Duncan Cameron
“The Next Great Transformation: Building a New Coexistence”
Karl Polanyi explains the first and second world wars as the consequence of the collapse of the three great social mechanisms that governed relations among nations and within societies in Europe: first, the balance of power, and the model of great power diplomacy established by the victors in the Napoleonic wars at the Congress of Vienna in 1815; second, the "self-regulating" market that emerged out of European feudalism, and was championed by English industrialists, and by political economists Adam Smith and David Ricardo; and third, the international gold standard which regulated international trade and finance, notably by imposing deflationary policies on nations experiencing persistent balance of payments deficits.
After 1945 this old order was repaired. The United Nations was envisaged as a system of collective security to replace balance of power diplomacy. The social welfare state was developed to offset the inequalities of market capitalism. And a multilateral system of international payments and lending was established at Bretton Woods as a substitute for the old gold standard. It is important to note that despite the worthy intentions of various political leaders, no new order emerged in any real sense. The existing structure was rebuilt with some important modifications. It is that repair job that is falling apart. U.S. unilateralism undermines the UN security council. The welfare state makes no progress in Western Europe and recedes in North America. The rise of the Euro poses the first real threat to the dollar standard implicit in Bretton Woods and after. The post war world order is being pulled apart by neoliberalism and naked U.S. imperialism.
This has deadly consequences for the rest of the world, who it hardly bears mentioning were not envisaged as the beneficiaries of the post 1945 structure.
This paper looks forward to the next great transformation, the move ahead to peaceful co-existence. How could a new international order be established that would promote justice, freedom, and equality for all the citizens of the world? The paper looks at how such as order would work and how it could be brought into being.

Michele Cangiani
“The mutual relation between democracy and peace: from John Hobson to Karl Polanyi”
The crisis of 19th century liberal society, and in particular imperialistic rivalries, gave rise to a debate on the preconditions of peace that the First World War made obviously impelling. During the war, John Hobson opposed the Pax Economica argument, i. e. the idea that free trade would be the only method for the abolition of war. He maintained instead that peace would depend on democracy, interpreted as the transition from the exclusive influence of “strong business organisations” on governmental policy to the development of “intelligent co-operation”, which democratic institutions would allow.
The concept of the necessary and irreversible shift from peace as a corollary of financial interests to peace as a conscious achievement, based on the continuous improvement of democratic quality of social life, is a central and constant factor in Polanyi’s concern for world politics. Furthermore, his very concept of peace – as “co-existence” – is inherently linked to democracy. Not only democratic participation to economic and political choices is a necessary condition for a peaceful external policy, but peace itself is to be understood as the possibility of an autonomous self-organization, that should be warranted to all nations and communities.
It is impossible not to note a sharp contrast between such conceptions as Hobson’s or Polanyi’s, and the present-day doctrine of an infinite struggle against Evil. This doctrine reveals, in fact, the need of unilaterally policing world order, through preponderant weapons, for the sake of global “Empire” (see M. Hardt and A. Negri, Empire, Harvard Univ. Press, 2000). While war is paradoxically intended as a means for democracy, we assist to the collapse of both the modern international right and modern civil liberties.

Ramon Castellblanch
“The Ascendant Neo-liberal Ideology andThe Attack on the Heart of the US Welfare State”
The rise in US military activity abroad has been accompanied by a rise in attacks on the US welfare state and the use neo-liberal ideology in making social policy domestically.
US businesses have now begun the assault on the New Deal and Great Society programs protecting mid-income Americans. In health policy, this attack features the move of the employer-based health insurance system toward mandating out-of-pockets healthcare costs so high that many may already be deferring necessary medical care. It also features a serious effort to sharply limit federal support for long-term care. These attacks further include threats to private pensions, Social Security
and Medicare.
Despite its staggering failures in 1990’s US health policymaking,
neo-liberal ideology has become increasingly dominant in discussions of these policies. It is now conjectured that health care cost inflation is impossible to contain (Altman & Levitt, Health Affairs, 2002). Emory’s Ken Thorpe, at a recent University of California meeting, argued that a key option for handling this inflation is making poor and working people pay for it on the assumption that they can manage much of their
own care.
Most alarming perhaps is the increasing reliance on neo-liberal ideology from forces that had been expected to defend social programs. A leading labor organization, the CA Labor Federation, is convening a meeting to study “market-based” solutions to health care costs – although there is little, if any, evidence that they work. Ken Thorpe is now a health policy advisor to Richard Gephardt (D) – author of the most ambitious proposal to expand health insurance in next year’s presidential campaign. For the Ninth International Karl Polanyi Conference, I propose a presentation describing the rising dominance of neo-liberal ideology in US social policymaking and how it supports the direct assault on the US welfare state as it protects mid-income citizens. I may compare these developments to the assaults on the welfare state and the use of neo-liberal ideology in other industrialized countries. For the conference, I see this analysis falling under the heading of AIssues of Population, Health and Environment”.

Larose Chalmers
“Les communautés transnationales dans le nouvel ordre global: questions relatives au nouveau paradigme de citoyenneté et au re-positionnement identitaire”
L’univers des communautés transnationales est en train de changer. Dans le contexte du nouvel ordre global marqué par un recentrage du cadre normatif des mouvements transnationaux des personnes, les pays industrialisés du Nord s’attellent activement à la redéfinition des paramètres de l’appartenance nationale et de la citoyenneté. Le retour de l’État-nation dans la sphère de contrôle des espaces sociaux et territoriaux nationaux de même que celui des flux d’échanges transfrontaliers ajoute des pressions renouvelées sur les pratiques transnationales des communautés migrantes. A travers un examen approfondi du nouvel univers des communautés transnationales, la communication compte explorer l’émergence d’un nouveau paradigme de la citoyenneté inspiré par une réaffirmation de l’État-nation et d’un resserrement des liens et identités nationaux. L’étude met également en perspective le repli, ou mieux le repositionnement identitaire des migrants transnationaux. Elle cherche à savoir en quoi ce nouveau paradigme de la citoyenneté se distingue-t-il par rapport aux phases de citoyenneté globale et post-nationale révélée dans la littérature sur la migration internationale au cours des récentes années.