Securing the Global Economy: G8 Global Governance for a Post-Crisis World

This new volume on the G8 explores how and why the G8 and other institutions of global governance have dealt with the increasingly comprehensive and complex economic-security connection in recent years. These connections are explored from an interdisciplinary perspective, with economists, political scientists and those in the policy world bringing their insights to bear. Moreover, it explores this economic-security connection from a constitutional or institutional perspective, captured by the German concept of Ordnungspolitik. In the classical liberal spirit of Adam Smith and David Hume and, more recently, of F.A. Hayek, Walter Eucken, Cordell Hull and Jan Tumlir, it is concerned with the organizing principles of a liberal international economic order and the framework of rules that enables it to survive and flourish. Security issues, national trade policies, the multilateral trade system and the detailed technical issues they subsume are analysed from this higher vantage point. This is thus a work about global governance as a whole and at its core, rather than a problem solving manual for a few of the issues now at centre-stage. Furthermore, flowing from the first two, it applies this larger vision to the current G8 and global economic-security agenda to generate a set of policy recommendations about how the global community, through and outside the G8, can better cope with the complex interconnected challenges it now confronts. Such an exercise yields policy alternatives and recommendations more innovative and ambitious than those that dominate the current policy discourse. But such recommendations are arguably more appropriate to address the new and serious challenges the world now confronts. This volume thus identifies the steps necessary to solve these problems and the political reality as observed in the Summit Declarations.