While the academic study of International Relations immediately following the World Wars was focused on the causes of war and the conditions of peace, the diversification of IR in the mid twentieth century led to the creation of a discrete subfield of security studies. For the remainder of the twentieth century, this subfield focused exclusively on the problem of war – conventional and nuclear – between nation-states. But the end of the Cold War and the proliferation of multiple, opaque, and transnational security risks opened an intellectual space within security studies for a re-envisioning of the analytical approaches to security, as well as to a widening of the agenda. Security was no longer linked exclusively to war but also to a wider range of issues, and security was no longer exclusively conceptualized as the continued existence of the state but applied also to a multitude of actors.

The First World War and its aftermath destabilized the international economic system. From volatile exchange rates and hyperinflation to industrial stagnation and mass unemployment, the collective challenges facing the nations of Europe threatened to undermine the prevailing order. In response, the Bank of England assumed a set of responsibilities aimed at upholding the City of London as an international financial center. It employed technical advisers who were able to shape domestic industrial policy, coordinate the creation of new central banks across the empire, and exert additional pressure on foreign governments abroad. Through these interventions, the Bank established a reputation as a leading monetary and intellectual authority and, in the process, redefined the structures of economic governance.

This chapter is a short intellectual biography focusing on my interest and engagement in questions of political legitimacy over the years. The chapter is organized into three parts. I begin by discussing how the issue of legitimacy has been one of my key intellectual concerns ever since I started to do research on politics, initially in the context of the study of political and legal regimes in Latin America (Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay). Next, I highlight my understanding of political legitimacy as a responsibility and what this means for the evaluation and judgment of politics. This understanding builds on one of my previous books, Legitimacy and Politics: A Contribution to the Study of Political Right and Political Responsibility. Finally, I focus on how, gradually, in particular in connection with my work with the United Nations (UN), I became interested in the question of political legitimacy at the international level.

This chapter aims at raising a sense of reflectiveness regarding the use of the concept of “infrastructure” in the analysis of finance, through addressing different, if interconnected, problematizations of financial infrastructural reason. First, infrastructures are problematized as a modernist social imaginary that reproduces functionalist reasoning about society, thereby systematically effacing asymmetries and exclusions enabled by infrastructures. Second, infrastructural thinking is tightly coupled to conceptions of sovereignty and governability of populations, territories, and resources, thus inviting security thinking. Third, infrastructural reason in finance reproduces a globalist view on the international political economy together with a realist imaginary of international relations, modeled after a zero-sum game. Fourth, infrastructural reason in finance sidelines important political-economic critiques of the global financial economy, effectively correcting the imagery of the relationship between production base and financial economy. In conclusion, when using infrastructural reason to diagnose the present condition of the finance economies, it seems worthwhile to view infrastructures not so much as fungible, smoothly operating, and only in exceptional cases failing systems, but rather as leaky networks through which shocks, disruptions, and exclusions are disseminated.

Not one of the numerous global risks we confront can be averted without better governance through global cooperation. All these risks – the ones we face now and the ones we may soon face next – transcend national borders, cross the globe, and therefore require global solutions. Moreover, many of these risks are interconnected; thus, they require interconnected solutions. Within the biological and chemical container of the Earth’s biosphere, human civilization is not a collection of individual structures of living that are entirely separate and distinct. It is a complex system of interconnected – and interdependent – networks of all kinds, many of which extend across our imagined political borders. Moreover, the ecologies of the world that human cities and states inhabit are all connected through natural systems. The atmosphere, hydrosphere, and cryosphere of the Earth, the biosphere that comprises the Earth’s ecosystems, are all connected. The many parts make a whole. To find planetary solutions, we must employ systems thinking to create institutions and other political arrangements to achieve effective Earth system governance, which must see and treat the world as a whole. To do this, we need human cooperation in problem-solving at every level of human endeavor. Foremost among our tools in this task must be democracy, and democracy must be devoted to sustainable development. Although democracy is in retreat throughout the world, we must fulfill our duty of optimism by establishing democracy everywhere and at every level, including democratic global governance.

Economic theories point to the potential problems associated with a monetary union but offer limited insights into explaining how the policy is designed. This chapter employs international relations theories to investigate the sources of the main controversies that have characterized policy design reforms, especially those concerning the degree to which provisions constrain states and empower the Council or the Commission. The chapter uses an original dataset of positions on contested issues from 1997 to 2012. In a way that best reflects the recurrent themes of the book, it shows that a host of economic, supranational, and national factors shape positions. Governments with a greater risk of noncompliance prefer greater discretion and governments with higher voting power prefer more Council involvement in enforcement as their risk of noncompliance increases. National public support for the European Union emerges as the most relevant correlate of positions on the Commission’s empowerment: governments facing a more sceptical public display greater reluctance. Other factors, such as governmental ideology, euro area membership, and the sovereign debt crisis, also shape positions.

Since the 2010s, the writing of European history – in both its incarnations, as the history of Europe and as the histories of nations in Europe – has seen fundamental transformations. Though it has been adapted in different ways, the global turn has deeply affected the historiography produced in many European countries. On the one hand, crucial watersheds of European history have been reinterpreted as part of larger configurations and as responses to global challenges. On the other hand, it is now clear that Europe’s claim to unity and cohesion was reinforced, not least, by observers from without. In the late nineteenth century, in societies across Latin America, Africa, and Asia, contemporaries began to refer to a “Europe” that was less a specific location than a product of the imagination; the result less of geography or culture than of global geopolitics. What emerges, then, is an understanding of the history of the continent that places it firmly in the context of global conjunctures and repeated moments of reterritorialization.

Fifteen years ago in All Politics is Global, I developed a typological theory of global economic governance, arguing that globalization had not transformed international relations but merely expanded the arenas of contestation to include policy arenas that had previously been the exclusive province of domestic politics. In my model, what truly mattered to global governance was the distribution of preferences among the great powers. When great power coordination was achieved, then effective governance would be the outcome. When great power coordination was not, then global governance would exist in name only. Demands for greater content moderation across platforms have increased as the modern economy has become increasingly data-driven. Can any standards be negotiated at the global level? The likeliest result will be a hypocritical system of “sham governance.” Under this system, a few token agreements might be negotiated at the global level. Even these arrangements, however, will lack enforcement mechanisms and likely be honored only in the breach. The regulatory center of gravity will remain at the national level. Changes at the societal and global levels over the past fifteen years only reinforce the dynamics that lead to such an outcome.