Elites on Trial: Introduction

In 2008, the world entered a new period of turmoil. Financial markets collapsed, banks and other financial institutions went into crisis as their balance sheets quickly moved into the red. As a result, credit dried up, consumption reduced and firms started to cut back and reduce investment in the light of uncertainty. Unemployment increased and welfare payments increased. States that had stepped in to support their banking system now faced a second challenge of how to fund growing expenditure at a time when tax revenues were declining with the fall in economic activity. A combination of borrowing from the financial markets and implementing austerity policies to cut state spending became the norm but it impacted differently in different countries and on different social groups. This book is concerned with what happens when elites are challenged by such a crisis; in our terms, elites are ‘on trial’, sometimes literally for the criminal part they played in the financial crisis by misleading and defrauding people and institutions but also metaphorically in the sense that they led societies to this crisis. They are thus on trial for their role in the past and in the crisis but they are also on trial in terms of what role they are playing in the aftermath. Can they reestablish their legitimacy or will they fail this trial and find themselves replaced by other groups with different objectives? In order to begin to answer these questions, we need approaches that are comparative across societies, historical across time and relational in the sense of focusing on the interaction between elites and other social groups. This collection draws together a variety of approaches which helps us understand elites on trial.