ABSTRACT
Introduction Régulation theory emerged out of an analysis of the Golden Age growth regime in the USA and it focused upon the structural factors that generated its crisis at the end of the 1960s. At that time, the international relations were hierarchically organized under American hegemony, under the so-called “Pax Americana.” The world economy was seen as a process of diffusion of Fordism as an accumulation regime and not only a technological innovation (Mistral 1986). The very success of this diffusion led to a progressive deployment of firms’ strategies in the direction of international markets, then the delocalization of production and finally the primacy of financial portfolio management at the world level. In this new context, many scholars have pointed to the inadequate analysis of international relations by régulation theory and the absence of any feedback upon the domestic institutional forms (Kebabdjian 1998; Palan 1998). Time has passed and during the last decades the research has developed and shown that Fordism was only one of the accumulation regimes; many others coexist, with quite different features. The present work builds upon the taxonomy of the contemporary socioeconomic regimes in order to understand how they relate with one another and sketches a new configuration at odds with the post-World War II (WWII) Bretton Woods system. Actually most domestic institutional forms are now shaped by the evolution of international relations, and thus the interdependency of national régulation modes, without any unchallenged hierarchy, is a key feature of the contemporary world. The converging interests with international political economy are noteworthy (Chavagneux 2010) and this is an invitation to develop the status of international regimes within the theory (Vidal 2002). The presentation is organized around the following sequence of questions. (1) When quite all the development modes are highly internationalized, what are the requirements over the international configuration? (2) Is it an accident if many crises seem to originate from the surge in natural-resource prices and/or real estate speculation? (3) Do the world crises originate from a single origin and mechanism or are they the outcome of the heterogeneity and interactions between three contrasted sociopolitical regimes? (4) Is the power to influence the evolution of international relations distributed equally among the different
nation states? (5) Are not the regions the entities that govern the future and the stability of the world economy, away from the implicit vision associated to the concept of globalization and the quest for a hegemon that would finally replace the USA? (6) Is not the contradiction between more and more economic interdependence and even complementarity on one side and geopolitical rivalry on the other the main threat to the stabilization of international relations? (7) Is not the problematic and difficult emergence of new global commons evidence for the radical uncertainty about the successor to the Bretton Woods system?
