanford 2016; A. 
Garbarini/P. B. Jaskot (eds.). Lessons and Lega-
cies XIII: New Approaches to an Integrated His-
tory of the Holocaust: Social History, Represen-
tation, Theory, Evanston 2018.
Jörg Goldberg: Ein neuer  
Kapitalismus. Grundlagen  
historischer Kapitalismusanalyse, 
Köln: Papyrossa, 2021, 199 pp.
Reviewed by
Hartmut Elsenhans, Leipzig
This is an excellent overview surrounding 
the history of capitalism since the mid-
nineteenth century. It centres upon great 
crises that have led to structural changes 
and new phases of capitalist accumulation. 
As the title indicates, the book is written 
in order to better evaluate the capacity for 
surmounting the contemporary crisis of 
capitalism. The author concludes that an 
overcoming of capitalism itself is improb-
able given the flexibility of capitalism in 
facing new challenges. 
The book is organized around the classical 
argument on the contradictions between 
relations of production and forces of pro-
duction. Capitalism is always embedded 
Rezensionen | Reviews | 275
in political, social, and institutional struc-
tures. They relate to the capital-labour 
dialectics. Labour is organized nationally. 
Further, capital requires the support from 
state institutions. Despite the – historically 
differing – degrees of globalization, crises 
take different shapes according to histori-
cal and, less so, national conditions. 
Great crises therefore cannot be explained 
by long waves, occurring automatically 
and with regularity. Rather, they result 
from a combination of external and inter-
nal factors as well as aspects of end specific 
phases of capitalism.
Such crises are overcome by a mixture of 
mechanisms, including epochal innova-
tions that change economic parameters, 
but in general by new arrangements in 
the management of the dialectics between 
labour and capital and between capitalist 
enterprises and capital fractions.
Crises occur normally in cyclical down-
turns and always lead to restructurings of 
the internal contradictions of capitalism. 
Cyclical downturns occur regularly and 
are qualitatively different from the types of 
great crises on which Jörg Goldberg con-
centrates.
Five crises are investigated. The 1847 cri-
sis resulted from bad harvests, which in 
turn led to price increases for grain. The 
purchasing power for industrial products 
decreased. It was overcome through migra-
tion, the expansion of global trade (open-
ing up of new regions), and monetary ex-
pansion (discovery of Californian gold).
The long depression of 1873–1896 origi-
nated from a stock market crash due to 
speculation. It led only to short-term re-
ductions of production in the real econ-
omy. It was overcome not only primarily 
through real wages increases but also via 
the intensification of railway construction; 
new gold findings in South Africa; declin-
ing grain prices; and, to a degree, by the 
Second Industrial Revolution (chemistry 
and electrical industry).
The Great Depression of the 1930s re-
sulted from falling prices for agricultural 
products, which diminished purchasing 
power not only in the United States but 
also especially in the Global South. This 
preceded the well-known stock market 
crash. It was overcome by way of military 
spending, first in Germany, and then, with 
the outbreak of World War II, in the Unit-
ed States. It should be added that in the 
Golden Twenties, wages fell despite pro-
ductivity increases in all major industrial 
countries.
Reflecting the experience of the interwar 
period, the ruling bourgeois strata agreed 
after 1945 that the demise of the world 
economy, mass unemployment, and the 
return to unregulated markets must be 
avoided at all costs.
This class compromise, called Fordism, 
was cancelled by capital during the crisis 
of 1973–1975. It was caused by the ris-
ing share of wages. The importance of 
the temporarily high balance of payment 
surpluses of the oil countries is only mar-
ginally mentioned. Despite the disempow-
erment of labour, the dominance of the 
markets and globalization with new mar-
kets featuring access to cheap labour did 
not subsequently lead to high net invest-
ment. The following period was character-
ized by moderate growth.
At the centre of the strategies of capital 
lies the growth of financial markets. Prof-
its are no longer invested in real capital 
formation but are used for speculation in 
increasingly sophisticated financial assets, 
276 | Rezensionen | Reviews
to which a shadow banking system and 
extra stock market operations greatly con-
tributed. Financial markets not only grew 
but were made informal and withdrawn 
from government regulation so that public 
regulations of banks and monetary policies 
of central banks lost their efficiency.
As a result, the share of instable elements 
in effective demand increased. The stable 
elements, especially mass incomes, saw 
their share reduced. 
Here, Goldberg recommends a correction 
of the distribution of total product in fa-
vour of mass incomes and efficient regula-
tions of the financial markets.
Goldberg is sceptical about the probability 
of such a general overcoming of capitalism. 
Instead, capitalism will be slightly adapted 
to new challenges by the increasing role of 
the state, serving to improve global com-
petitiveness. Such state expenditure can 
be partly characterized by unproductive 
spending, like a new armaments race.
In covering the key characteristics of these 
five important crises of capitalism in the 
last 180 years, Goldberg concentrates on 
the contradiction between consumption 
and production in capitalism. Crises are 
ultimately triggered by lack of effective 
demand, with the exception of the crisis 
of 1973–1975, wherein the “undercon-
sumption” of the oil-rich countries played 
its role. They are overcome by increas-
ing demand, in the case of the crisis of 
1973–1975 by the shift of surplus to the 
financial markets, whereas technical inno-
vations, here the microelectronics revolu-
tion, only play a minor role.
These arguments correspond entirely to 
Keynesianism, which, in contrast to Gol-
berg’s view, is not limited to increasing 
government deficits but rather focuses on 
the necessity to increase demand by safe-
guarding the bargaining power of labour. 
This empowerment of labour is not pro-
duced by the capitalists. Capitalists, in 
contrast to the implicit argument of Gold-
berg, do not produce the conditions for 
capitalism. These conditions for capitalism 
have to be imposed on them.
Significantly, the introductory chapters, 
which deral with issues of Marxist schools 
of political economy, do not guide the 
presentations of the crises, with the excep-
tion of the arguments of regulation theory. 
These are rejected as capitalism does not 
need a compromise with labour at the po-
litical level. This refers to the absence of 
such a class compromise under neo-liber-
alism after 1973–1975. Yet, the precari-
ous character of this overcoming is due to 
financialization, which ultimately leads to 
new crises.
Nowhere are crises of capitalism associated 
with an inevitably occurring lack of sur-
plus, as implied in the theory of the fall of 
the profit rate, because of a rising organic 
composition of capital, which is weakly re-
jected. If this tendency of the profit rate 
to fall does not materialize, capitalists may 
produce social evils and crises. I argue that 
by empowering labour and maintaining 
effective demand this can be dealt with, 
perhaps better than in centrally planned 
economies.
In two of the five cases, the rising mass 
incomes allowed for the crises to be over-
come. In the third case, the weakness of 
this mechanism caused a prolongation and 
deepening of the crisis, especially in the 
United States in the 1930s. According to 
Goldberg’s analyses, rising mass incomes 
are of utmost importance.
Rezensionen | Reviews | 277
Green capitalism is underway and shows 
that capitalism avails itself of any cost in-
creasing new demand as a basis for accu-
mulation. Crucially, this is also the case for 
rising mass incomes or reduced working 
hours, which are ultimately the source of 
capitalist growth beyond the often quoted 
exogenous factors. This is, however, a re-
formist perspective wherein capital must 
be checked by labour in order to save capi-
talism, a perspective that seems to be re-
jected by Goldberg.


Jörg Goldberg: Ein neuer Kapitalismus. Grundlagen historischer Kapitalismusanalyse, Köln: Papyrossa, 2021, 199 pp.

Gebresenbet, Fana

The Debate on Social Cohesion and Transitional Justice in Ethiopia: An Interview

Originally composed by Richard Fay in 2006, this (composition-as-output) workis in the process of being recorded for the upcoming album, Flotsam, due out later in 2023. It also featured as the final piece in the Helix / Hamosity CD Launch Concert in September 2021.(Draft Sleeve Note)After the final flotsam is sounded (by strings), Equilibrium (2006) is a lively statement of preference and belief that life runs much better when the elements are balanced, a lesson learned over many years.<br/

Fay, Richard; id_orcid

Gee, Sam

Equilibrium

Berger, Stefan

Rezensionen | Reviews | 497
of power, and “civilizing missions” on 
the global scale. By turning empires into 
transnational sites for theoretical observa-
tion and practical experimentation, social 
science contributed to shaping a “global 
knowledge regime” characterized by the 
coexistence of a multiplicity of actors who, 
more or less intentionally, demonstrated 
that knowledge production was never neu-
tral because it was inseparable from justifi-
cations of power relations and from the in-
vention and reproduction of social, racial, 
and political hierarchies (p. 6).
Rather than conceiving of empire as a 
mere topographical expansion of the so-
cial sciences’ traditional state boundaries, 
the book adopts empire as a methodologi-
cal category. This reframing of empire is, 
indeed, the work’s most original scholarly 
contribution. While the book’s chapters 
focus on several empires, its title points 
to empire as method – an epistemologi-
cal rather than geographical framework of 
analysis. Understood this way, the notion 
of empire subsumes the most distinctive 
feature common into all historical impe-
rial formations: the fact of being unitary 
yet not internally uniform.
In empires, aspirations to and accomplish-
ments of unity have coexisted with inner 
differentiation and fragmentation. Asym-
metries in scales (between metropole and 
colonies, the self-arrogated centre and 
alleged peripheries), as well as racial and 
political inequalities forged within impe-
rial structures, could never be reduced to 
stable hierarchies but instead produced 
conflictual processes that shaped polycen-
tric assemblages (p. 217). As historical 
imperial polities, by encapsulating this 
polycentrism, featured that combination 
of integration and heterogeneity which 
would become the most distinctive char-
acteristic of the global world, empire thus 
can be understood as an epistemological 
category that can be employed as a crucial 
instrument in the methodological tool-
box of global history (p. 9). By adopting 
an imperial perspective that incorporated 
“home” and “abroad” into a single analyti-
cal frame, social scientists historically stim-
ulated the creation of “cross-border sys-
tems” of understanding and ruling, which 
scholars can study as intellectual bricks in 
the expanding edifice of the “global history 
of knowledge” (pp. 3–4).
Florian Bieber: Debating Nationalism. 
The Global Spread of Nations,  
London: Bloomsbury Academic, 
2020, 246 S.
Rezensiert von  
Stefan Berger, Bochum 
Seit den 1980er Jahren hat das Thema Na-
tionalismus in der Wissenschaft Konjunk-
tur und es gibt mittlerweile eine Vielzahl 
von guten Überblicken, die die zahllosen 
Debatten und die fast unüberblickbaren 
empirischen Arbeiten zum Thema ver-
ständlich und konzise zusammenfassen. 
Florian Bieber reiht sich mit seinem Buch 
in diese Literatur ein. 
Die Einleitung bietet eine gute Problema-
tisierung der leider besonders in der Politik 
immer noch weit verbreiteten, aber eben 
in die Irre führenden Unterscheidung zwi-
schen Patriotismus und Nationalismus. 
498 | Rezensionen | Reviews
Den eigentlichen Gegenpart zum Natio-
nalismus macht Bieber im Universalismus 
aus, wobei auch hier anzumerken wäre, 
dass es Nationalismen gibt, die sich uni-
versalistisch gebärden. Der französische 
Nationalismus und seine Berufung auf die 
universalistischen Werte der Französischen 
Revolution von 1789 ist hier nur ein be-
sonders prägnantes Beispiel. Bieber lässt 
Definitionen und Typologien des Natio-
nalismus Revue passieren, wobei er über-
raschend die klassische Unterscheidung 
von „ethnic“ und „civic“ nationalism mit 
Modifikationen bestehen lässt, während es 
doch in der Literatur einen fast überwäl-
tigenden Konsens gibt, dass diese binäre 
Konstruktion eher nicht hilfreich ist, um 
Nationalismus zu verstehen.
Das zweite Kapitel beschäftigt sich mit den 
Anfängen von Nationen und Nationalis-
men. Er informiert hier über die Debatte 
um die Ursprünge von Nationen und die 
Vorformen von Nationalismen, wobei er 
sich, wie die große Mehrzahl der Forscher, 
auf die Seite der Modernisten schlägt. Al-
lerdings widmet er auch einige Seiten den 
Proto-Natonalismen, die er nicht nur in 
Europa, sondern auch im vormodernen 
China lokalisiert. 
Nachdem das zweite Kapitel schon einige 
spannende Blicke in die außereuropäische 
Welt geworfen hat, ist das dritte Kapitel 
ganz eurozentrisch strukturiert, was mit 
der Auffassung des Autors zu tun hat, dass 
der Nationalismus in Europa erfunden 
wurde und von hier aus die Welt erobert 
hat. Im 18. und 19. Jh., so zeigt Bieber, 
verbreitet sich der Nationalismus, wenn 
auch nicht einheitlich und zeitgleich, über 
den ganzen Kontinent. Er betont die Be-
deutung von Nationalstaaten für die In-
tensivierung nationalistischer Diskurse 
und zeichnet nach, wie der Nationalismus 
die Imperien des 19. Jhs. unterminierte. 
Leider geht er kaum darauf ein, dass die 
meisten Imperien des 19. Jhs. selbst zu 
Förderern des Nationalismus im Zent-
rum der Imperien wurden, ein spannen-
des Forschungsfeld, auf dem immer noch 
viel Arbeit zu tun bleibt. Stattdessen be-
lebt er, zumindest in Ansätzen, die doch 
etwas müde gewordene Unterscheidung 
zwischen „civic“ und „ethnic nationalism“ 
wieder, was in den Augen des Rezensenten 
nicht ganz zu überzeugen vermag. 
Im vierten Kapitel geht es um die globale 
Ausweitung des Nationalismus im Kontext 
der Dekolonisierung. In der Debatte um 
die Frage, ob der Nationalismus ein letzt-
endlich europäisches Konzept ist, das sich 
über die europäischen Imperien weltweit 
verbreitete, oder ob Nationen und Nati-
onalismus unabhängig voneinander welt-
weit auftauchten, tendiert Bieber zu der 
Auffassung, dass oftmals europäische For-
men des Nationalismus durch antikoloni-
ale nationalistische Bewegungen appropri-
iert und transformiert wurden, z.T. unter 
Zuhilfenahme von regionalen Konzepten 
und Ideen zu Nation und Nationalismus. 
Überzeugend ist seine Darstellung, wie 
der Kolonialismus und die ihn begleitende 
zunehmende Globalisierung von Handel 
und Kommunikation, unterschiedliche, 
z.T. miteinander in Wettbewerb tretende 
Nationalismen generierte. Dabei betont 
der Autor, dass bis heute viele postkolo-
niale Nationen damit zu kämpfen haben, 
dass die Kolonialmächte die Grenzen der 
Kolonien und damit oft auch der postko-
lonialen Nationalstaaten willkürlich und 
ohne Aufmerksamkeit auf vorkoloniale 
ethnische und politische Identitäten gezo-
gen haben.
Rezensionen | Reviews | 499
Im fünften Kapitel steht der Nationalstaat 
im Mittelpunkt der Analyse. Hier weitge-
hend John Breuilly folgend, sieht Bieber 
in ihm einen wesentlichen Treiber des 
Nationalismus, der eben für die National-
staatsbildung eine entscheidende Bedeu-
tung hatte. Der „banale Nationalismus“ 
(Michael Billig) des Alltags mit seinen 
vielfältigen Symbolen, Traditionen und 
Praktiken prägte die unterschiedlichen so-
zialen Gruppen und trug ganz wesentlich 
zum gesellschaftlichen Zusammenhalt bei. 
Besonders gut gelingt es Bieber in diesem 
Kapitel, die Intersektionalität der nationa-
len Identität mit einer Reihe von anderen 
Identitätskonstruktionen nachzuzeichnen, 
unter denen Geschlecht, Religion, Klasse 
und Ethnizität die Bedeutendsten waren.
Das sechste Kapitel widmet sich dem 
Verhältnis von ethnischen Konflikten 
und Nationalismus. Diversität war und 
ist eine der großen Herausforderungen 
für die Nationalstaatsbildung. Dabei, so 
Bieber, war es immer wieder gerade die 
Konstruktion von ethnischen Identitäten 
und die Versuche, selbige in Einklang zu 
bringen mit nationalen Identitäten, die zu 
Gewalt führten. Formen wirtschaftlicher 
Ungleichheit, der Kampf um Ressourcen 
innerhalb und zwischen Nationalstaaten 
und eine ganze Reihe von soziodemogra-
fischen Faktoren wurden oftmals ethnisch-
identitär aufgeladen, wobei Bieber sehr 
differenziert und abwägend darauf schaut, 
inwiefern diese Aufladungen von unten 
über nationalistische Graswurzelbewegun-
gen erfolgte oder inwiefern sie von oben, 
also von politischen, sozialen, kulturellen 
und wirtschaftlichen Eliten instrumenta-
lisiert wurden, um Mobilisierungen von 
unten zu generieren. 
Das siebte Kapitel bringt die Geschichte 
des Nationalismus in die Gegenwart und 
fokussiert sich auf den Stellenwert der 
Migration in Debatten über nationale 
Identität – sowohl in Gesellschaften mit 
einem starken Selbstverständnis als Mig-
rationsgesellschaften als auch solchen, die 
sich eher als ethnisch homogen definieren. 
Wie im sechsten Kapitel stehen auch hier 
Fragen von Diversität im Mittelpunkt 
der Diskussion. Wie Nationalstaaten und 
nationalistische Bewegungen mit Min-
derheiten und Einwanderern umgehen, 
unterscheidet sich im weltweiten Vergleich 
erheblich, und es ist nicht ganz nachzu-
vollziehen, warum Bieber sich hier auf die 
Alternativen liberale und multikulturelle 
Zugänge zu Einwanderung konzentriert, 
wenn doch ganz viele Nationalstaaten il-
liberale und homogenisierende Zugänge 
bevorzugen. 
Das achte Kapitel beschäftigt sich mit den 
populistischen Nationalismen der letzten 
Jahrzehnte, die in vielen gegenwärtigen 
Gesellschaften auf der Welt hochaktuell 
sind. Bieber diskutiert hier wiederum sehr 
kenntnisreich sowohl die wirtschaftlichen 
als auch die kulturellen Gründe für die 
Entstehung dieser populistischen Natio-
nalismen und ihre Verbindung zu Globali-
sierungsdiskursen und den neuen sozialen 
Medien.
Etwas kurz geraten ist das letzte Kapitel 
des hier anzuzeigenden Bandes, das sich 
mit den zentralen Texten zur Geschichte 
des Nationalismus auseinandersetzt und 
ein besonderes Augenmerk hat auf Texte, 
die zu wichtigen Debatten rund um das 
Phänomen Nationalismus beigetragen 
haben. Hier hätte man einen wesentlich 
fundierteren Literaturbericht erwarten 
können.
500 | Rezensionen | Reviews
Insgesamt kann man den Band als globale 
Einführung in die Geschichte des moder-
nen Nationalismus durchaus empfehlen, 
auch wenn sicher viele Leser nicht mit 
allen Einschätzungen des Autors d’accord 
sein werden. Dazu ist eben die Geschichte 
des Nationalismus bis heute viel zu kont-
rovers und spannungsreich diskutiert wor-
den, was aber nach wie vor den Reiz dieses 
Forschungsfeldes ausmacht.
Fabian Scheidler: The End of the 
Megamachine: A Brief History of 
a Failing Civilization, Winchester/
Washington: Zero Books, 2020,  
427 pp.
Reviewed by 
Felipe Fernández-Armesto,  
Notre Dame
Maybe Karl Marx was right, after all. De-
fects as a prophet undermined confidence 
in his critique of capitalism. When the 
revolutions he predicted failed to occur in 
highly industrialized economies, it looked 
for a while as if capitalism’s capacity for 
self-correction was as great as its apolo-
gists claimed. Bosses heeded dangers, re-
strained exploitation, and boosted wages 
to increase their own markets. After the 
first decade or so of the twentieth century, 
living standards began to converge. Em-
bourgeoisement of proletarians and prole-
tarization of bourgeois eased class conflict. 
Social democratic modifications of capital-
ism made the system easier to live with. 
Revolution receded because, as William 
Cobbett said, you cannot “agitate a fellow 
with a full stomach”.[1]
In the last 40 years or so, however, ex-
pectations of indefinite social peace have 
weakened. Wealth gaps have widened to 
levels unexperienced since before the First 
World War. Greed has become “good”. 
As Thomas Piketty shows, the decades of 
convergence in the twentieth century were 
the result not of the benevolence of the 
master class but of war, driving up wages 
and increasing regulation.[2] Meanwhile, 
economic growth, which provides the 
modern equivalent of bread and circuses, 
has come to look unsustainable, as madcap 
consumption threatens resources, pollutes 
the planet, and aggravates climate change. 
Problems of controlling climate and dis-
ease seem to demand more regulation of 
what Étienne Girard calls “spiralling de-
sire”.[3]
Fabian Scheidler is among writers who 
have described this new crisis of capital-
ism with minatory glee. Part of his object 
is to denounce a “system” he deems “crazy” 
and “sick” (p. 3); a further part, less con-
sistently foregrounded, is to hear “voices 
drowned by the megaphone of power” (p. 
4). He warns that current practices con-
demn the world to conflict and ecological 
disaster (p. 6). So far, so familiar.
Less convincing are his attempts to place 
current problems in a millennia-long con-
text and, more particularly, to blame Eu-
ropean expansion for current woes. Em-
pire bashing is a popular sport but, like 
others (say bear baiting or cock fighting), 
lacks both subtlety and moral authority. 
Empires, Scheidler avers, have been “as-
sociated with expulsion, impoverishment, 


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Alexander E. Davis / Vineet Thakur / Peter Vale: The Imperial Discipline: Race and the Founding of International Relations, London: Pluto Press, 2020, 197 pp.

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Jörg Goldberg: Ein neuer Kapitalismus. Grundlagen historischer Kapitalismusanalyse, Köln: Papyrossa, 2021, 199 pp.

The Debate on Social Cohesion and Transitional Justice in Ethiopia: An Interview

Equilibrium

Florian Bieber: Debating Nationalism. The Global Spread of Nations, London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020, 246 S.

2,370

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