Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World

by Adam Tooze

Did the contradictory geopolitical consequences of global growth, strengthening both Russia and its former satellites, make conflict inevitable? Certainly not from an economic point of view. The growth of the Polish and Baltic economies and the development of Ukraine, Georgia and Russia did not preclude each other. European exports to Russia flourished and all of Europe relied heavily on Russian gas. The question was whether a shared and interconnected prosperity could be given a common political meaning. Would it be cast as a foundation for a stable and prosperous international order? Or would the uneven but dramatic growth serve as fuel for a new arms race? Would interdependence come to be seen not as productive and efficient but as a source of vulnerability and threat? In the dark years of the 1990s the former Communist economies had experienced a common emergency. Exhaustion and disorder were shared. The common boom, ironically, would prove far more explosive.