An extraordinary development occurred in the Australian economy in the last quarter of 2008: for the first time since the first half of 1991, gross domestic product (GDP) declined. But even more extraordinarily – and despite the then Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s assertion that ‘the worst global economic recession in 75 years means it is inevitable that Australia too will be dragged into recession’ – data for the first quarter of 2009 showed that the economy had resumed growth. Among the countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Australia alone avoided recession as conventionally defined (two consecutive quarters of negative growth in GDP).

Chapter 8 focusses on the region’s recent history of sustained economic decline and political change and conflict. It explains the reasons for this crisis and the role of indebtedness, political corruption and the imposition of austerity and market-oriented policies in reducing living standards and necessitating the ‘reform’ of the mining industry and Copperbelt societies. The chapter explores the rising local opposition to both these policies and to political repression and the contrasting experiences of political change in the early 1990s, with Zambia transitioning to multi-party democracy while Congo was mired in profound social crisis and military conflict. It then explores the liberalisation of both economies and the privatisation of the mining industry, associated in the Copperbelt with the loss of formal-sector jobs, falling living standards and the loss of company social provision. The chapter uses interviews to explore local understandings of this period of decline and political change and how social scientists have explained this extended period of decline.

The recession of the 1970s saw the advent of financialised capitalism and a renewed focus on cost containment in health care. At the same time, new identity politics had displaced the old politics of distribution associated with the welfare state. The political contraction of the welfare state, together with the spread of ‘precarity’ in employment via zero-hours contracts, and the undermining of work conditions, sick pay and pensions have been facilitated by a recasting of personal responsibility. Strong flows of biological, psychological, social, cultural, spatial, symbolic and, especially, material asset flows are conducive to good health and longevity, while weak flows are associated with poor health and premature death. Ideological assaults on the welfare state have been major contributors to growing material and social inequalities. Financial capitalism has witnessed an accelerating rate of mental as well as physical health problems in line with the fracturing of society. The period 1960–2010 set the scene for what many at the time of writing (2020) see as a severe crisis in welfare care.

The arrival of 19,000 Vietnamese ‘boat people’ after 1979 came after nearly two decades of immigration restriction, when Britain was entering its deepest recession for fifty years and just as Thatcher’s New Right government’s marketisation and anti-statist policies were being enacted. If this signalled new and significant challenges facing these refugees to Britain, this chapter shows that the reception and resettlement of refugees from Vietnam also saw a number of significant continuities with earlier periods. Internationally, this included the continued importance of colonial and Cold War geopolitical considerations, which pushed Britain into reluctantly participating in the UNHCR-led Vietnamese resettlement programme. Domestically the reception programme emphasised the ongoing importance of voluntary action and revealed the persistence of housing problems, poverty and racism for the new arrivals. This all took place against the backdrop of the continued emergence of an ever more diverse – ‘multicultural’ – society where the state and refugee agencies alike were being reshaped by their own increasingly heterogeneous workforces. And yet, despite this apparent new openness, educational and linguistic disadvantages of the refugees themselves collided with limited state support and high levels of unemployment to ensure that the Vietnamese were often only able to establish lives for themselves at the margins of British society.

This chapter examines a number of postapocalyptic Irish films produced and released in the aftermath of the collapse of the Celtic Tiger economy in Ireland. It considers the ways in which three of these films in particular, Conor Horgan’s One Hundred Mornings (2009), Stephen Fingleton’s The Survivalist (2015), and David Freyne’s The Cured (2017), represent both the state of the nation in the wake of fiscal catastrophe and its future self-projections: the “post” of “postapocalypse.” The films depict bleak presents, clearly reflecting the socioeconomic context of recession and austerity in which they were made. Yet they also offer bleak futures, with limited potential for transformation or growth. The sites of resistance to neoliberal dystopia that emerge within the films, especially those based on reconstruction of a premodern, pastoral community as an ethical alternative to capitalist subjectivities (a key signifier of the postapocalyptic genre), are profoundly ambivalent and contingent. Thus, the chapter argues, the postapocalyptic cycle of Irish cinema represents a key cultural engagement with the economic discourses of recovery and restoration that emerged almost simultaneously with discourses of crisis in Ireland.

A central bank is expected to produce results that are generally beneficial to the people to whom (through parliament) it is accountable. In the late twentieth century, the belief that monetary policy was a tool in fighting short-run economic problems gave way to thinking about monetary stability as providing a framework within which better informed judgements about long-run decisions could be made. The period is punctuated by two traumatic recessions. The early 1980s collapse in large part was the intentional result of a radical change in macro-economic strategy; the second was a product of the aftermath of a loose money period with excessive credit growth and then a collapse of a housing bubble. Both occurred in a wider international economic setting: in the early 1980s in the wake of the second oil price shock and of the 1979 anti-inflationary turn in US monetary policy; in the early 1990s the responses to the fiscal and monetary shock of German unification, a US slowdown and a new oil price spike after the first Gulf War. In both cases, the UK output performance was significantly poorer than that of other major industrial countries.

In October 1990, after a sustained campaign from the Treasury, the UK joined the European Monetary System’s Exchange Rate Mechanism. The move was heavily supported by Leigh-Pemberton, who persuaded the US central banker, Alan Greenspan, to persuade Margaret Thatcher that the ERM was a modern version of the nineteenth century gold standard. UK entry into the EMS ERM was accompanied by an interest rate cut, but the consequences of German unification and of German interest rate moves led to tightening of monetary policy at a moment of UK recession. In September 1992, the UK’s exchange rate became unsustainable as very large speculative flows bet on a UK exit from the mechanism (September 16). The result was initially seen as a massive humiliation for the UK and its monetary policy-makers, Black Wednesday, but quite quickly opinion shifted to considering it as a liberation that allowed policy reform, White Wednesday. The UK’s ERM experience thus became a game-changer in thinking about monetary policy and exchange rates.

After the chronic political instability that marked the conservative collapse and then the feverish pace of the truncated Whitlam regime, the ensuing years present an outward appearance of equilibrium. Between 1975 and 1991 there was just one change of government, and two prime ministers held office for roughly equal terms. Both in their own ways were striving for the security the electorate desired, and both held to the middle ground. Yet in the circumstances that now prevailed there could be no security without upsetting the ingrained habits of the past. One prime minister preferred confrontation and the other consensus as the way to bring change, but the changes were never sufficient. There was always a need to go further, to abandon yet another outmoded practice and make additional improvements. The first of the leaders was Malcolm Fraser, who headed a Liberal–National Country Party coalition from 1975 to 1983. In 1983 the voters rejected him for a new Labor leader, Bob Hawke. Both leaders searched for solutions. In the absence of older certainties, governments sought to restore national cohesion and purpose. Most of all, they tried to repair an economy that no longer provided reliable growth and regular employment.

Chapter 11 covers the period from the DNVP’s resignation from the first Luther cabinet in October 1925 to its reentry into the national government in January 1927. In particular, this chapter examines the deteriorating situation in the German countryside and increased pressure from organized agriculture for the DNVP to rejoin the national government in order to protect the domestic market against agricultural imports from abroad. Industry, too, had become frustrated with the DNVP’s absence in the national government and intensified its pressure on the party for a reassessment of its coalition strategy. But the patriotic Right – and particularly the Stahlhelm, which had fallen more and more under the influence of Theodor Duesterberg and the militantly anti-Weimar elements on its right wing – strongly resisted any move that might presage the DNVP’s return to the government. Shocked by the impressive showing of middle-class splinter parties in the Saxon state elections in late October 1926, the DNVP responded to overtures from the DVP and Center to explore the possibility of reorganizing the government and entered into negotiations that ended with its entry into the fourth Marx cabinet in January 1927.

Discussions about the state of Irish fiction during and after the Celtic Tiger often centred on the issue of cliché, as detractors criticised writers for rehearsing timeworn tropes instead of addressing the vertiginous upheavals of the boom and bust. This chapter considers the gendered and generic underpinnings of that claim. More than an aesthetic pitfall, cliché serves as a constitutive feature of post-Celtic Tiger women’s fiction. In Anne Enright’s The Forgotten Waltz (2011) and Tana French’s Broken Harbor (2012), narrators draw upon conventions derived from post-war genre fiction in order to reinforce fraying narratives of bourgeois happiness and success. While cliché provides temporary narrative and affective ballast amid recession, it also enmeshes women novelists within ongoing debates about the value of genre in an evolving literary marketplace.

The Introduction provides a guided tour of the content of the book, highlighting its main themes and historical sequences of crises and slumps. It discusses the frequency and intensity of recessions; the relationship between war and recessions; the impact of hyperinflation on economic activity; the role of currency crashes, debt, and macroeconomic crises on output; and the role played by populist political cycles in producing severe economic contractions.

Chapter 3 studies the impact of World War I and World War II on aggregate economic activity in the countries engaged in these two armed conflicts. The chapter shows a variety of effects (stimulus, slump, economic disintegration) and seeks to explain many contributing factor (including levels of defense spending) in generating these different outcomes. The chapter also examines the causes and consequences of hyperinflation in Austria, Hungary, Germany, Poland, and Soviet Russia in the first half of the 1920s.