Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World

by Adam Tooze

The year 2016 began with the nationalist government in Warsaw picking fights with Brussels over the freedom of the press, the independence of the judiciary and abortion rights. In their challenge to the EU they could count on applause from Viktor Orbán’s self-proclaimed “illiberal democracy” in Hungary. Meanwhile, the British government was demanding negotiations over opt-outs from the European future. The British prime minister let Brussels know that he would be happy to take a pro-European position. But from the outset, Cameron’s approach was disconcertingly transactional. If he did not get the concessions he demanded, his threat was that he would lead the campaign against EU membership in a referendum scheduled for the summer of 2016. Nationalism and xenophobia were the common denominators of the challengers from the Right. But, unlike the leadership of Law and Justice, Cameron was in an awkward position. He was struggling to square a groundswell of popular sentiment fanned by the propagandists of his own party with a broader agenda of business-driven globalism. Since the 1970s EU membership had shaped the competitive modernization of the UK economy. The Tories, as much as any party, had participated in that drive. The City of London in its twenty-first-century form had emerged as one of the most important strands of the UK-EU relationship. Its offshore relationship to the eurozone had defined both Britain’s and Europe’s places in the networks of financial globalization...