International relations and the collective memory of the Global Financial Crisis

Organised by

• Department of Political and Social Sciences

I argue that International Relations ought to study the ways in which the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) is becoming remembered. For this to be possible, two kinds of conceptual difficulties need to be tackled. The first kind concerns the narrow disciplinary focus on the nation state. The second kind concerns what I have termed the transpersonal and transhistorical nature of memory. I highlight how the 2022 'Economics Nobel Prize' tries to shape the collective memory of the GFC in ways that erases the failures of a particular way of studying money and banking and what had become discredited approaches which rely on microeconomic theories of perfect rationality and information. This not only sidelines alternative approaches to the study of money and banking, what in the contemporary era has become known as the 'macro-financial turn' but also legitimates policy agendas which support financial market deregulation. Understanding the construction of the collective memory of the GFC is thus a first necessary step towards understanding the evolution of financial market regulation over the last decades as well as a prerequisite to appreciate how particular policy agendas are legitimated.

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