Europe is living its Weimar moment. The historic task of the European Union (EU) today, the book argues, is to articulate and institute a new imaginary of prosperity. Imaginaries of prosperity integrate societies around the shared pursuit of a prosperous future, while rendering “political-economic” questions the main preoccupation of politics. The new imaginary of prosperity today has to be both credible (able to provide answers to contemporary challenges) and appealing (conjuring a world in which people want to live). It has to include not only an alternative macroeconomic framework (a different role for tax, public spending, or welfare provision) but also a different set of microeconomic institutions (a new role for the corporation, technology, industry, finance, and consumption). It is exactly in this latter space that the EU has undertaken the first important steps towards reimagining prosperity. The book analyses several policy fields, showing that the EU has already made significant efforts to foster more caring consumption, circular products and technologies, sustainable industry, and fairer corporate activity. But the EU has to go further and faster – if it intends to respond effectively to the soaring problems, while halting another Europe’s slide into tribalism.

This chapter explores the relationship between natives and migrants in the territory transferred from Germany to Poland in 1945 using contemporaries’ memoirs. It shows that migration status and region of origin served as salient identity markers, structuring interpersonal relations and shaping collective action in the newly formed communities. Statistical analysis is used to demonstrate that indigenous villages and villages populated by a more homogeneous migrant population were more successful in organizing volunteer fire brigades than villages populated by migrants from different regions.

Chapter 6 discusses the attempts of the European institutions, especially the European Commission and the European Parliament, to change the way in which corporations are structured and operate. This chapter tracks the European Commission’s initial ambitions to transform corporations by simultaneously improving their administrative capacity (due diligence) and reforming certain corporate fundamentals (civil liability and the remuneration of directors). After pushback by its own internal body, the Regulatory Scrutiny Board, the Commission retreated from its more transformative plans, narrowing its focus mostly to due diligence. At the time of writing, however, even the resulting less ambitious proposal was facing intense (and to an extent even unexpected) resistance. Despite the drawbacks, there may be other avenues for the EU to transform corporations. In the last section, I discuss the possibilities for engaging more directly with the fundamentals of corporate activity – by legally facilitating those organisations consciously founded on different principles (ownership and governance), such as social enterprises, which are more distributive and inclusive by design.

Chapter 3 surveys enterprise reforms in China since the late 1970s to highlight evolving constraints and space for leadership in SOEs. It examines five periods: emergence and decline of “dual track” economic reform (1978–91), establishment of a socialist market economy (1992–94), retrenchment of state ownership in the “commanding heights” (1995–2001), internationalization and consolidation of the state sector (2002–12), and combination of limited economic liberalization with increased political control (2013 to present). Since the late 1970s, SOE leaders have transitioned from managing production to determining how to restructure their firms, managing state-owned capital, and expanding in both domestic and international markets. Although the overall trend has been toward expanded space for leadership, the current Xi Jinping administration has tightened political and commercial control.

This chapter first describes the dependent variable – agrarian elites’ strategies of political influence – and its three categories (nonelectoral, party-building, and candidate-centered) in terms of their reliability and costs. Then, it introduces a new theory to explain the variation in agrarian elites’ strategies of political influence under democracy. It highlights the role of two independent variables – perception of an existential threat and intragroup fragmentation – to explain when and how agrarian elites will organize in the electoral arena. It argues that agrarian elites will enter the electoral arena only when they perceive an existential threat. In turn, landowners’ level of intragroup fragmentation conditions the way they organize their electoral representation. Where landed elites are cohesive, they will engage in party-building. In contrast, highly fragmented elites will prefer a nonpartisan, candidate-centered strategy of representation, supporting individual like-minded politicians across partisan lines. Lastly, the chapter assesses three main alternative explanations, previous history of electoral organization, electoral rules, and the relevance of congress as a policymaking arena.

This chapter presents a case of nonelectoral strategies of political influence by agrarian elites in Argentina and the limitations of such strategies. Until 2008, Argentine landowners influenced politics through lobbying and, when this failed, through protests. The chapter presents evidence of how Argentine agrarian elites did not invest in electoral representation prior to 2008 because they did not experience an existential threat. It also shows how landowners decided to enter the electoral arena with the rise of an existential threat in the form of confiscatory taxes in 2008. Given Argentine agrarian elites fragmentation, they deployed a candidate-centered strategy, sponsoring the candidacies of a dozen agricultural producers for Congress under diverse party affiliations. However, institutional features and ideological differences among producers’ associations blunted the effectiveness of the strategy and led to its abandonment. Later on, with the consolidation of Propuesta Republicana (PRO) as a viable electoral alternative and the continuity of hostile polices, part of the Argentine agrarian elite has engaged in party-building. However, economic cleavages within Argentine agricultural producers continue to undermine the kind of sector-wide party-building effort that we saw in Chile during the democratic transition.

This chapter examines the generalizability of the book’s main argument. It synthesizes the conclusions of other studies on the consequences of three similar episodes of forced migration in the twentieth century: the Greek-Turkish population exchange, the Partition of India, and the repatriation of Pied-Noirs to France. It then considers ways in which the argument can be extended to other cases of forced and voluntary migration.

I offer an overview and analysis of charitable giving in Kuwait, Qatar, Oman and Saudi Arabia, and explore its linkages to politics. I study giving at home and abroad, by governments, non-governmental organizations, ruling elites, and private actors, and doctrinally connected giving. I examine how these entities give, to whom they give and why they give as they do. I highlight several key findings: First, in three of the four countries, the most active and best endowed foundations have been created by (members of) ruling families or prominent politico-religious associations; second, private giving tends to concentrate on family, tribe, ethnic community; third, religious precepts are routinely modified to appease a particular social category; fourth, with few exceptions, migrant workers are excluded from access to charity. These findings suggest that charitable giving, while intrinsic to the practice of Islam, may be instrumentalized to advance secular interests: 1) gather information about society, 2) assert relationships of authority and control, 3) shore up allegiance (to a ruler and/or an ideology), 4) consolidate a definition of community.

Chapter 8 concludes the book with a study of Ukrainian refugees’ migration to Europe after Russia’s brutal attack on their country in February 2022. It shows that publics and elites across Europe’s political spectrum sustained extraordinary levels of support for the refugees’ inclusion, and deploys the book’s analytical framework to explain why. The EU’s Temporary Protection Directive (TPD) provided Ukrainian citizens with immediate and collective protection and full social rights in EU member states. Public opinion data and political parties’ (including populists’) programs are used to account for positive reception of the refugees, based on their multiple sources of deservingness. Relying on UNHCR, OECD, and other studies of refugees’ reported experiences the chapter assesses progress in their social inclusion as well as deficiencies. It considers welfare nationalist grievances that have arisen in Europe and shows that governments have responded to them as ‘normal politics’ rather than by scapegoating the refugees. The chapter ends by comparing European responses to the MENA and Ukrainian refugee migrations, and externalization agreements to address the continuing problem of migration to Europe from MENA and other third countries.

India has been rapidly changing since globalisation, albeit not uniformly. In 2022, India has been found to be the most unequal country in the world (Chancel et al., 2022). This makes it critical to understand where the inequality came from: is it new or structural or something else? Several characterisations have been attributed to India's transformation since globalisation; some talk about rapid urbanization, fast growth with incoming global investments, the IT boom, and an expanding middle class, while another set of scholars highlight aspects such as the agrarian crises, farmers’ suicides, food insecurity, and corruption. The point, however, is to comprehend how each version of this story has a saga of unequal distribution within it, whether in cities or villages. India being the most unequal country in a Marxian term means certain classes are accumulating and others are not even able to reproduce themselves. This makes it even more crucial to look at ‘capital’, and how it is accumulating, which spreads across the urban and rural. This book offers an in-depth analysis of diversification and various sources of accumulation accessed by the agrarian proprietary class, and a discussion on the other two proprietary classes, the petty bourgeoisie and the capitalist. By disaggregating the sources along fractions of the agrarian proprietary class, it shows how the class adopted new means within agriculture and outside agriculture, to further accumulation during the 2004–2014 policy regime. The policies under scrutiny are agricultural and those related to rural population in general, such as Panchayati Raj institutions (PRIs), land acquisition and affirmative action in employment. The latter may serve caste groups but in addition contribute to consolidating class structure. What these policies demonstrate is the key role played by the state in the globalisation era, thereby maintaining a stable political settlement with the three proprietary classes. The state and the nature of the state are important questions raised in this book, thus ‘bringing the state back in’, as Skocpol (2010) once argued. This book's third contribution is that it brings an understanding of classes that does not begin from being informed by abstract categories but rather begins with the empirical observations that guide the formulation of the conceptual classes and fractions. Skocpol finds neo-Marxism's conceptualisation of state very abstract, therefore hard to be applied, and hence starting from the empirical to the abstract following a methodology of ‘thick description’ (Geertz 1973) is an attempt to address that limitation.

Looking backward, we will document the communication successes of the Bank’s Monetary Policy Committee, and highlight where things could have been better. Turning to the future, we shall build on this last 25 years and try to suggest the ways communication needs to evolve further.

Overview

This chapter addresses three primary concerns. First, what kind of political settlement is operating in the newly formed state of Chhattisgarh. Second, what has been the impact of (class) interest on the state apparatus with respect to agricultural policies. Third, in the era of liberalisation, has the market's free play caused a retreat of the state from the sector of agriculture? Additionally, with regard to the consequences of prevailing agricultural policies, if the existing three proprietary classes have transformed themselves, remained unaffected, or have been replaced by new classes since the formation of the state. Land acquisition policy and the political economy around it have been addressed as well. Simultaneously, the implications of these policies on the different fractions of rich farmers and their means of accumulation alongside the other two dominant proprietary classes – industrial capitalist and petty bourgeoisie – have been developed.

Chhattisgarh was created under the Madhya Pradesh Reorganisation Act, 2000. Its creation was more a decision of the national political parties than having been driven by the struggle for regional autonomy under the Chhattisgarh Mukti Morcha (Berthet and Kumar, 2011; Tillin, 2013). The popular story is that the high proportion of tribal (adivasi) population, who had a claim to a separate state, was the basis for the formation of the state. The new state would make things favourable for the tribal population, who would then be able to assert themselves more in the new political entity; this would turn development in their favour. However, arguably, this was not the only reason for the new state formation. The concentration of natural resources fostered the need to make the region into a political entity, so as to facilitate smoother economic access to the resources (Berthet and Kumar, 2011). The state has registered high incidence of food insecurity and low human development. What really has happened since to the political economy unfolds in the following sections.

Geographically, Chhattisgarh is divided into hills in the north and south and plains in the centre. The total population of the state is 26 million (approx.) as per the 2011 census. Scheduled Tribes, who form one-third of the population, inhabit the hills. The Scheduled Castes (11.61 per cent) and other communities, including the Other Backward Classes, form the remaining 55 per cent of the population and live in the central plains.

I build upon the earlier discussion – in Chapter 3 – of internal forms of social "tiering" and exclusion to further interrogate the politics of belonging in Gulf monarchies, this time through the employment of foreign labor. I disentangle the ways in which foreign labor plays a role in the shaping and consolidation of the national community, and I distinguish among European "expats," non-GCC Arabs, Asian and African laborers. I argue that labor from the three different categories play similar but also distinct roles in the delineation of national community: While they are differentially incorporated in ways that protect the "nation" and appease the citizen-subject, varying degrees of marginality reflect Gulf society’s perceptions or aspirations of the difference between itself and "the other(s)." Additionally, I examine some of the peculiarities of the importation, organization and incorporation of foreign labor, connect them to the normative tradition, and consider how they serve the ruler’s objective to manage and control society.

This chapter describes how the relationship between government debt management and monetary policy has evolved since the late twentieth century. When the Bank’s Monetary Policy Committee was established in 1997, the relationship was distant, but after the Global Financial Crisis, with the advent of quantitative easing, the relationship became a very close one, in which debt management objectives have been subordinated to monetary policy