The postwar deconcentration of IG Farben AG shows that the Allied military governments and their German counterparts were anything but united on the extent and form of sovereignty the Federal Republic of Germany should receive. The American plan to divide the corporate enterprise into a large number of individual companies aimed to establish a democratic state independent from the influence of domestic business. By contrast, West German government officials and the business community were convinced that the future sovereignty of the Federal Republic depended on the global competitiveness of large industrial conglomerates. To thwart the American deconcentration plans, they traded off one dimension of sovereignty against the other. Leading members of the West German government accepted delegating the negotiations over the future of IG Farben to business representatives, thereby sharing domestic sovereignty because the delegation promised to maintain a powerful German chemical industry that could support the trade balance of the future West German state. This development contributed to the emergence of a Federal Republic characterized by the close involvement of economic actors in political decision-making. It contained important elements of a post-democratic sovereignty, which is commonly used to describe the development of the late twentieth century.

Critical scholarship often presents corporate social responsibility (CSR) as a reflection or embodiment of neoliberalism. Against this sort of sweeping political characterization we argue that CSR can indeed be considered a liberal concept but that it embodies a “varieties of liberalism.” Building theoretically on the work of Michael Freeden on liberal languages, John Ruggie and Karl Polanyi on embedded forms of liberalism, and Michel Foucault on the distinction between classical liberalism and neoliberalism, we provide a conceptual treatment and mapping of the ideological positions that constitute the bulk of modern scholarly CSR debate. Thus, we distinguish between embedded liberalism, classical liberalism, neoliberalism, and re-embedded liberalism. We develop these four orientations in turn and show how they are engaged in “battles of ideas” over the meaning and scope of corporate responsibilities—and how they all remain relevant for an understanding of contemporary debates and developments in the field of CSR and corporate sustainability.

The rise of China as a genuine world power, economically and militarily, constitutes the gravest challenge faced by the liberal international order constructed in the aftermath of the Great Depression and the Second World War. A major source of strain in the trade relations between China and the other core members of the liberal world trading system is its extensive use of state-owned enterprises as an instrument of general (domestic) economic policy. This paper builds on Ruggie's theory of embedded liberalism and the theory of economic policy to characterize the political and economic difficulties and opportunities in moving toward a new regime for dealing with subsidies. The conclusion sketches some goals such a regime should seek to embody.

In recent years, the volume and intensity of attacks on globalization have been steadily rising. It is frequently argued that the antiglobalization backlash stems from strains that have been placed on the compromise of embedded liberalism. We argue that existing research underemphasizes how technological change and the digital revolution have contributed to these strains. Global value chains facilitated by the digital revolution have linked technology in advanced industrial countries to low-cost labor in developing countries, precipitating distributional losses for low-skilled labor in the industrial world. Further, the digital revolution has led to regulatory challenges involving both capital and labor. We argue that, as a result, governments face both mounting opposition to globalization and heightened difficulty in supporting the programs and policies necessary to buffer the adverse domestic effects of globalization and maintain support for embedded liberalism.

Analyses of embedded liberalism have focused overwhelmingly on trade in goods and capital, to the exclusion of migration. We argue that much as capital controls were essential components of the embedded liberal compromise, so too were restrictions on the democratic and social rights of labor migrants. Generous welfare programs in labor-receiving countries thrived alongside inclusionary immigration policies, but this balanced arrangement was only tenable if migrants were politically excluded in their destination countries. That is, embedded liberalism abroad rested on exclusionary political foundations at home. In bringing together the IPE literature on the “globalization trilemma” with the comparative politics of citizenship, we provide a novel account of how embedded liberalism worked politically, with implications for current debates about the fate of the liberal order in a time of populist resurgence.

The political economy of trade literature argues that the policy of compensating those who lose from trade is an important component of maintaining public support for free-trade, a linkage known as the compensation hypothesis or embedded liberalism thesis. This article tests the causal mechanisms underlying the compensation hypothesis by examining support for trade-related compensation using survey data from the United States. Expectations about the effects of trade strongly predict support for trade-related unemployment insurance, with those who expect to lose more likely to support and those who expect to gain more like to oppose, but has no influence on support for general unemployment insurance despite previous research suggesting it should.