The Australian economy performed surprisingly strongly throughout most of the five-year period under consideration. The performance was surprising, that is, given the troubles – concentrated in the years 1997–99 – that afflicted most East Asian economies, which together account for more than half of Australia’s exports. By the end of the five-year period, however, the triumphalism that had accompanied Australian official reaction to the Asian economic crisis began to look premature. In 1999–2000, the government had to apply the brakes (in the form of higher interest rates) to the economy largely because of external constraints: a worsening current account deficit and a depreciating currency. The economy was showing all-too-familiar signs of the stop–go pattern that had choked off growth in earlier periods. Fears were mounting that the economic growth that had occurred throughout the period – the country’s longest boom since the 1960s – was drawing to an end.

State aid law controls public spending by Member States by prohibiting aid which damages the internal market and encouraging spending on projects of interest to the EU economy. The Court of Justice plays a central role in delimiting the scope of application of State aid law. The Commission has extensive powers to investigate State aid and may order recovery of funds that are granted illegally. This remedy harms the beneficiary but does little to deter the Member State granting aid. The Commission has been successful in reducing the grant of State aid and encouraging States to fund certain types of State aid which contribute to the EU’s emerging industrial policy. Moments of economic chaos like the financial crisis in 2008 and the Covid-19 pandemic led to a significant relaxation of State aid discipline but the Commission used these two crises to press for further economic integration in the form of the Banking Union and the Recovery and Resilience Facility respectively.

This chapter documents the restrictive conditions under which rightwing, traditionalist populism managed to destroy democracy in Europe. Only Victor Orban of Hungary (2010-present) and Recep Erdogan of Turkey (2003-present) have accomplished this feat because they benefited from the institutional openness of parliamentary systems and faced an acute, severe crisis in the economy. This massive problem discredited the established parties, so the two populist leaders won clear parliamentary majorities, succeeded in dismantling the remaining checks and balances, and established authoritarianism. In the absence of a crisis and a reliable parliamentary majority, by contrast, Polish populists have tried to push aside institutional constraints through para-legal maneuvers, but have provoked substantial domestic and international pushback, which has defended democracy. Moreover, several populists in Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia, who did not encounter conjunctural, resolvable economic crises, did not manage to still their power hunger and asphyxiate democracy. Facing similar conditions, Silvio Berlusconi in Italy (1994, 2001–2006, 2008–2011) left democracy intact as well.

Chapter 7 focuses on the 1970s, when anti-colonial movements sought to turn global hierarchies upside down. Their efforts moved from the US civil rights movement to expose the racism and sexism embedded in professional work, as in education, social work, and medicine. Teachers observed their ‘hidden curriculum’, which excluded those they long claimed to help. Lawyers noted their close alliance to capital and sought, for the less-powerful, alternative routes to legal service. Engineers, who up to this point claimed that they had literally built civilization, began to ask whether they had in fact condemned society to live in concrete boxes and breathe polluted air. Even accountants were not immune. The high and fluctuating inflation that characterized the end of the moral-economic order established after the Second World War produced a legitimation crisis that required, in Britain, a Royal Commission on something as fundamental to capitalism as the calculation of profit.

On 2 May 2010, the Eurogroup and the International Monetary Fund agreed to a three-year €110 billion loan to Greece (which was deprived from the private capital markets) in order to avoid a sovereign default. The loan was conditional on the implementation of austerity measures to restore the fiscal balance, privatisation of government assets to keep the debt pile sustainable as well as implementation of structural reforms to improve competitiveness and growth prospects. In October 2011, Eurozone leaders consequently agreed to offer a second €130 billion loan for Greece, conditional not only on the implementation of another austerity package (combined with the continued demands for privatization and structural reforms outlined in the first programme), but also on a restructuring of all Greek public debt held by private creditors. In August 2015, a third programme was agreed, offering Greece an additional €86 billion loan. In 2018, the third programme was concluded. Does this delay reflect the failure of economic adjustment programmes in the case of Greece? The purpose of this chapter is to answer this question.

Political and property crises open up vital new questions for property theorists, and analyses of state responses to these crises cast new light on how property systems, and property law, adapt and evolve to meet complex challenges – while remaining institutionally resilient themselves. Resilient Property draws on equilibrium theory to understand how resilience is produced, for states and for individuals. In this postscript, we reflect on the property crises we are currently collectively facing, across the world: the impact, and aftermath of the global coronavirus pandemic. Applying the lens of our Resilient Property theory, we examine the emergency measures adopted by several governments as the pandemic threatened the health and wellbeing of citizens on a scale that was unprecedented for most of our lifetimes. As “stay-in-place” orders, including the provision of emergency shelter for unhoused or precariously housed people, collided with an upsurge in vacant commercial buildings and stalled development projects, the perfect property storm of homelessness, squatting and empty buildings/land was brought into fresh relief. Through a Resilient Property lens, state responses to property problems in the pandemic reveal the resilience needs that states were confronted with during the crisis, and the actions they took to maintain and restore equilibrium through the shockwaves of the pandemic and its aftermath

Chapter 3 examines post-1873 depression-era Ottoman novels and plays that articulate a language of difference by juxtaposing the success of industrious heroes against the failure of consumerist dandy anti-heroes. The representation of industrious and dandy characters in fin-de-siècle Istanbul shows the interconnectedness and interdependence between novels and the discourses and practices of productivity, in sharing the same new moral universe. Differing from the normative and distant language of the morality authors, or the authoritative and punitive language of the bureaucratic reforms explored in Chapters 1 and 2, the playful voices of novelists displayed dynamic and at times ambivalent representations of the idle and dandy, as an alternate, yet socially undesirable form of self-fashioning. By pitting a hardworking and upwardly mobile hero against the dandy anti-hero, novels thematized the period’s concern with valuing work as a constitutive element of character and nation-building, and also drew boundaries that defined who was and was not included in the nation. As a forum in which citizenship was debated, fiction established difference using ridicule, marginalization, and even criminalization as a social intervention.

This chapter presents the government’s economic policies and the oppression of peasants by state agents and large landowners. After the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the building of the modern Turkish republic was financed largely through taxes and monopoly revenues extracted from the agricultural economy. Turkey’s economy was largely based on agriculture, and accordingly, the new state relied heavily on rural resources. Oppression and coercion by state agents such as tax collectors and gendarmes and local dominants such as large landowners or village headmen accompanied the economic exploitation of peasants. This chapter gives a detailed picture of the exploitation and domination mechanisms that afflicted smallholders and the rural poor. It also sheds light on the impact of the Great Depression on Anatolian peasants.

This chapter introduces the social, economic, political and cultural conditions of the working class. Industrial workers, artisans and wage earners in the service sector and low-income white collars and retirees constituted the largest proportion of the urban population. In contrast to the existing literature reducing the working class to factory workers, this chapter also covers all of these groups. It gives the backdrop against which they struggled. That is, this chapter describes how these groups experienced the social and economic policies and conditions of the first decades of the republic. This chapter especially underlines the low wages, problems with payments of salaries, paucity of social security measures, high cost of living and the urban masses’ material deprivation.

The sixth chapter applies the analytical framework for due diligence obligations to the field of human rights protection. The individual components of due diligence obligations are analyzed with regard to the specific risks and problems of human rights law. It addresses how knowledge of human rights risks can be established, how resource constraints alter human rights obligations in times of conflict and economic recession, and what reasonable measures of protection are required. Conclusions from the previous chapter are consulted in order to decide whether due diligence concepts and methods developed in other fields of international law might be fruitfully applied to the area of human rights protection. When analyzing the application of human rights due diligence obligations though, the chapter will also reveal that the implementation of such obligations is often hampered where states lack sufficient capacities to effectively regulate and control harmful non-state conduct.