This chapter illustrates how a potential for goods substitution may foment a strategy of playing the big powers against one another. Client states are using the threat of exit to gain leverage, and to renegotiate deals. There are signs of decline of US hegemony in the North Atlantic, and an increased potential for goods substitution by Russia and China. However, goods substitution has not been initiated by Russia and China offering what the USA or the West have ceased to offer. Rather, alternative goods provision has been sought out from below, by polities with complex post-colonial and hegemonic relationships with a variety of states. These polities are experimenting with new ways of playing the USA, Russia and China against each other. Greenland, Iceland and the Faroes exploit their strategic positions to push great powers to compete in offering a variety of public and private goods. Client states may be using the threat of substitution as strategic leverage, which drive the hegemon to renegotiate. Client leverage will be at the highest when the client can easily switch goods provider, but where the hegemon cannot easily find an alternative client.

China has begun to take a more active and assertive role in international public goods provision and the results of this are more varied than the duality of revisionism versus status quo orientations would have it. As a goods supplier, China is increasingly identifying gaps in the existing international order and filling them without necessarily challenging the USA directly. In this chapter, Julia Bader shows how China’s Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) became a successful example of asset substitution. The AIIB was initiated as a counter-hegemonic attempt, targeted at the architecture of international finance and at US dominance therein. Yet, as ever more European democracies somewhat unexpectedly joined the Bank – against the wishes of the USA – the institution gradually transformed into an integrated part of the existing international financial architecture. The case of the AIIB illustrates how opportunistic hedging and uncoordinated herding by third states may inadvertently undermine the existing order. Bader shows how the framework of international goods provision, involving producers and consumers alike, directs our attention to non-hegemonic actors as crucial but overlooked players.

In this concluding chapter, Ole Jacob Sending and Iver B. Neumann sum up the volume’s contribution to the discipline of international relations and the study of international order, and suggest how the goods substitution framework may be extended in future research. Moving beyond a contractual view of goods substitution, they emphasize how identity could play a central role in goods ecologies, particularly in instances where a goods recipient uses its own resources to coproduce the goods with the provider as a means of gaining recognition and relevance. In turn, the quality and perceptions of goods and assets are also likely to play a part in a global goods ecology.

Financial crises are widely perceived to be the reason monetary rules cannot work. The extraordinary challenges posed by crises require policymakers to act discretionarily. We show that this argument is not only wrong but backward: It is more important than ever to have true rules for monetary policy, which actually bind, to cope with financial crises. We show how the Fed failed to respond appropriately to the 2007–2008 crisis. Contrary to the then chairman Bernanke’s public statements, the Fed did not behave as an orthodox lender of last resort. Instead, it experimented with dubious policies that further entrenched moral hazard in the financial system. We criticize these policies, as well as an approach to economics, which we call “triage economics,” that mistakenly supposes the basic rules of price theory provided no guidance in crafting policy responses to crises. A rules-based approach to monetary policy is thus consistent with extreme market turbulence. In fact, rules are how such turbulence is pacified.

In this chapter, Cooley and Nexon argue that instead of operating with a continuum from “revisionist” to “status quo” powers, we should rather focus on the broader strategic environment in which power political maneuvers take place. This is an international goods ecology, comprising types of goods and their distribution. The key advantage of studying power politics as operating within such an asset ecology is how order itself then becomes something different from polarity or hegemony. This makes it possible to distinguish between challenges to the power position of the hegemon and challenges to the architecture of the international order itself. Cooley and Nexon therefore develop an alternate typology of how international orders are challenged to show how acts of substitution are themselves potentially order transforming. They argue that US-led hegemonic order may be undermined before any overt challenge to the power position of the United States emerges. The main benefit of studying the logic of asset substitution is that it gives us a tool to assess how seemingly unimportant acts of substitution, bit by bit and regardless of a lack of revisionist intent, can shape and transform the international order.

In this chapter, we focus on the idea of the rule of law in the classical liberal tradition. The rule of law is a basic jurisprudential norm that undergirds liberal democracies. We show that discretionary central banking is inconsistent with the rule of law. Discretionary central banking fails the test of generality: It benefits special interests, but not the public as a whole. Also, discretionary banking fails the test of predictability: It does not create an environment conducive to reliable public expectations of future policy. For these reasons, it is unlikely that discretionary central banking can be reconciled with self-governance. We reaffirm the imperative of liberal democracy, as well as uncovering monetary institutions that are compatible with liberal democracy. Until we do so, we fail to meet the basic challenge of self-governance.

The excitement of attending a first football match is ingrained in the memory of many fans. They can recall the details of the journey to the ground, who they were with, the merchandise and food being sold outside and the feeling they had on entering the ground for the first time. They can remember the match itself, the emotional involvement of the other spectators around them, the singing and the chanting. I recall catching the number 53 bus from Plumstead Common at the age of six with my parents, walking with the crowds through Maryon Park and standing on the huge East Terrace at The Valley, the home of Charlton Athletic.

For many fans, that first experience begins a lifelong commitment that becomes an important part of their identity. Going to a match is not simply a release from the pressures of everyday life, important though that is, it also represents an opportunity to connect with an extended football family. This may include generations of the same family and old school friends. However, it may also involve “football friends” with whom the only contact is at the game, for a drink beforehand or afterwards. I frequently make the two-hour journey to attend Charlton home games to meet football friends in my birthplace of Greenwich for brunch and a pre-match pint.

Even if after moving away from the club's location, a fan's continuing support for their team can be a means of maintaining and reviving their connection with an area familiar to them. Topophilia, a love of place, and the cultural identity associated with a place, can be a powerful force. Of course, in some ways this is a nostalgic and sentimental interpretation, or at least a constructed version of the experience of football. Many fans never visit the ground of the team they support and simply follow their progress on television and social media. Football is now a global game with supporters of leading teams located all over the world. Inevitably this leads to a tension between a club as a global business, perhaps with foreign owners, and the idea of a club as an expression and embodiment of a particular community.

The most consequential foundational contribution of the Ostromian research program to the field of public administration is the effort to introduce the apparatus of modern “political economy” to the core of the field. The other important contributions to the theories of governance and public administration are, in one way or another, based on, or derived from, that. Following the evolution of public administration as a field, and its relationship with economics since its inception in Woodrow Wilson's effort to institutionalize the new discipline, one realizes that the Ostromian perspective was a turning point. The Ostroms pushed for a change of paradigm, as the main advocates in the field of public administration of the public choice revolution fuelled by scholars such as James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock in the 1960s.

Public administration and political economy developed as two distinctive domains and traditions. Yet, with the burst of the public choice movement in the academic arena in the 1960s, a convergence takes place. Elinor and Vincent Ostrom's contributions emerge as uniquely important in this respect because the two Bloomington scholars were the unquestionable architects of the intellectual junction point. Working in both traditions – public administration and public choice – they created an entire research program aiming at their integration (Aligica 2015; Aligica & Boettke 2009). The attempt to promote public choice as the theoretical foundations in public administration, and public administration as the applied domain of public choice is undoubtedly a major contribution of the Ostroms to both the foundational and the applied social sciences in the twentieth century.

By the beginning of the 1970s Vincent Ostrom recognized an acute “intellectual crisis of public administration”, which created the conditions for a potential new start and a novel approach. The Ostroms’ alternative was to use the new theory of public choice as the foundational theoretical framework for public administration:

In November 2020 the chairman of the EFL, Rick Parry, said that partnerships with betting companies were worth L40 million and an immediate ban would be “potentially catastrophic” (Off the Pitch 2020). His statement emphasizes just how reliant football clubs have become on their financial relationships with betting companies, a relationship that has attracted increasing criticism from advocacy groups and the media and attention from government.

An activity that at one time was seen as a source of innocent pleasure, betting is now recognized as potentially harmful and addictive. Like smoking, alcohol addiction and sugar, betting has become the focus of increased government regulation on its marketing, advertising and tax in recognition of the social harm it can cause (Grant 2018: 52–6). Industries that face such criticism often try to head off direct government intervention by trying to make a case for self-regulation and voluntary levies based on partnership with government. Responsibility for reducing harm, they argue, should rest with the individual addict rather than the industry or society more generally.

The betting industry's political vulnerability was apparent with the success of the campaign against fixed odds betting terminals (FOBTs). Campaigners against them described them as the “crack cocaine” of gambling, arguing that the quick-fire plays and the high stakes involved encourage customers to chase losses. The gambling industry argued that use of FOBTs could be a symptom rather than a cause of problem gambling. The government secured substantial tax revenues from the machines while the industry claimed restrictions on the machines would result in the closure of betting shops. Despite the efforts of the industry, the advocacy campaign was successful and the maximum stake was reduced to L2 (Grant 2018: 56–60).

There has been a long relationship between football and betting. At one time the football “pools” were a significant part of people's lives in the UK. “As late as 1998, 34% of all adults were players” (Forrest 1999: 161). Coupons would be carefully filled in seeking to predict draws, later score draws, in the hope of winning a life-changing prize.

On a summer's day in 2008 I was walking around Reykjavik when I heard football chanting. Following the sounds, I located the ground of KR Reykjavik and went in to watch the match. Without knowing a word of Icelandic I was able to understand immediately what was happening in the game and to respond to the local fans around me. Football is a universal language, shared everywhere, and participating in a game whether as a spectator or a player creates mutual understanding.

Football has become a global sport and is subject to the forces of globalization that have shaped the world economy over the last 40 years. The experience of globalization has sparked considerable debate and led to the creation of a variety of theoretical perspectives that seek to explain the phenomenon and understand its effects on the economy and society. Globalization itself is a contested concept, not least because it has been used normatively as well as analytically. Competing definitions of globalization abound and it is important to note that it has a number of dimensions: principally economic, cultural and political. In broad terms, it is a process that reduces the significance of national boundaries as an impediment to the free movement of capital, goods and services and (to a far lesser and more contested extent) of labour. It is a process in which international trade grows faster than national output; foreign direct investment grows faster than national trade; and there is a transformation in response of international financial markets. These trends have been facilitated by advances in communication and digital technology, which Goldblatt (2019: 26) argues “have been the key to the economic globalization of football, multiplying the game's audience many times over, and forging the basis of the phenomenal income it now generates”. However, it is more than a single economic dynamic, or even a set of them, but “a syndrome of changes of social relations that also produce deep tension” (Markovits & Rensman 2010: 27n).

How far football has been globalized is a more complex and nuanced question than it may first appear.