Chapter 6 discusses the attempts of the European institutions, especially the European Commission and the European Parliament, to change the way in which corporations are structured and operate. This chapter tracks the European Commission’s initial ambitions to transform corporations by simultaneously improving their administrative capacity (due diligence) and reforming certain corporate fundamentals (civil liability and the remuneration of directors). After pushback by its own internal body, the Regulatory Scrutiny Board, the Commission retreated from its more transformative plans, narrowing its focus mostly to due diligence. At the time of writing, however, even the resulting less ambitious proposal was facing intense (and to an extent even unexpected) resistance. Despite the drawbacks, there may be other avenues for the EU to transform corporations. In the last section, I discuss the possibilities for engaging more directly with the fundamentals of corporate activity – by legally facilitating those organisations consciously founded on different principles (ownership and governance), such as social enterprises, which are more distributive and inclusive by design.

To explain the economic miracles in Germany and Japan after the Second World War, we need to pay close attention to the networks of miracle makers, who drew upon skill and knowledge that existed before and during the war. Under Allied tutelage, and in cooperation with workers and other groups that had previously been excluded from decision-making, members of these networks fundamentally refashioned German and Japanese cooperative capitalism into something more suited both to the emerging post-war capitalist economic order and to peaceful existence within it. Most of the fundamental reforms to German and Japanese capitalism were in place by about 1950, as were the networks that would prove essential to producing the economic miracle. However, we need to bear in mind that the renewed and reformed systems of cooperative capitalism did not function well immediately; in fact, the West German and Japanese economies languished as the 1940s drew to a close. What proved essential were two things explored in the next chapters: first, fundamental recasting of manufacturing in firms of all sizes in both countries; and, second, vastly increased domestic consumption followed crucially by worldwide demand for all sorts of products as the capitalist world entered the Golden Age.

Why are progressives often critical of US foreign policy and the national security state? What would a statecraft that pulls ideas from the American left look like? Grand Strategies of the Left brings the progressive worldview into conversation with security studies and foreign policy practice. It argues that American progressives think durable security will only come by prioritizing the interconnected conditions of peace, democracy, and equality. By conceiving of grand strategy as worldmaking, progressives see multiple ways of using foreign policy to make a more just and stable world. US statecraft – including defense policy – should be retooled not for primacy, endless power accumulation, or a political status quo that privileges elites, but rather to shape the context that gives rise to perpetual insecurity. Progressive worldmaking has its own risks and dilemmas but expands how we imagine what the world is and could be.