With the lecture series and the first Willy Brandt Lecture on December 7, 2021, the impulses of an international policy emanating from Willy Brandt will be illuminated with a view to today's challenges. Also, the competence of an intellectually and scientifically based political debate will be broadly and argumentatively shown. The political reference point of the 50th anniversary will be the event „Peace Policy of Our Time“ on December 8, 2021, which will address the question of how social democracy can revitalize the European peace mission in a more confusing world.
"Change through trade" was a pillar of the policy of détente at the beginning of the 1970s, without which Willy Brandt's Ostpolitik would have had to overcome much higher obstacles. In response to the oil crisis, the leading economic powers of the West met for the first World Economic Summit in 1975. This resulted in the "Group of Seven," which established itself as the G7 in the late 1970s. Expanded in the meantime to G8 with the addition of Russia, the summit has developed into a place of permanent exchange beyond financial and economic policy issues, supplemented by the G20 meeting featuring the economic powers of the global South.
This context, originally conceived for crisis management, has become a symbol of unrestrained globalization in recent years. Trade policy, in particular, remains a field of heavy debate, which can deeply interfere with working societies, e.g. by hindering the free movement of goods or by imposing protective tariffs. In this lecture, Prof. Dr. Quinn Slobodian takes up the perspectives on institutional and legal regulation of the global economy.
Quinn Slobodian is author of the award-winning Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Harvard University Press, 2018), which has translations published or forthcoming in eight languages. A frequent contributor to The Guardian, Foreign Policy, Dissent, The Nation, New Statesman, and New York Times, he is Marion Butler MacLean Associate Professor of the History of Ideas at Wellesley College and associate fellow at Chatham House. His next book will be published by Metropolitan in the U.S. and Penguin in the U.K. He lives in Cambridge, MA.
Katja Patzel-Mattern is Professor of Economic and Social History and, since October 2020, Dean of the Faculty of Humanities at Heidelberg University. She researches and teaches on the history of labor as well as the history of early childhood and parental care. She pays particular attention to the significance of categories of difference.
This lecture series is a cooperation event by: