Chapter 2 defines leadership and outlines a leadership approach to studying China’s politics and economy, centered on the top-ranked individuals in public-sector organizations. It explains how the autonomy of Chinese public-sector leaders originates from multiple sources: the discretion built into the CCP’s cadre management system, guanxi (关系) with superiors and allies, decentralization of authority in the Chinese bureaucracy, and policy ambiguity and uncertainty. It critically reviews recent studies of China’s politics and economy to uncover the importance and influence of leadership. It concludes by discussing how a leadership approach helps to account for divergence, inaction, and subversion in reform outcomes.

Chapter 6 looks at political responses to the MENA migration to Europe from 2011, the most harshly exclusionary case in my study. The migration mixed asylum seekers fleeing wars in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan, with labor migrants from other MENA states. The chapter tracks Europe’s progression from initially cautious receptiveness of asylum seekers to policies of exclusion of MENA migrants from the continent. It shows that the growing numbers, migrant “mix,” and terrorist attacks by (mostly non-migrant) Islamic extremists in Europe combined to undermine need-based deservingness, empower populist parties and feed xenophobic media. The chapter focuses on the EU’s turn to militarized securitization of its land and sea borders and ‘externalization of borders’ to Turkey and Libya, policies that ended the migration surge by indiscriminate physical exclusion of migrants and asylum seekers. Case studies show the varied effects of and responses to the migration in the five European cases and in Russia, which received much smaller numbers. Responses to the MENA migration brought international migration to the core of Europe’s politics, entrenched populist parties, and showed the failure of the Geneva Convention asylum system in the 21st century.

With the start of the pandemic in 2020, central banks re-deployed unconventional policy tools used for the Global Financial Crisis but also added new and even less conventional ones. The steps they took followed a textbook description of a risk management approach to monetary policy when operating close to the effective lower bound on interest rates.[1] This involved loosening policy aggressively and working with many different instruments simultaneously to maximise policy impact. Judging from the aftermath, they were successful. They steered the economy through a crisis and avoided a depression. One could argue that the episode has shown that monetary policy can be effective also in a low interest rate environment if central banks are willing and able to deploy multiple measures with scale and speed. This suggests that central banks are well equipped for the future, irrespective of the path of interest rates.

This chapter introduces cases motivating the book and presents a three-step argument about the effects of forced migration on societal cooperation, state capacity, and economic development. It reviews evidence from post-WWII displacement in Poland and West Germany, discusses the applicability of the findings to other cases, and highlights the main contributions of the book.

For most of the 20th century and earlier, central banks went about their business without ever feeling the need to communicate what they were doing to the financial markets or the general public. Then from around 1990 onwards, central banks became ever more transparent, trying to make clear to the markets and the public what they were doing and why. The purpose of this chapter is to understand why this change came about and how successful it has been.

Chapter 3 explores how European institutions have (re)imagined consumption, and consumers, as part of the changing imaginaries of prosperity. It does so by exploring systematically the discursive shifts behind the European Union’s consumer policies over the past fifty years, identifying how the changing imaginaries of economy, government, law, politics and nature have produced different imaginaries of consumers and consumption. After the long arc of the dominance of neoliberal imaginaries of prosperity and consumption, we have witnessed more recently a gradual shift in the background understanding of political economy. The emergent imaginary of prosperity shares some elements with the previous ‘welfare state’ imaginaries of prosperity and consumption, such as the return of the language of ‘protection’. But it also incorporates entirely new preoccupations such as repair, longevity, maintenance, circularity, and sharing, all the while embracing a more expanded, ‘holistic’ understanding of consumer interests.

Chapter 5 turns to westward labor migration from the EU’s newly acceded Central and East European (CEE) states to the EU15 from 2004. Despite the EU’s promise full social inclusion, the migration followed an exclusionary cycle. Focusing on Britain, the chapter shows how migrants’ EU-mandated free entry and social rights provoked a welfare nationalist backlash that was amplified by the tabloid press and reflected in opinion polls and in growing support for the populist, anti-immigrant United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP). Relying on government documents, the chapter shows how Britain’s social security bureaucracy progressively rescinded CEE labor migrants’ social rights while the government adopted exclusionary migration reforms, culminating in the 2016 Brexit vote that ended CEE migrants’ entry rights. The Brexit Settlement Scheme preserved residence rights for some on ethnically and economically discriminatory bases. Comparative case studies of CEE migration to Germany, Sweden, and Italy show that each followed the British model ‘part of the way,’ adopting more selective exclusionary policies that discriminated the poorer, younger and less-skilled. The conclusion explains why the EU failed in the effort to extend its egalitarian, inclusionary, European citizenship project eastward.