Geopolitics and Neoliberalism: US Power and the Limits of European Autonomy

Abstract

The first decade of the twenty-first century has not been kind to the American superpower. The meltdown in US credit markets resulting from the bursting of the housing bubble in the fall of 2007 has laid the global financial system ‘wide open to catastrophic failure’ (Financial Times, 2008). A disastrous military campaign in Iraq, a bloody and inconclusive holding action in Afghanistan, and growing threats to the super-currency status of the dollar have given rise to predictions of ‘terminal decline’ (Arrighi, 2005) and celebrations of a European counter-hegemonic project in defence of the European social model (Habermas and Derrida, 2003; Kupchan, 2002; Haseler, 2004; Reid, 2004; Judt, 2005; Leonard, 2005; McCormick, 2007). The ‘project for a new American century’ seems to have ended almost before it was supposed to have begun.