Excerpt

“Europe is not America,” opined the leading editorial in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung¹ in the midst of the most severe financial crisis that the United States has experienced in its history. A few days later, when it became obvious that European-style capitalism was not immune to the problems caused by the reckless investment strategies of banks around the globe, the outburst of this European (German?) Schadenfreude dissipated. Yet, the underlying assumption remained: the economic downturn in the United States was indicative of a profound crisis of the neo-liberal capitalist order that had been championed by different U.S. administrations for at…