GLOBALISTS: THE END OF EMPIRES AND THE BIRTH OF NEOLIBERALISM

HANNO LOEWY and QUINN SLOBODIAN in dialogue

GLOBALISTS: THE END OF EMPIRES AND THE BIRTH OF NEOLIBERALISM

In his book Globalists: The End of Empires and the Birth of Neoliberalism, which will be published in German in November, Quinn Slobodian takes a new, critical look at the history of free trade and neoliberal globalisation - and at the question of how globalisation and borders are connected. At the centre of this is a group of economists around Friedrich von Hayek and Wilhelm Röpke - and the birth of neoliberalism from the collapse of the Habsburg Empire. Driven by the fear that national mass democracies could disrupt the smooth functioning of the global economy through tariffs or capital controls, their vision was to legalise and thus protect the market on a global level. Slobodian accompanies his protagonists through the 20th century. He shows how they reacted to new challenges - decolonisation, for example, or European integration - and conquered the power of interpretation from an outsider position.

Quinn Slobodian, born 1978 in Alberta, Canada), Associate Professor in the Department of History at Wellesley College. His research focuses on German history, social movements and the relationship between industrialised countries and the global South. He is the author of Foreign Front: Third World Politics in Sixties West Germany (2012) and the editor of Comrades of Colour: East Germany in the Cold War World (2015).

Hanno Loewy, born in Frankfurt/Main in 1961, literary and media scholar, publicist and director of the Jewish Museum Hohenems, where the exhibition Sag Schibbolet! Of Visible and Invisible Borders was on display until March 2019.

The event will be held in English and in cooperation with the Suhrkamp Publishers Berlin instead.

Quinn Slobodians
Globalists. The end of empires and the birth of neoliberalism
Suhrkamp Verlag, November 2019 (ISBN: 978-3-518-42903-7).