World Politics in Turbulence HANNS W. MAULL ARTIKEL /ARTICLES Introduction The world financial crisis, which began in the spring of 2007 but erupted in September 2008 with the spectacular collapse of the us investment bank Lehman Brothers, will not rewrite the future of international relations, but it will accelerate the fundamental transformation in international politics which has already been under way for quite some time. This trans­formation is not only, and perhaps not even primarily, about the growing power and significance of China, Asia and other emerging economies, however much this presently dominates the public perception. Its most important aspect is that world politics overall are becoming more un­predictable, more uncertain and more dangerous. In this sense, the great world financial and economic crisis of 2008–2010 has been both effect and cause. Its outbreak and its dimensions were symptoms of growing systemic weaknesses in the international order, and its reverberations will probably cause this process of erosion to accelerate further. Among the principal causes of this crisis were the systematic expansion of credit in the form of mortgages and credit cards by financial institutions aided and abetted by governments, together with the creation of a host of new and innovative financial instruments. 1 This led to an unparalleled consumption boom and helped to disguise serious structural fault lines and imbalances in America and in the world economy which otherwise might have become visible earlier. Prolonged lax monetary policies by the us Federal Reserve Bank unwisely fuelled this consumption binge, perhaps to defuse social strains caused by an excessive redistribution of 1. See, for example, Raghuram Rajan(2010): Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Econom y. Princeton, NJ/Oxford: Princeton University Press; Hans-Werner Sinn(2010): Kasino-Kapitalismus: Wie es zur Finanzkrise kam, und was jetzt zu tun ist. Frankfurt: Ullstein; Nouriel Roubini and Stephen Mihm(2010): Crisis Economics, A Crash Course in the Future of Finance. New York: Penguin(Ger­man edition: Das Ende der Weltwirtschaft und ihre Zukunft. Frankfurt: Campus). ipg 1/2011 Maull, World Politics in Turbulence 11