Eric Helleiner
Biographic Data
| ID | 509389 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Eric Helleiner |
| GIVEN NAMES | Eric |
| FAMILY NAME | Helleiner |
| SIGNATURE | HELLEINER E |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Waterloo |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5083-5394 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 77 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 999 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 77 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1989 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 14 |
Where Did Development Economics Come From
The European Central Bank in the International Political Economy
Central banks lie at the interface between domestic and international political economy. Powerful technocracies tasked with domestic and international macroeconomic governance functions are responsible for monetary policy, sometimes banking supervision, and to contribute to overall financial stability. On occasion, they supervise a variety of non-banking financial services and other functions, such as anti-money laundering. During economic and fi…
A less reluctant (green) Atlas? Explaining the People’s Bank of China’s distinctive environmental shift
Why did the Chinese central bank embrace environmental policies earlier than Western central banks and with a consistent focus on a wider range of environmental issues and more ambitious promotional policies? Although the greening of central banks has attracted growing attention from scholars of political economy, this distinctive and pioneering role of the People’s Bank of China has received less attention than that of Western central banks. It …
Financial technocrats as competitive regime creators
Why did a group of eight central bankers and financial supervisors from across the globe create a Network for Greening the Financial System in 2017? Why did they design this network as they did? The founders were an uncommon coalition, led by French financial authorities working closely with their Dutch, British, and Chinese counterparts, and backed by others from Germany, Mexico, Singapore, and Sweden. They were engaged in an unusual act of comp…
Climate change governance by central banks in an era of interlocking crises
In this article, we survey the literature on central bank action on climate change, focusing particularly on how the combined crises of COVID-19, inflation, and Ukraine have affected this action. We argue that the current situation is a critical juncture in which recent crises have created a highly indeterminate situation regarding what central banks might do regarding climate change. To date, some central banks have used these crises as opportun…
Economic Globalization's Polycrisis
In this article, I suggest that economic globalization is experiencing a particularly serious kind of crisis: a “polycrisis.” Use of this term has proliferated recently but with many meanings. I propose that it be defined as a cluster of distinct crises that interact in ways that they and/or their effects tend to reinforce each other. This core definition enables the identification of distinct types of polycrises that capture multiple uses of the…
The New Makers of Modern Strategy
The New Makers of Modern Strategy
Silences of Bretton Woods
In the formal deliberations of the Bretton Woods conference, little was said about gender inequality, racial discrimination, or environmental degradation. At the time, however, the significance of these issues to international economic governance was prominently discussed elsewhere, including in other conferences planning the postwar international order. The fact that the Bretton Woods architects chose to ignore these issues, thus, was an anomaly…
The Neomercantilists
At a time when critiques of free trade policies are gaining currency, this book helps make sense of the protectionist turn, providing the first intellectual history of the genealogy of neomercantilism. The book identifies many pioneers of this ideology between the late eighteenth and early twentieth centuries who backed strategic protectionism and other forms of government economic activism to promote state wealth and power. They included not jus…
The Neomercantilists
At a time when critiques of free trade policies are gaining currency, The Neomercantilists helps make sense of the protectionist turn, providing the first intellectual history of the genealogy of neomercantilism. Eric Helleiner identifies many pioneers of this ideology between the late eighteenth and early twentieth centuries who backed strategic protectionism and other forms of government economic activism to promote state wealth and power. They…
The Return of National Self-Sufficiency? Excavating Autarkic Thought in a De-Globalizing Era
As the global crisis triggered by the COVID-19 virus unfolded, The Economist magazine published a cover in May 2020 titled “Goodbye globalization: the dangerous lure of self-sufficiency.” The title summed up well the new political interest in the ideology of national economic self-sufficiency in the pandemic context. Unfortunately, contemporary textbooks in the field of international political economy (IPE) say little about this kind of “autarkic…
Neglected Chinese Origins of East Asian Developmentalism
East Asian developmentalism is often depicted as a derivative ideology with its origins in the diffusion of Western thought to the region, first to Japan after the 1868 Meiji Restoration and then to the rest of the region in the twentieth century following the Japanese example. Recent scholarship has challenged that perspective by highlighting important endogenous roots of the developmentalist ideology of Meiji Japan. This paper shows that Chines…
The Evolution of the International Monetary and Financial System
This chapter explores the international monetary and financial system, which plays a central role in the global political economy (GPE). Since the late nineteenth century, the nature of this system has undergone several pivotal transformations in response to changing political and economic conditions at both domestic and international levels. The first was the collapse of the integrated pre-1914 international monetary and financial regime during …
The Diversity of Economic Nationalism
The growing political salience of economic nationalism after the 2008 financial crisis has strengthened arguments made in pre-crisis political economy (PE) scholarship about the enduring importance of this ideology and the need for more study of the economic significance of nationalism and national identities. Scholarship on this topic suffers, however, from some blindspots that inhibit understanding of the two most systemically important strands…
The life and times of embedded liberalism
In a widely cited 1982 article, John Ruggie identified the normative framework of Bretton Woods as ‘embedded liberalism’ and pointed to its enduring legacy in international economic governance through the 1970s. Revisiting Ruggie’s analysis at the 75th anniversary of Bretton Woods, I advance three arguments about the content and legacy of embedded liberalism in the international monetary and financial system. First, the embedded liberalism of Bre…
Crashed
Conservative Economic Nationalism and the National Policy
Two distinct strands of conservative Canadian economic nationalism—associated with the ideas of John Rae and Isaac Buchanan—helped to inform the country's protectionist National Policy of 1879. These strands of nationalism were much less influenced by Listian ideas than was economic nationalist thought in many other countries at this time. This study of their content, intellectual sources and influence contributes empirically and analytically to …
Multilateral Development Finance in Non-Western Thought
Recent initiatives of China and other emerging powers to create new multilateral development lending institutions (MDLIs) are often portrayed as efforts to build upon and/or reform an idea pioneered by Western officials during the Bretton Woods negotiations. However, recent literature has shown that support for MDLIs also had deeper non-Western roots in the pre-Bretton Woods era. What led thinkers outside the West to propose MDLIs in that earlier…
The Richness of Financial Nationalism
Financial nationalism has received little attention in the literature on Chinese nationalism. Nor has China been a focus of the emerging literature on comparative financial nationalism. This is surprising as financial matters were central to modern Chinese nationalism when it began to take shape in the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, and financial nationalism remains influential in contemporary China, which has undoubtedly become a major …
States and the Reemergence of Global Finance
Most accounts explain the postwar globalization of financial markets as a product of unstoppable technological and market forces. Drawing on extensive historical research, Eric Helleiner provides the first comprehensive political history of the phenomenon, one that details and explains the central role played by states in permitting and encouraging financial globalization.Helleiner begins by highlighting the commitment of advanced industrial stat…
Beyond the Tributary Tradition of Chinese IPE
As China’s influence in the world economy grows, scholars have become increasingly interested in distinct Chinese traditions of thought relating to the study of international political economy (IPE). While much has been written about historical Confucian ideas about tributary relations, IPE scholars have devoted little attention to another Chinese intellectual tradition that challenged those ideas in the 19th century: Chinese economic nationalism…
Limits to the BRICS’ challenge
Although many scholars have analyzed the BRICS’ creation of the New Development Bank (NDB) and the Contingent Reserve Arrangement (CRA), less attention has been paid to other – less successful – BRICS efforts to challenge the dominant global financial order through institutional innovation. This paper examines the case of BRICS’ discussions to create their own credit rating agency (CrRA) which began in 2012 around the same time as the initiatives…
Civilisational values and political economy beyond the West
This paper analyses the prominence of civilisational values in Korean political economy debates in the late 19th and early 20th centuries concerning their country’s dramatic opening to the world economy at the time. Korean supporters of economic opening saw this policy change as part of a wider embrace of Western civilisational values, while opponents argued that their country’s longstanding economic autarchy upheld traditional Neo-Confucian civi…
Sun Yat-sen as a Pioneer of International Development
Although the concept of international development is often said to have been pioneered in the West, Sun Yat-sen's ideas on the topic predated those of most Western thinkers and included one of the first proposals ever advanced for an international institution with a core development mandate. In the immediate aftermath of World War I, Sun proposed the creation of an "International Development Organization" that could channel foreign capital to Chi…
Subprime catalyst
The 2008 financial crisis has had an important, but neglected, impact on carbon market governance in the United States. It acted as a catalyst for the emergence of a domestic coalition that drew upon the crisis experience to demand stronger regulation over carbon markets. The influence of this coalition was seen first in the changing content of draft climate change bills between 2008 and 2010. But the coalition's more lasting legacy was its role …
The End of an Era in International Financial Regulation? A Postcrisis Research Agenda
The global financial crisis that erupted in summer 2007 has made the reform of international prudential financial regulation one of the top priorities of global public policy. Past scholarship has usefully explained the creation and strengthening of international financial standards with reference to three policy arenas: interstate, domestic, and transnational. Despite the accomplishments of this specialist literature, the recent crisis has revea…
Troubled futures? The global food crisis and the politics of agricultural derivatives regulation
The global food crisis of 2007-08 triggered an important US-led initiative to tighten regulations over agricultural derivatives markets. The lead role of the US reflected its structural power in global finance and the influence of societal interests within the US concerned about the rapid growth of financial investment in agricultural derivatives markets over the past decade. Encouraged by market developments and deregulation in the United States…
Economic Nationalism as a Challenge to Economic Liberalism? Lessons from the 19th Century
What kind of challenge does economic nationalism pose to economic liberalism in today's global political economy? Conventional wisdom holds that economic nationalism is an outdated ideology in this age of globalization and economic liberalization. But this argument rests on understandings of economic nationalism that are increasingly being called into question by recent scholarship. In this article, I show how the history of economic nationalism …
The Making of National Money
Why should each country have its own exclusive currency? Eric Helleiner offers a fascinating and unique perspective on this question in his accessible history of the origins of national money. Our contemporary understandings of national currency are, Helleiner shows, surprisingly recent. Based on standardized technologies of production and extraction, territorially exclusive national currencies emerged for the first time only during the nineteent…
States and the Reemergence of Global Finance
Most accounts explain the postwar globalization of financial markets as a product of unstoppable technological and market forces. Drawing on extensive historical research, Eric Helleiner provides the first comprehensive political history of the phenomenon, one that details and explains the central role played by states in permitting and encouraging financial globalization.Helleiner begins by highlighting the commitment of advanced industrial stat…
Understanding the 2007–2008 Global Financial Crisis
Economists have explained the 2007–2008 global financial crisis with reference to various market and regulatory failures as well as a macro-economic environment of cheap credit during the precrisis period. These developments had important political causes that scholars of international political economy (IPE) should have been well positioned to study before the crisis. How well did they anticipate the crisis? Although none foresaw all the causes,…
National Currencies and National Identities
In what ways do national currencies contribute to a sense of national identity? Building on the insights of 19th-and early 20th-century observers, the author suggests that national currencies might foster national identities in five ways: (a) providing a vehicle for nationalist imagery that constructs a sense of collective tradition and memory, (b) acting as a common medium of social communication that may facilitate the “communicative efficiency…
Political determinants of international currencies
In recent years, the economic determinants of international currency status have attracted growing attention among economists. But what about the political determinants? This paper proposes a framework or taxonomy for thinking about this question. It identifies two distinct channels – one indirect and one direct – through which politics can influence the international standing of a currency. In the former category, politics is important through i…
Explaining the globalization of financial markets
Many accounts of the globalization of financial markets over the past three decades explain it as a product of unstoppable technological and market forces. This article emphasizes that the behaviour of states was also of central importance in encouraging and permitting the process. States are shown to have supported financial globalization in three ways: (1) granting freedom to market actors through liberalization initiatives; (2) preventing majo…
A Bretton Woods moment? The 2007-2008 crisis and the future of global finance
The 2007–2008 global financial crisis encouraged speculation about the prospects for a ‘Bretton Woods moment’ in which the global financial system would be radically redesigned. Many of those hoping for this outcome have since become disillusioned with the limited nature of the international financial reform agenda. But the success and innovation of the Bretton Woods conference was made possible by unique political conditions that are not present…
Limits to the BRICS’ challenge
Although many scholars have analyzed the BRICS’ creation of the New Development Bank (NDB) and the Contingent Reserve Arrangement (CRA), less attention has been paid to other – less successful – BRICS efforts to challenge the dominant global financial order through institutional innovation. This paper examines the case of BRICS’ discussions to create their own credit rating agency (CrRA) which began in 2012 around the same time as the initiatives…
The Diversity of Economic Nationalism
The growing political salience of economic nationalism after the 2008 financial crisis has strengthened arguments made in pre-crisis political economy (PE) scholarship about the enduring importance of this ideology and the need for more study of the economic significance of nationalism and national identities. Scholarship on this topic suffers, however, from some blindspots that inhibit understanding of the two most systemically important strands…
The life and times of embedded liberalism
In a widely cited 1982 article, John Ruggie identified the normative framework of Bretton Woods as ‘embedded liberalism’ and pointed to its enduring legacy in international economic governance through the 1970s. Revisiting Ruggie’s analysis at the 75th anniversary of Bretton Woods, I advance three arguments about the content and legacy of embedded liberalism in the international monetary and financial system. First, the embedded liberalism of Bre…
The Mystery of the Missing Sovereign Debt Restructuring Mechanism
The absence of a formal international regulatory mechanism to facilitate sovereign debt restructuring has long been recognized as a most serious gap in the architecture of global finance. Why has it proven so difficult to create such a sovereign debt restructuring mechanism (SDRM) at the international level? Political economists have devoted relatively little scholarly attention to this question. This paper attempts to begin to fill this gap in t…
Think Globally, Transact Locally
(2000). Think Globally, Transact Locally: Green Political Economy and the Local Currency Movement. Global Society: Vol. 14, No. 1, pp. 35-51
Economic liberalism and its critics
If neoliberal ideology was quite globally dominant at the time of RIPE"s creation, it is much less so ten years later. But what is replacing the 'Washington consensus'? This question is difficult to answer in part because the critiques of neoliberalism have come from such varied ideological sources. Some opponents of neoliberalism draw inspiration from the three ideologies which presented the most prominent critiques of nineteenth-century classic…
Towards a New Bretton Woods? The First G20 Leaders Summit and the Regulation of Global Finance
The Monetary Dimensions of Colonialism
In the last few years, northern policymakers are increasingly interested in creating regional currency blocs which link their respective monetary systems more closely to those of nearby poorer 'southern' countries. To what extent does this new interest signal a kind of monetary 'neo-colonialism'? As a starting point for answering this question, I examine the motives that drove imperial powers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries t…
Historicizing territorial currencies
Great Transformations
Half a century after the Bretton Woods conference, the world has changed in ways that would be startling to those who met in 1944 to build the constitution for the postwar international financial order. Particularly striking is the new power and influence of global financial markets. Policy makers from the 1940s would find themselves lost in today's globally integrated financial marketplace where assets are traded in enormous volumes across borde…
Financial technocrats as competitive regime creators
Why did a group of eight central bankers and financial supervisors from across the globe create a Network for Greening the Financial System in 2017? Why did they design this network as they did? The founders were an uncommon coalition, led by French financial authorities working closely with their Dutch, British, and Chinese counterparts, and backed by others from Germany, Mexico, Singapore, and Sweden. They were engaged in an unusual act of comp…
International political economy and the greens
(1996). International political economy and the greens. New Political Economy: Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 59-77
The world of money
Southern Pioneers of International Development
What is the origin of the norm that international institutions should support the economic development of poorer countries? It is commonly argued that the norm of international development was pioneered by US president Harry S. Truman in a famous 1949 speech as a means of serving US economic goals in the early Cold War. But this norm in fact emerged much earlier from Sun Yat-sen's thinking in China in 1918 and after that from Latin American prefe…
Money and Influence
In the past few years, much attention has been paid to the growing power of Japan in the international monetary and financial system. At the end of the day, however, opinions vary considerably about the degree of this power. Robert Gilpin, to provide one example, portrays Japan as the dominant financial power of today.1 Susan Strange, on the other hand, asserts that Japanese power in the international economy is still quite limited.2 This chapter…
States and the future of global finance
One of the central objectives of the field of international political economy (IPE) in the last 20 years has been to introduce insights from the field of international relations into the study of global economic affairs. Although this effort has been largely successful in the study of international trade, much less attention has been focused on the financial sector of the global economy. Seemingly highly technical and arcane, the study of interna…
Japan and the Changing Global Financial Order
The global financial system has been undergoing enormous structural changes in recent years. Not only have financial markets become integrated to a degree unparalleled in the post1945 period, but immense shifts are also under way in the underlying power positions of states. Although full European monetary and financial union will pose a serious threat to American financial hegemony in the near future, the more dramatic shift to date has been the …
The world of money
Freeing money
Explaining the globalization of financial markets
Many accounts of the globalization of financial markets over the past three decades explain it as a product of unstoppable technological and market forces. This article emphasizes that the behaviour of states was also of central importance in encouraging and permitting the process. States are shown to have supported financial globalization in three ways: (1) granting freedom to market actors through liberalization initiatives; (2) preventing majo…
Great Transformations
Half a century after the Bretton Woods conference, the world has changed in ways that would be startling to those who met in 1944 to build the constitution for the postwar international financial order. Particularly striking is the new power and influence of global financial markets. Policy makers from the 1940s would find themselves lost in today's globally integrated financial marketplace where assets are traded in enormous volumes across borde…
Handling “Hot Money”
It is widely recognized that capital flight was a major contributor to the Latin American debt crisis of the 1980s. According to one estimate, the accumulation of foreign assets by Latin American citizens was equal to as much as 50 percent of the total external debt acquired by the ten largest Latin American debtors between 1975 and 1985. For some countries, such as Argentina, Mexico, and Venezuela, the value of the foreign assets of their citize…
States and the Reemergence of Global Finance
States and the Re-emergence of Global Finance
International political economy and the greens
(1996). International political economy and the greens. New Political Economy: Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 59-77
Uneven Globalization and the End of the Cold War
Braudelian reflections on economic globalisation
In the 1990s, the focus of the field of International Political Economy (IPE) has come to be centred on the phenomenon of ‘economic globalisation’. It is a phenomenon that seems to both describe and explain many of the momentous changes in the global political economy of the late twentieth century. Although economic globalisation is now at the centre of the field's concerns, its precise meaning and significance remain hotly contested among Intern…
Innovation and Transformation in International Studies
This book explores the nature of, and conditions for, theoretical innovation in international studies. Highlighting classic and new research problems, this collection of critically minded, original essays pushes international relations scholarship in uncharted directions. Bridging social theory and international relations theory, it searches for sources of intellectual innovation in the everyday lives of ordinary people. The seventeen contributor…
Who Elected the Bankers? Surveillance and Control in the World EconomyLouis W. Pauly Ithaca
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
National Currencies and National Identities
In what ways do national currencies contribute to a sense of national identity? Building on the insights of 19th-and early 20th-century observers, the author suggests that national currencies might foster national identities in five ways: (a) providing a vehicle for nationalist imagery that constructs a sense of collective tradition and memory, (b) acting as a common medium of social communication that may facilitate the “communicative efficiency…
Historicizing territorial currencies
Think Globally, Transact Locally
(2000). Think Globally, Transact Locally: Green Political Economy and the Local Currency Movement. Global Society: Vol. 14, No. 1, pp. 35-51
The Making of National Money
Why should each country have its own exclusive currency? Eric Helleiner offers a fascinating and unique perspective on this question in his accessible history of the origins of national money. Our contemporary understandings of national currency are, Helleiner shows, surprisingly recent. Based on standardized technologies of production and extraction, territorially exclusive national currencies emerged for the first time only during the nineteent…
Economic Nationalism as a Challenge to Economic Liberalism? Lessons from the 19th Century
What kind of challenge does economic nationalism pose to economic liberalism in today's global political economy? Conventional wisdom holds that economic nationalism is an outdated ideology in this age of globalization and economic liberalization. But this argument rests on understandings of economic nationalism that are increasingly being called into question by recent scholarship. In this article, I show how the history of economic nationalism …
The Monetary Dimensions of Colonialism
In the last few years, northern policymakers are increasingly interested in creating regional currency blocs which link their respective monetary systems more closely to those of nearby poorer 'southern' countries. To what extent does this new interest signal a kind of monetary 'neo-colonialism'? As a starting point for answering this question, I examine the motives that drove imperial powers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries t…
Dollarization diplomacy
Beginning in 1999, US policymakers suddenly began to debate the idea of encouraging Latin American countries to adopt the US dollar as their domestic currency. In this article, I show that the US debate concerning the pros and cons of ‘dollarization diplomacy’ has two interesting historical precedents that help us understand the politics of US policymaking in this area. The first took place between 1900 and 1915 when the US also showed considerab…
Economic liberalism and its critics
If neoliberal ideology was quite globally dominant at the time of RIPE"s creation, it is much less so ten years later. But what is replacing the 'Washington consensus'? This question is difficult to answer in part because the critiques of neoliberalism have come from such varied ideological sources. Some opponents of neoliberalism draw inspiration from the three ideologies which presented the most prominent critiques of nineteenth-century classic…
Forum
The Strange Story of Bush and the Argentine Debt Crisis
When the government of Argentina declared itself unable to pay its debts in December 2001, the world witnessed the largest sovereign default in history. While international investors were predictably upset, the response of the USA was more unusual. Instead of supporting foreign private creditors as it had during most sovereign debt crises of the 1980s and 1990s, the US government did very little. Indeed, since the initial default, US policy maker…
Political science (65 works) · Economics (61 works) · Politics (53 works) · Law (47 works) · Political economy (44 works) · Law (37 works) · Global Financial Crisis and Policies (28 works) · International Development and Aid (23 works) · Sociology (21 works) · Finance (20 works)