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The unusual suspects: The French Left and the construction of global finance

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French Politics Aims and scope

Abstract

How can we explain shifts in capital controls? How can we account for the emergence and diffusion of new norms that guide financial practices? How can we explain the rise of global finance? Instead of the usual suspects that such questions would lead us to consider, Rawi Abdelal's brilliant book, Capital Rules: The Construction of Global Finance (Harvard UP, 2007) opens new paths and summons a set of very unusual suspects: French socialists rather than American neoliberals, and norms rather than material interests. The result is a fascinating, detailed account of how a few entrepreneurs put their mark on global finance.

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Notes

  1. Even though the rules of global finance are not American but French, Jean-Charles Naouri, Chief of Staff of Pierre Bérégovoy, when he was Minister of Finance from 1984 to 1986, and responsible for the liberalization of the national financial system at the time, remarked that his team explicitly looked at the United States as a model to reform the French system (quoted in Landier and Thesmar, 2007, p. 137). In this respect, it is worth pointing out that, in the late 1970s and the early 1980s, leftwing ‘modernizers’ like Michel Rocard and Jacques Delors were called ‘the American Left’ by their opponents, particularly Jean-Pierre Chevènement's CERES.

  2. There is a substantial literature on sociological institutionalism. For reviews, see Campbell (2004), DiMaggio and Powell (1991) and Hall and Taylor (1996).

  3. Delors defined himself as the representative of the CFDT in the government (Hamon and Rotman, 1984, p. 344).

  4. On the internal divisions of the Socialist Party with respect to the EU and globalization, see Crespy (2008).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sociology, McGill University, Leacock 712, 855 Sherbrooke Street West, Montreal, QC H3A 2T7, Canada

    Marcos Ancelovici

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  1. Marcos Ancelovici
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Correspondence to Marcos Ancelovici.

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Ancelovici, M. The unusual suspects: The French Left and the construction of global finance. Fr Polit 7, 42–55 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1057/fp.2008.20

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