Juliet Ellen Johnson

• Professor at McGill University

The 2008 global financial crisis and its aftermath provided fertile soil for criticism of and alternatives to the international liberal order, including the rise of financial nationalism. Contemporary financial nationalism is a view of the world that is nationalist in its motivation for political action, financial in its policy focus, and illiberal...

Central bankers and financial regulators in in East Central Europe and the Balkans regularly employed macroprudential policy before the global financial crisis and continue to be among its most active proponents in the European Union. We draw upon the Dependent Market Economy framework to explore how the EU’s five DMEs ‐ the Czech Republic, Hungary...

This article examines the extent to which central bankers have been willing and able to rethink their beliefs about monetary policy in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis. We show that despite the upheaval, the core pre-crisis monetary policy paradigm remains relatively intact: central bankers believe that they should primarily pursue price sta...

This article examines the extent to which central bankers have been willing and able to rethink their beliefs about monetary policy in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis. We show that despite the upheaval, the core pre‐crisis monetary policy paradigm remains relatively intact: central bankers believe that they should primarily pursue price sta...

Those advocating the removal of US Confederate monuments have generally relied on the claim that because the ideas these monuments represent (i.e. White supremacy) have no legitimate place in political discourse, the monuments should be removed from public space. While we share this normative position, experiences while teaching our interdisciplina...

Currency crises have been a recurrent feature of Russia's post-Soviet experience. This article examines three episodes of sudden and sharp ruble depreciation in 1998, 2008, and 2014–16. We examine these crises and their political consequences as iterative episodes in the Russian government's ongoing efforts to deal with its structural dependence on...

The Russian government saw the 2008 global financial crisis as both a repudiation of western neoliberalism and as an ideal opportunity to promote its own international economic leadership. Russia's alternative vision encompasses multipolarity, financial nationalism and political illiberalism. These policies are symbiotic. The state uses its control...

This book explores the unsung revolutionary campaign to transform postcommunist central banks from command-economy cash cows into Western-style monetary guardians. The book argues that a powerful transnational central banking community concentrated in Western Europe and North America integrated postcommunist central bankers into its network, shaped...

This chapter analyzes the Hungarian, Czech, and Slovak central banks in depth, tracing their extensive transformations and surprising difficulties with internalization in the context of the European integration process. Hungary represented the best-case scenario, the country that began in the most advantageous political and economic position. Stron...

Priests of Prosperity explores the unsung revolutionary campaign to transform postcommunist central banks from command-economy cash cows into Western-style monetary guardians. Juliet Johnson conducted more than 160 interviews in seventeen countries with central bankers, international assistance providers, policymakers, and private-sector finance pr...

Viktor Orbán and his centre-right Fidesz party won Hungary's April 2010 parliamentary elections in a landslide, running on a nationalist-populist platform of economic self-rule. This paper explores Hungary's financial nationalist turn and its surprisingly successful resistance to IMF and EU pressures to change course. We open by theorizing financia...

An anniversary issue provides an inescapably inviting opportunity to reflect on the past, evaluate the present, and contemplate the future. Eschewing the self-congratulatory rhetoric of traditional anniversary celebrations, we have devoted this 20th anniversary issue of RIPE to contributions that critically examine the academic discipline of intern...

This article looks at collective memory formation—the study of monuments, memory, and public space—through a political science lens. An explicit theoretical focus on power relations in "monumental politics" and a methodological approach featuring large-N comparative analysis are combined to examine the process of monument creation, destruction, and...

Visitors are subject to extensive access-control procedures at the open but as-yet unfinished World Trade Center (WTC) memorial site. This is in sharp contrast to the open plaza envisioned in Michael Arad's finished design. We argue that rather than being merely a pragmatic security measure or a distraction from the memorial, such access-control ca...

Although central and eastern European states widely adopted central bank independence in the 1990s, many later baulked at meeting the Maastricht criteria and adopting the euro. We employ two key variables - regime and institutional "discontinuity" at the domestic level and the "credibility" of international institutions' policies - to explain these...

Both studies of political power and Europeanization studies have tended to neglect central banks. As the age of the euro reaches its 10th anniversary, it is timely to reflect on what it means for central banks, which have been at the forefront of the establishment of Economic and Monetary Union in the European Union. Central banks have been caught...

When eight postcommunist states became European Union members in 2004, they committed to eventually joining the euro zone. But by 2005 the states' diverging preferences on pursuing rapid euro adoption had split them into 'pacesetters' (the Baltic states, Slovenia, and Slovakia) and 'laggards' (Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary). This contrast...

At the turn of the twenty-first century, Russia entered into a unique relationship with the US dollar: it became the only major country with both a highly dollarized economy and extensive dollar reserves. Russia also played a pivotal role in the international gas and oil markets, where resources are priced in and sold for US dollars. This paper arg...

Post-communist Europe's increasing convergence with the European Union has generated contentious debate over the underlying impetus for this change. Did the material incentives and implicit coercion inherent in the EU accession process prod East Central European leaders onwards in their reform efforts, or did they adopt new institutions because of...

Both proponents and detractors of central bank independence (CBI) view granting central bank independence as a domestic decision made for domestic economic reasons after domestic political consideration. However, postcommunist independent central banks began their lives burdened with a dual democratic deficit. Not only were they predominantly devel...

Imagined Economies: The Sources of Russian Regionalism. By Yoshiko M. Herrera. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 318p. $75.00. In her book Yoshiko Herrera crafts an impressive theoretical argument by first noting and then rectifying an important intellectual inconsistency in contemporary studies of nationalism. While these studies typical...

Building Democracy in Contemporary Russia: Western Support for Grassroots Organizations, Sarah L. Henderson, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003, pp. xii, 229. In this well-researched and provocative book, Sarah Henderson asks to what extent Western aid can facilitate the emergence of civil society in countries where civil society is domesticall...

Through a comparative analysis of Germany and Russia, this paper explores how participation in the memorialization process affects and reflects national identity formation in post‐totalitarian societies. These post‐totalitarian societies face the common problem of re‐presenting their national character as civic and democratic, in great part because...

This article explores the formation of post–Soviet Russian national identity through a study of political struggles over key Soviet–era monuments and memorials in Moscow during the “critical juncture” in Russian history from 1991 through 1999. We draw on the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Pierre Nora to explain how competition among political elites f...

The effectiveness of institutional design policies in postcommunist states depends upon interactions among policy choice, institutional legacies, state capacity, and policy sequencing. Institutional change is path-contingent. It is explained neither by the voluntarism of agency-centered approaches nor by the determinism of structural, path-dependen...

Paradoxically, although a market economy may be necessary to consolidate a democracy, the monopolization of financial resources by Russian commercial banks may give rise to an oligarchical financial and industrial elite that threatens the country’s democratic future.

The numerous similarities between Russia and China make it intuitively attractive to examine the relevance of Chinese economic reforms to the troubled situation in Russia. In addition, Russia's wavering between Chinese and Western economic models is a real-world replay of two heated theoretical debates: first, between shock therapists and those who...

In the late 1980s an international consensus emerged on the desirability of formally insulating domestic monetary authorities from direct government influence, on the grounds that an independent monetary authority can best take the sometimes unpopular measures necessary to keep inflation low. Acting on the consensus typically meant passing legislat...

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