The Soviet Union and the Construction of the Global Market

Energy and the Ascent of Finance in Cold War Europe, 1964–1971

Oscar Sanchez-Sibony

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2023
• Topic: Economics
• eBook ISBN:
  9781009002370
• Subtopic: Economic History
• Index: Economics

Oscar Sanchez-Sibony reveals the origins of our current era in the dissolution of the institutions that governed the architecture of energy and finance during the Bretton Woods era. He shows how, in the second half of the 1960s, the Soviet Union sought to dismantle the compartmentalized nature of Bretton Woods in order to escape its material ostracism and pave a path to global finance and exchange that the United States had vetoed during the 1950s and 1960s. Through the construction of a set of pipelines that helped Europe's energy regime change from coal to oil and gas, the Soviet Union succeeded in developing market relations and a relationship with Western capital as durable as the pipelines themselves. He shows how a history of the development of capitalism needs to integrate the socialist world in bringing about the new form of capitalism that regiments our lives today.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title
• Title page
• Copyright information
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Prologue: The Grain Crisis, 1963
• 1 Italy, Cold War Maverick
• 2 Great Britain: Bretton Woods and the Financial Fix
• 3 Austria: Bretton Woods and the Soviet Politics of Liberalization
• 4 West Germany: Betrayal, Stagnation, and the Triumph of Capitalization
• 5 France: The Travails of Institutionalization
• Coda: Italy, Cold War Straggler
• Bibliography
• Index