Archive

With Roy BHASKAR: ”Reconstructing global interconnectedness: the complementary roles of philosophy and social sciences – a conversation with Roy Bhaskar and Heikki Patomäki”. This conversation took place in Helsinki (Radison SAS Plaza Hotel), 12.11.2005. The main editing of the text was done by Matti Jutila, but Bhaskar and Patomäki edited their parts of the conversation. The introduction was written collectively by all three. We use the Harvard-style of references only in the introductory part in order to emphasise the oral origin of the conversation itself. A Finnish translation was published as “Ihmiskunnan kohtalon yhteys: filosofisia ja yhteiskuntatieteellisiä vastauksia – Roy Bhaskarin Ja Heikki Patomäen keskustelu”, Kosmopolis, (36):1, 2006, pp.6-25.

W.Warren WAGAR: ”Crisis and Catastrophe”. This is an unpublished paper from 2004, originally meant for a TCS special issue on global democracy I was editing. Prof. Wagar died in November 2004 and only two of the papers meant for the TCS special issue were ever published (a dialogue about global democracy between me and David Held, available here, and Jamie Morgan’s interview of Michael Hardt). Please let me know if you have any ideas about a suitable outlet for Wagar’s paper that is now, in 2021, more relevant than ever!

With Lieven A. Denys: ”Draft Treaty on Global Currency Transactions Tax”. This is a slightly modified 2005 version of the Draft Treaty text we originally composed in 2002. It provided a partial basis for a law enacted by the Belgian parliament in 2004. A parallel but somewhat more complicated project of preparing a fully-fledged draft treaty for a global greenhouse gas tax has been in progress for years.

With James K. Galbraith & Henning Meyer: ”Governance of the EU: Problems and Reform Proposals”, Progressive Economy Policy Recommendation: Governance, published in August 2016. “We take as our premise that the ‘democracy deficit’ in Europe has become a crisis of legitimacy for the European Union, requiring early and dramatic action to begin to restore the trust, faith and confidence of European citizens in European institutions. The steps outlined below are feasible. And they are urgent.”

Early 2000s manuscript: ”Multiple Pasts, Converging Presents, and Alternative Futures for the European Union”. This is a paper I had been working on since the late 1990s. While I was never totally satisfied with it — I was just beginning to think about the future in a systematic fashion — I submitted it to the Journal of Common Market Studies in 2004, I think, and possibly to another journal as well around the same time. So it must have been rejected twice (a version came out in an edited volume on the future of Europe in 2007, in Finnish). But in some ways it is quite prophetic. Scenario 1 has become almost common sensical and perhaps the most likely future is Scenario 2 via Scenario 3. And what is the scenario 3? The EU partly disintegrates because of the conflict with the UK and the new Eastern European members with regard to the direction of the integration process and also because of a general legitimation crisis of the Union. This possibility was not properly spelled out in my later scenarios in Uusliberalismi Suomessa (2007) and The Political Economy of Global Security (2008), perhaps partly because of discouragement, but mostly because that would have complicated my global scenarios further. Of course there is also the possibility of more radical disintegration, which I now think is fairly likely as well. PS. I first discussed the possibility of EU distingretation in ”Emu and the Legitimation Problems of the European Union”, in P.Minkkinen & H.Patomäki (eds.): The Politics of the European Monetary Union, Kluwer: Dordrecht, 1997, pp.164-206.

A lecture on the methodology and purpose of social sciences: ”On the Nature of Social Scientific Research”. This is a long (4h) lecture where I first criticise quantitative and qualitative versions of empiricism and their irrealist consequences, and then provide a better alternative that stresses the role of contrasts, aporias and dialectical argumentation. Among other things, the lecture shows how artificial the standard dichotomies between theoretical-empirical, quantitative-qualitative and factual-normative are. From 2011 onwards I have given this lecture many times in Helsinki and a few times in Tampere and other universities.