Wrestling with unevenness: Sino-American rivalry, state strategy and the reformation of German capitalism

Abstract

This article focuses on the case of Germany to demonstrate how the lens of ‘uneven and combined development’ (U&CD) can help critical scholars of Global Political Economy (GPE) make sense of a worldwide but nationally specific movement towards an augmented role for the state in the regulation of capitalism. The first section finds that the prevailing comparative-institutional literature suffers from a narrow conception of the international environment in which the German political economy is drifting in the direction of its main organisational rival – US-style neoliberalism. By contrast, the second section shows that the alternative lens of U&CD provides a richer picture of the systemic forces experienced by German state actors: they flow from a technologically leading US as well as a leapfrogging China, they increase competition but also present commercial opportunities, and they do not point towards freer markets but rather novel forms of state intervention that are best explored as a creative, if contested, process of ‘re-combination’. The third section details the structural, strategic and institutional reasons for why the German state cannot emulate either the US or China. It concludes that – in lieu of strong support from capital and labour and independent state capacities like the Chinese party apparatus or the US military-industry complex – German attempts to expand the remit of the state follow a substitutive process of ‘bricolage’ that patches together foreign and domestic techniques and a motley of special interests.