Heikki Patomaki

• Professor
• Professor of World Politics and Global Political Economy at University of Helsinki

In this forum, six scholars discuss Heikki Patomäki’s book World Statehood: The Future of World Politics, published in 2023. The editor’s introduction situates it in the discursive contexts of cosmopolitanism, deep history and functional differentiation. Ian Crawford looks at the concept of world statehood from an astrobiologist’s point of view, pu...

Kansainvälisen poliittisen talouden tutkimus on kriittisen itsereflektion tarpeessa. Merkittävä osa alan tutkijoista on hylännyt Open Economy Politics -viitekehyksen, joka on hallinnut alan pohjoisamerikkalaista tutkimusta viime vuosikymmeninä. Vaikka tuorein tutkimus usein käsittelee oleellisia kysymyksiä kiinnostavilla tavoilla, kansainvälisen po...

Critical cosmopolitan orientation has usually been embedded in a non-geocentric physical (NGP), providing a contrast to the underpinnings of centric cosmologies, which see the world as revolving around a particular observer, theorist, or identity. NGP cosmology makes it plausible to envisage all humans as part of the same species. The connection wo...

Examining the gridlock and decline of global governance in the 2000s–2020s, I show its deeper political economy underpinnings. Apart from attempts to lock in particular institutional arrangements, the prevailing disintegrative tendencies co-explain the gridlock. However, I qualify some of the earlier claims concerning complexity, law, and instituti...

World history is part of the cosmic story of increasing complexity and emerging powers. This chapter focusses on the industrial revolution and its consequences, arguing that modern Europe is merely a possible manifestation and moment in a process that is best understood as global history of humanity. The key to understanding this transformation lie...

The Cold War as we know it was only a contingent episode within a much wider process. The planetary-nuclear era would have come about sooner or later anyway, independently of the leading ideologies or location of shifting centres. Moreover, the meaning of the Cold War 1947–91 remains open. As is evident in the 2020s, whether the destructive powers...

It is often assumed that global democracy will manifest itself as a world parliament. But what is a world parliament: a sovereign legislative body or just a place to talk? I argue that apart from the task of coordinating activities of functional systems, a world parliament can be a response to the indeterminacy of international law. As “possessive...

Independently of how dominant the layer of world statehood becomes, that layer will require political support, authorisation, and validation in a complex and pluralistic world. By focusing on legitimacy, we can analyse the feasibility of paths towards global-scale integration and the potential for conflicts, divisions, and subsequent disintegration...

The idea of the book is to develop a new processual understanding of world statehood. The three parts of the book focus on different aspects and moments of evolution and history. The main questions include (1) whether and to what degree elements of world statehood exist, (2) whether the development of further elements and functions of world stateho...

The idea of a world state became a focal point of discussions during WWII. The realists were opposed to world constitutionalism, but they shared the sense of acute importance of political integration on a global scale. They advocated gradual integration, contrasting the existing communities with a future world state. Compared to the 1940s discussio...

In the immediate aftermath and decades following WWII, the world economy grew exponentially and thousands of new international agreements and organisations were established to coordinate and regulate the world economy and its underpinnings. In the subsequent era, the concepts of globalisation and global governance became established, providing the...

A worldwide greenhouse gas tax is a global-Keynesian solution to the aporia of the climate crisis. We argue that taxes should be preferred to trading and that there is a need for a global organisation and coordination of this taxation. A global greenhouse tax can be simultaneously a practice of governance and subversion, of regulation and resistanc...

The rise of the World Social Forum (though not its decline) can be perceived in Polanyian terms: a phase of neoliberal globalisation is followed by attempts to create structures of global solidarity and protection. Yet, this is ambiguous because WSF lacks agency—re-opening the question of transformative agency. Collective learning and actions are d...

In complex societies, hegemonic struggles abound over constitutive including scientific mythologems, which shape stories about the past and future. I argue that the Big History story is ambiguous. Is the cosmos purposeless and evolutionary processes arbitrary? Or is there coherence, wholeness, and even purpose? By using some pragmatist and critical...

The idea of double movement (Polanyi) suggests questions such as: given the socially and ecologically disruptive consequences of uneven growth and globalisation, should we anticipate a global “protective response”, paving the way for global Keynesian institutions? I criticise the pendulum metaphor and the simple dialectical thesis-antithesis-synthe...

In Part 1 of this interview, Professor Patomäki discussed his work and career up to the Global Financial Crisis. In Part 2 he turns to his later work. Questions and issues range over the use of retroduction and retrodiction, the degree of openness and closure of systems, and the role of iconic models, and scenario-building and counterfactuals in so...

In Part 1 of this wide-ranging interview Heikki Patomäki discusses his early work and career up to the Global Financial Crisis. He provides comment on his role as a public intellectual and activist, his diverse academic interests and influences, and the many and varied ways he has contributed to critical realism and critical realism has influenced...

INTERNATIONAL INTERDISCIPLINARY CONFERENCE "UNKNOWN WARS" The conference “Unknown Wars” is dedicated to the concept of global threats and phenomena directly bonded to them. The events of recent years have demonstrated that major changes are happening with more frequency. We live in the context of global threats: hybrid wars, epidemics, pandemics,...

IPE is in need of critical self-reflection. A large proportion of scholars have rejected the Open Economy Politics framework, which has dominated American IPE since the late 1990s. While new, unconventional research, both in the US and especially elsewhere, often tackles crucial questions in imaginative ways, we argue that critical IPE is yet to ad...

Abstrakti Olisiko Ukrainan 2022 sota ollut vältettävissä? Tässä artikkelissa käymme vuoropuhelun kautta läpi keskeisiä historian solmukohtia ja pohdimme tulevaisuuden mahdollisuuksia myös laajemmasta maailmanhistoriallisesta perspektiivistä. Ensin keskustelemme kysymysten, kontrafaktuaalien ja selittämisen logiikasta. Sen jälkeen analysoimme kontra...

The Paris Agreement and the subsequent IPCC Global Warming of 1.5 °C report signal a need for greater urgency in achieving carbon emissions reductions. In this paper we make a two stage argument for greater use of carbon taxes and for a global approach to this. First, we argue that current modelling tends to lead to a “facts in waiting” approach to...

Can the rise of nationalist-authoritarian populism be explained in terms of neoliberalism and its effects? The first half of this paper is about conceptual underlabouring: in spite of significant overlap, there are relatively clear demarcation criteria for identifying neoliberalism and nationalist-authoritarian populism as distinct entities. Neolib...

This chapter addresses scientific realism. After the heyday of empiricism in the interwar period and its immediate aftermath, many critical reactions to empiricism seemed to suggest scientific realism. It was widely agreed that scientific theories make references to things that cannot be directly observed (or at least seen), and thus emerged the is...

The question I raise is whether the basic features of mind, social categories, and society are unchanging or changing. Some understandings of ontology would seem to suggest that social ontology is a branch of metaphysics. However, as the history of concepts such as metaphysical and ontology indicate, our concepts and knowledge are historical. It is...

This paper, written in Finnish, is published in the local journal of futures studies, Futura, (39):2, 2020, pp.10-29. Here is the ABSTRACT in English: "My ten theses on global power in 2040 are based on a realist analysis of open systems. These theses have a context: capitalist market society, nation-states and planetary economy after the Industria...

The theory of capitalist peace claims that contractual social relations, free trade and cross-border investments are conducive to peace. In discussing this theory, I first sketch some key paradoxes and contradictions of capitalist market economy. These paradoxes and contradictions have critical implications for the theory of liberal-capitalist peac...

Can the rise of nationalist-authoritarian populism be explained in terms of neo­liberalism and its effects? The frst half of this paper is about conceptual under­labouring: in spite of signifcant overlap, there are relatively clear demarcation criteria for identifying neoliberalism and nationalist-authoritarian populism as distinct entities. Neolib...

Temporal reflexivity requires that we recognize consciousness, society and history as mythopoetically constituted. Mythopoetic imagination can also be a means of critique of the prevailing myths. In complex pluralist societies, there are hegemonic struggles over constitutive myths, shaping both our explanatory accounts of the past and scenarios abo...

Positivists have been unsuccessful in finding laws in society and most post-positivists have little to say about causation. Critical Realism (CR) can help to overcome these kinds of aporias of social science by providing better understandings for instance about emergence, open-systemic causation and the role of critical reason in human sciences. Ho...

Amin’s Leninist-Maoist vision is unlikely to be persuasive to twenty-first century citizens. Nonetheless, there is a rational kernel in Amin’s call for a new worldwide political organization. Some structures, mechanisms and tendencies of the capitalist world economy are relatively enduring and some patterns recurrent, although the world economy is...

From a post-Deutschian perspective, common institutions may aggravate the problem of conflicts and violence, but they can also be part of its solution. Contradictions and conflicts arise from shared processes and especially those of global political economy. Contradictions can be overcome through learning and building common institutions. Social co...

The purpose of the contemporary university has been redefined across the world in terms of success in global competition, usefulness for money-making, and efficiency, meaning application of New Public Management ideas. My aim is to sketch an alternative and future-oriented ethico-political conception of the university to serve counterhegemonic purp...

Shared problems require shared action. The world economy and deepening global risks bind us together, but we lack the collective global agency required to address them. A sustainable global future will be impossible without a fundamental shift from the dominant national mythos to a global worldview, and the concomitant creation of institutions with...

This chapter revisits the debate between Chris Brown, Mark Hoffmann and the author on the state-centric view and cosmopolitanism that took place quarter of a century ago. It first explores whether similar deconstructions would anymore be possible. Second, it discusses Brown’s ideas about global civil society, democracy and justice, particularly in...

In this brief polemic we argue that Trump’s words, actions and inactions are potentially deeply damaging to the legitimacy of the office he holds and to the continuity of the institutions defining that position. This, writ large, is an issue for organization theory. We use Searle’s concept of status functions to argue that Trump invokes problems of...

When the social reality is changing, we need to know also the following: What exactly is changing and why? To what extent is reflexivity involved in changes that take part in making the future uncertain and open? For instance, an announced policy change can become a self-altering prediction (or involve such a prediction), which is subject to contra...

Greater temporal reflexivity means that we recognize consciousness, society and history as mythopoetically constituted. Mythopoetic imagination can also be a means of critique of the prevailing myths. In complex pluralist societies, there are hegemonic struggles over constitutive myths, shaping both our explanatory stories about the past and scenar...

Brexit means Brexit and other meaningless mantras have simply confirmed that confusion and uncertainty have dominated the early stages of this era defining event. Though there has been a lack of coherent and substantive policy goals from the UK government, this does not prevent analysis of the various causes of Brexit and the likely constraints on...

Whether we talk about human learning and unlearning, securitization, or political economy, the forces and mechanisms generating both globalization and disintegration are causally efficacious across the world. Thus, the processes that led to the victory of the ‘Leave’ campaign in the June 2016 referendum on UK European Union membership are not simpl...

In this article we place Tony Lawson’s account of contrast explanation in context. Lawson’s development of it is given meaning both by the roots of the approach in his work on social ontology and the state of economics that provides the grounds for the critique contained in that social ontology.This is important because such an approach to explanat...

ProtoSociology is an interdisciplinary journal which crosses the borders of philosophy, social sciences, and their corresponding disciplines for more than two decades. Each issue concentrates on a specific topic taken from the current discussion to which scientists from different fields contribute the results of their research. ProtoSociology is f...

Is it true that either the EU will be democratised or it will disintegrate? I concur that the current policies, principles, and institutions of the EU both generate counterproductive politico-economic effects and suffer from problems of legitimation. These effects and problems, which are not confined to Europe, give rise to tendencies towards disin...

Both positivists and post-positivists have misunderstood causation. By explaining why there are no stable and uncontested empirical invariances in IR, critical realism (CR) has pushed theoreticians and practitioners to reflect critically upon the conception of causation they have so far taken for granted. However, the original CR claim about radica...

We measure time and coordinate our activities in terms of mechanical movements of clocks (seconds and minutes and fractions of these) and in terms of the rotation of the Earth (days) or its orbit around the sun (a year). However, these constant and repetitious movements do not constitute time. They are just particular rhythmics amongst numerous ong...

Contributors: Dean Baker, Víctor A. Beker, David Colander, Edward Fullbrook, James Galbraith, Jayati Ghosh, Claude Hillinger, Merijn Knibbe, Richard Parker, Heikki Patomäki, Ann Pettifor, Alicia Puyana, Lars Pålsson Syll, Geoff Tily, Yannis Varoufakis, Robert Wade

Following decades of economic globalisation and market-oriented reforms across the world, Karl Polanyi's double movement has been invoked not only to explain what is happening but also to give reasons for being hopeful about a different future. Some have suggested a pendulum model of history: a swing from markets to society leading, in the next pha...

One of the great appeals of securitization theory, and a major reason for its success, has been its usefulness as a tool for empirical research: an analytic framework capable of practical application. However, the development of securitization has raised several criticisms, the most important of which concern the nature of securitization theory. In...

There are good security and political economy reasons for furthering integration towards a world political community (WPC), possibly assuming the form of a world state. However, would these reasons provide a legitimate and sustainable basis for the WPC? It is argued in this article that, while the standard security-military and functionalist politi...

In some contrast to the traditional and ongoing normative discussions about the desirability of a world state, new and more explicitly geo-historical questions about world political integration are being posed, especially (i) whether elements of world statehood are in existence already, (ii) whether a world state is in some sense inevitable, and (i...

We measure time and coordinate our activities in terms of mechanical movements of clocks (seconds and minutes and fractions of these) and in terms of the rotation of the Earth (days) or its orbit around the sun (a year). However, these constant and repetitious movements do not constitute time. They are just particular rhythmics amongst numerous ong...

Orthodox economic theory has functioned as a justification for financial deregulation and the growth of the global financial markets. However, in the absence of a proper analysis of the real world, there can be no adequate regard of the reality of imposing the orthodox ideal of “free markets”. 1 In

Human beings are temporal and spatial beings. We cannot go back in time; whatever we do is an intervention in irreversible, on-going causal processes; physically, we cannot be in two places simultaneously; and the specific area of space we fill in cannot be occupied by anybody else simultaneously. While the nature of time has been theorised in phil...

While the transnational public sphere has existed in the Arendtian sense at least since the mid-19th century, a new kind of reflexively political global civil society emerged in the late 20th century. However, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), advocacy groups, and networks have limited agendas and legitimacy and, without the support of at leas...

A sustainable global future depends on a fundamental shift from the currently dominant national imaginary to a global imaginary. Most of human reasoning is based on prototypes, framings and metaphors that are seldom explicit; although they can be forged, usually they are merely presupposed in everyday reasoning and debates. The background social im...

Critical cosmopolitan orientation has usually been embedded in a non-geocentric physical (NGP) cosmology that locates the human drama on the surface of planet Earth within wide scales of time and space. Although neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for critical cosmopolitanism, NGP cosmology provides a contrast to the underpinnings of cen...

In response to Hostettler, I clarify the intended meanings of ‘After Critical Realism?’ My point is not to abandon critical realism but to develop it further and make it more self-reflexively critical. Bhaskar's journey through different stories about our place in the cosmos is a dialectical learning process from Althusserian scientist existentiali...

While recent scientific discoveries and theories can be taken to provide additional evidence for some of the central critical realist claims, overall critical realism seems to be in need of reassessment, revisions and further developments. First, I argue that here has been an inclination among critical realists to prefer the language and model of p...

In order to build scenarios of possible futures and grasp the structural liabilities and tendencies of global financial markets, we do not need just historical analogies to past crises and collapses but also a conceptual-theoretical model that explains the characteristic mechanisms of financial markets. Firstly, I summarise the neoclassical underst...

The current era of neo-liberal globalisation is in some important ways similar to the era of new imperialism from the early 1870s to 1914. In The Political Economy of Global Security (Patomäki, 2008), I suggest that we can learn from the study of the causes of the late nineteenth-century neoimperial competition that led to the Great War — an outcom...

First I make a case for the possibility of defining neoliberalism in a sufficiently evident and coherent way as a programme of resolving problems of, and developing, human society by means of competitive markets. Second, I argue that the more narrow, technical and short-term one's definition of Keynesianism is, the more plausible the claim about a...

Benjamin J. Cohen's story of the transatlantic divide in IPE follows a simple plot, creating expectations concerning the outcome and culmination of this process. The conclusion is not predictable – there is no story unless our attention is being held in suspense by contingencies – but it must be acceptable. In Cohen's story, the expectation created...

Richard Ned Lebow has written a monumental and unique book. Few IR scholars can claim such multi-expertise in the ancient world, medieval Europe, modern Europe before 1789, the era of new imperialism, World War I, World War II, the Cold War and the contemporary era. The bibliography runs to nearly 170 pages. A Cultural Theory of International Relat...

What are the conditions of, and possibilities for, global security in the 21st century? Have we learnt anything from the late 20th century peace and security studies? In the aftermath of the end of the Cold War, two main lessons suggest themselves.2 The first lesson is liberal democracies do not fight each other (Doyle 1986; Russett 1993a; MacMilla...

What are the possibilities for and conditions of global security in the 21st century? This book provides an innovative study of future wars, crises and transformations of the global political economy. It brings together economic theory, political economy, peace and conflict research, philosophy and historical analogy to explore alternatives for the...

International theory remains Eurocentric. The implicit assumption is that all relevant modern concepts, practices, technologies and capacities are essentially European. Modernity — including the Industrial Revolution — originates exclusively in Europe, and with it, the modern international problematic. In this paper I argue that it is possible to t...

In her otherwise first-rate review of my After International Relations, Branwen Gruffydd Jones maintains that 'Patomaki refuses to contemplate the necessity of radical social transformation (in the sense of socialist transformation) in the struggle for human emancipation'. 1Nothing could be further from the truth.