Publisher's Synopsis
In this book, Austrian political scientist Arno Tausch, born in 1951, looks back on five decades of political science. Was the current global crisis preventable? Tausch, who has had a long career in academia and administration and is now Visiting Professor of Political Studies and Governance at the University of the Free State, Bloemfontein, South Africa, tries to show in his scholarly memoirs that the unequal relations between centres and peripheries that he has analysed over five decades, as well as the long conflict-ridden cycles of the world economy and world politics, could have been avoided, and Putinism and nationalism and the end of peace and social justice in the West are also linked to the neoliberal model of society in the West, which he learned to reject as a student of Nobel laureate Friedrich August Hayek in Salzburg from 1969 to 1971. He is one of the few political scientists in the world who, since 1991, has persistently warned against the hardening of Russia's course, including in leading Russian academic journals. In 1991 he wrote his book "Russia's Treadmill", the predictions of which have come true in an almost eerie way. But neo-liberal economic policy also corresponds 1:1 with the foreign policy vision of the "neocons", whose policy of NATO expansion first fuelled those destructive forces in Russia like an accelerant, leading to today's world crisis over Ukraine, which could end in a global nuclear catastrophe. The world must leave behind neo-liberalism, and return to political and economic concepts such as those of Michal Kalecki, Kazimierz Laski, Kurt Rothschild and Josef Steindl, whose basic structures he became acquainted with in the 1970s and which are still valid today: demand as the engine of growth, a stable or rising wage share, the growth of the public sector, fiscal coordination, international cooperation, coexistence and the rule of law within the framework of the 1975 Helsinki Accords.
