Austerity-related expertise and mainstream economics in particular have been widely blamed for locking in austerity regimes and reproducing austerity policies in European countries and in the EU. Austerity is here understood in the broader sense of social reforms to reduce private sector charges beyond the narrower ‘technocratic’ concern with balanced budgets and ‘sound’ public finance or the reduction of public debt. Austerity politics are designed to reverse the historic development of the expansion of the public sector in general and in the area of social policy and welfare provision in particular. Reducing welfare state benefits would qualify much like cutting public services, for example, because the aim is to overall reduce the level of taxes and social security contributions in spite of clear evidence of fundamental flaws, pathologies and counterproductive impacts of such welfare state retrenchment and resulting redistribution from the bottom to the top (Blyth 2013).

Although a range of economists in the field of social (in)equality, (modern) monetary theory and Post-Keynesianism like Thomas Piketty (2015), Stephanie Kelton (2020) or Steve Keen (2001) have long worked to debunk claims made by neoliberal and neoclassical economists of various schools (supply side economics, public choice, monetarism, ordoliberalism and so on), heterodox positions have been marginal in many countries. German economics has been found to constitute a particularly problematic case due to a strong conservative-neoclassical and neoliberal bias in the German profession (Heise and Thieme 2015; Grimm et al 2018). Botzem and Hesselmann (2018) document the close proximity of neoliberal think tanks and the German Council of Economic Experts (compare also Pühringer 2020). Fricke (2016) observed a reversal of this long-term development following the GFC. But it remains to be seen if this will lead to a change in the institutional sphere of policy consulting. In one way or another, the argument about the German economic field emphasizes asymmetry and bias in favour of austerity.

Opposing claims can be found in the literature on German economic expertise under the labels of corporatism and pluralism. Campbell and Pedersen (2014) introduce the German system of expertise as a classical model of inclusion. Different groups in society in general and capital and labour in particular are considered well represented in policy-related knowledge production.

Austerity, defined broadly as a compound of fiscal consolidation, public sector restructuring and labour market flexibilization, has played a key role in the decades-long hegemony of neoliberalism, and in its subsequent crisis. After a brief period of fiscal stimulus after the Great Financial Crisis of 2007–08, there was an intensification of austerity, albeit with some variety within a common theme (see Whiteside et al 2021). Its effects have influenced experience of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Considered as a ‘solution’ to the financial and economic crisis austerity policies were an abject failure. In a global system experiencing multiple crises austerity had nothing positive to contribute. Its intellectual rationale was subjected to lethal critique (Stiglitz 2011; Blyth 2013; Herndon et al 2013; Krugman 2013;). Yet the national and international economic and political elites, international organizations and national governments remained in lockstep, imposing austerity as a necessary and productive response.

Though clearly not directly responsible for the health crisis that emerged as a result of the spread of the COVID-19 virus in early 2020, some effects of austerity (and of neoliberal globalization more generally) exacerbated the situation. These included diminished public services, a precarious and low-waged labour force in affected sectors such as long-term care, the intrusion of the profit motive into such facilities where returns could be maximized through over-crowding, labour economies involving a just-in-time workforce often working in several facilities and therefore liable to spread the infection, eroded capacity of national governments and diminished industrial capacity where ‘advanced’ industrial societies were unable to supply protective equipment in a timely fashion. Austerity thus contributed to the severity of the pandemic and the lived experience of it for many.

Driven by finance and producing extreme inequality of wealth and income, austerity sustained its own economic crisis for a decade after the GFC and contributed to the multiple other crises the world is experiencing – environmental-ecological, food security, dislocation of peoples and migration, stagnant economies and now health. Compounding all this is the failure of institutions to represent popular will and respond democratically.

On 21–22 February 2019, more than a hundred university and non-government organization-based researchers from across Europe, Canada and Australia gathered in Berlin to participate in the ‘Austerity: Coping Is Not Enough’ conference. The chapters collected in this volume emerge from this international event which was hosted by the German Social Democratic Party's think tank, the FES. The conference itself grew out of a collaboration between FES and Stephen McBride's ‘Austerity and Its Alternatives’ Canadian-based project funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The conference participants sought to move the study of post-2008 crisis austerity forward through both a rigorous diagnosis of actually existing austerity as well as imagining the pathways out of permanent austerity. Among the key questions the conference sought to address were: how do social and economic relations change under conditions of permanent austerity? How do international, national and regional political institutions influence the development of austerity-regimes? What commonalities and differences exist between nations? And which alternatives exist to overcome the status quo of austerity politics? To analyze the causes, connections and effects of this new age of austerity-capitalism, a broad debate that questions the core ideas and dominant paradigms that animated politics, explores political alternatives and develops new and far-reaching perspectives is necessary to move beyond the contemporary stasis of coping. And coping is demonstrably not enough. The project of this book is to contribute to moving on.

In the wake of the 2008 crisis, as the ‘clean-up’ rolled out, critics of market liberalization, globalization and financialization saw their initial expectations dashed. Initial optimism was understandable, encouraged as it was by a rapid revival of the largely dormant ‘institutional legacy of Keynesianism’ (Strange 2012, 121) by governments and central banks, and doing so regardless of partisan hue. Such a coherent and broad response was seen to herald ‘the end of the Reagan-Thatcher counter-revolution’, nothing less than the demise of the era of neoliberalism (Collignon 2008, 8). It was a profoundly erroneous reading of the historical moment. Instead of witnessing the unravelling of a paradigm, it became an abject lesson in the stickiness of an established social order where neoliberalism, post-crisis, remained very nearly entirely intact, has even been solidified (Crouch 2011, 179; Mirowski 2013).

Introduction

The critique of state-centered approaches to international relations and international political economy has resulted in a rapidly growing literature focusing on a variety of “private authorities” in international relations (Cutler et al. 1999). In this literature, arrays of transnational communities are prominent subjects of analysis. Epistemic communities promoting new environmental standards, discourse communities pushing for new public management across borders, and advocacy coalitions shaming the perpetrators of human rights abuses, for example, have been observed and conceptualized in order to shed light on the extent to which dispersed actors from diverse locations can build and maintain crucial links, and develop social identities across borders. In turn, these have been found important for setting political agendas, acquiring a voice in policy implementation processes, policing compliance, and spreading ideologies more generally (Haas 1992a; Keck and Sikkink 1998; Bislev et al. 2002; Djelic 2006). At the same time, it is becoming clear that many of these transnational communities recruit their members among private as well as public constituencies. A study of these communities thus also needs specifically to address the linkages between civil society, business, and the public sphere.

Transnational community research has also contributed to the rise of social constructivist approaches in international relations (Risse 2007). However, given the increasing attention paid to knowledge, ideas, and discourse, it is surprising how little international relations scholarship in general, and transnational community research in particular, have had to say so far about the global rise of neoliberal discourse.