Alan Cafruny, the Henry Platt Bristol Chair of International Affairs and Professor of Government, recently published a book chapter on “Re-routing Globalization: Polycrisis, Europe’s Decline, and the Crisis of Atlanticism.” The chapter was co-authored by Vassilis Fouskas of the University of East London, and appears in Critical Political Economy of the European Polycrisis, an edited volume from Edward Elgar Publishing.
The chapter “documents the shifting tectonic plates of the global economy and their harsh impact on Europe,” Cafruny said, and that “predatory U.S. economic policies resulting from the war in Ukraine and the United States’ neo-mercantilist turn are fueling the growth of far-right movements and parties across the European continent, even as the United States confronts its own, potentially cataclysmic, crisis in a second Trump administration.
“Germany forms the epicenter of Europe’s contemporary crisis,” he said. “Its distinctive ordoliberal, export-led economic model was predicated on access to the U.S. and Chinese markets as well as cheap Russian energy.”
Cafruny blames the combination of US protectionism, inflation, and the substantial cost of rerouting energy supplies for accelerating processes of deindustrialization and the loss of national and regional autonomy. “Policies and structural forces are shifting the imperialist centers of global capital accumulation away from Europe as global capital recomposes and reorganizes in the geography of North American and Chinese orbits,” he said.
Posted November 6, 2025
