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Work group
The Economy (Senior Fellow)
Sandrine Kott is Professor of Modern European History at the University of Geneva and Global Distinguished Professor at New York University. She specialises in the history of social welfare and labour in modern Europe and in a global perspective.
Her recent publications include: A More Equal World. An Internationalist Perspective on the Cold War, Columbia University Press, 2004; Social State and Society. The German Empire in Europe, Göttingen, Vandehoeck&Ruprecht, 2014, (ed. with Kiran Klaus Patel), Nazism across Borders. The Social Policies of the Third Reich and their Global Appeal, Oxford University Press, 2018, (ed. with Michel Christian and Ondrej Matejka), Planning in Cold War Europe, competition, cooperation, circulations, Oldenburg, De Gruyter, 2018.
Research Project
European debates on Multinational corporations. Global capitalism and local resistance (1960-1980)
In 1967, in Le défi américain (The American Challenge), French journalist Jean Jacques Schreiber warned of the danger of "American colonization" of Europe, through the multiplication of US multinational corporations.
Already since the early 1960s, the major international -mainly Western- trade union secretariats, had highlighted the danger these MNC posed to European workers and, more broadly, to the European social model.
Interestingly, while trade unions tried -and failed- to organize international responses to the internationalization of capitalism, employers stressed that multinationals were no more than an aggregate of national companies and should be submitted exclusively to national rules and legislations.
Therefore, employers with the support of governments -and also trade unions) in the global South were able to use social dumping strategy to the detriment of European workers.
For their part, European workers, whose solidarity is mainly rooted in their territories (workshops, enterprises, nations) have revealed unable to counteract this global strategy.
I will study this pattern: global capitalism versus local resistance through a series of specific cases.