The high economic growth was supported by an "aggressive but vulnerable system," with a large current account deficit and the firm-finance nexus tending to produce non-performing loans. It precipitated a crisis in 1972, but the government resolved it with an emergency decree. The government then launched a strong industrial policy backed by expansionary macroeconomic policy through the First Oil Shock, laying the ground for another crisis in 1979. The government carried out disinflation policy in the 1980s, and the high economic growth resumed, now with a lower inflation rate and a smaller current account deficit, culminating in a boom in 1986–1988. However, inflation and the current account deficit returned, though in a milder form. The country sustained the high economic growth by boosting construction investment, and then as facility and intellectual property investments increased to meet the emerging global boom. However, the non-performing loans and capital market openings made the economy vulnerable to crises.

This chapter refutes the reading of midcentury Spanish American novels as transitional works that prepared the ground for Boom novels of the 1960s and 1970s. Invoking the disaster theories of Thomas Homer-Dixon and Naomi Klein, the chapter reads Alejo Carpentier’s El reino de este mundo (The Kingdom of This World, 1949) and Miguel ángel Asturias’s Mulata de tal (Mulata, 1963) as responses, respectively, to the disasters of the Spanish Civil War and the 1954 military coup in Guatemala. Extending this reading to one of the culminating works of the Boom, the conclusion continues this rupturing of the chronology of transition by analyzing José Donoso’s novel El jardin de al lado (The Garden Next Door, 1981) as a response to the 1973 military coup in Chile. These novels’ technical innovations are interpreted as personal reactions to dire circumstances, usually at about a decade’s distance from the event, rather than as components of an arc of self-conscious, collective literary development. Transition, therefore, becomes more arbitrary, and more personal, than most literary histories portray it as being.

This chapter refutes the reading of midcentury Spanish American novels as transitional works that prepared the ground for Boom novels of the 1960s and 1970s. Invoking the disaster theories of Thomas Homer-Dixon and Naomi Klein, the chapter reads Alejo Carpentier’s El reino de este mundo (The Kingdom of This World, 1949) and Miguel ángel Asturias’s Mulata de tal (Mulata, 1963) as responses, respectively, to the disasters of the Spanish Civil War and the 1954 military coup in Guatemala. Extending this reading to one of the culminating works of the Boom, the conclusion continues this rupturing of the chronology of transition by analyzing José Donoso’s novel El jardin de al lado (The Garden Next Door, 1981) as a response to the 1973 military coup in Chile. These novels’ technical innovations are interpreted as personal reactions to dire circumstances, usually at about a decade’s distance from the event, rather than as components of an arc of self-conscious, collective literary development. Transition, therefore, becomes more arbitrary, and more personal, than most literary histories portray it as being.

Why have so many Latin American authors recently taken up themes of Nazism, the Second World War and the Holocaust? This introduction re-caps the development of Latin American literary production from the nineteenth century to the present in order to explain why it is a notable trend that can tell us about phenomena as diverse as literary generations, globalization, racism, precarious labour, dictatorship, democracy, ethics and ontology. It investigates whether narratives from Argentina, Chile, Mexico, Colombia and Brazil have anything in common in their approaches to the subject; and whether they are similar or distinct from works by their canonized precursors such as Jorge Luis Borges, Carlos Fuentes, Carlos Onetti and Ricardo Piglia. Ultimately, this introduction sets out a framework for understanding a gradual shift in Latin American literature, from novels underpinning the ‘imagined communities’ of nations (Benedict Anderson), to authors deconstructing these and instead gesturing towards ‘inoperative communities’ (Jean-Luc Nancy).

Trump’s America First Energy Plan, which focuses on oil and gas expansion and rolling back regulations, promised to insulate the US economy from the volatile global oil market. In reality, the US shale oil industry, operating within the global oil markets, suffered contractions when oil supplier nations’ price wars caused global oil prices to crash. While the plan promised to bring Americans jobs and prosperity, predicating economic development on oil and gas extraction is a dubious strategy for several reasons. The shale industry, which contributed to the recent boom and expected future production, suffers from a shaky financial foundation. Even prior to COVID-19, traditional investors had begun cutting lending to shale companies and bankruptcies were accelerating. In March 2020, under Congress’s COVID-19 financial rescue package, the Trump administration executed a bailout for the oil and gas industry that shifted financial losses to American taxpayers without securing companies’ agreements to keep workers employed. The bailout replicates the decades-long economic model of the industry, which privatizes profits to the companies, while socializing the costs from the industry, through tax preferences and subsidies for the industry and through various laws that favor extraction over those that suffer from the industry’s adverse impacts.

The hybrid name for Latin America is a clue to its double consciousness and, as a corollary, to its talent for exploring complexity. A push and pull between competing classical and local lineages among displaced and replaced peoples has brought curses on Latin America, but also the blessings of an unbidden freedom to invent new patterns. If bitterness haunts the deracination on a continental scale, irreverence lightens the burden. From colonial times through the current post-Boom period, Latin American literature has been a vehicle for cagey revenge against metropolitan conventions, and for re-membering aboriginal cultures. The legend of Inkari, for example, literally foretells how the body of the Inca emperor, dismembered by Spanish conquerors, will reassemble underground and emerge triumphant. Double consciousness in Latin America describes a culture of baroque anxiety and compensation for doubt about one’s place in the world. With Afro-Latin American literature, the ironies multiply exponentially. Architectural monuments to excess -- meant to overwhelm worries that followed from the discovery of sophisticated cultures that had no debts Europe – worries about the nature of God, the center of culture, one’s own identity -- are visible throughout the continent’s landscape. Local gods and African orishas adorn Catholic temples. Excess is audible too, in the complex strategies for addressing readers, starting from colonial times and reviving after interruptions of purposeful coherence and optimism. The great first masters of Latin American literature were baroque, practically by default as they navigated conflicting codes and overwhelmed the fault lines with clever structures. As pioneers of local style, they set the tone for future movements, through the taste for complexity waffled when political ambitions for independence or national consolidation triumphed through foundational fictions written by political leaders in order to win the hearts of newly minted citizens.  Compared to the skillful jousts with European conventions by baroque masters, nation builders and populists would seem naïve to the ironic novelists who ignited a Boom in Latin American literature and who brought European readers face to face with the structural contradictions of modern cultures.

Instead of seeing Boom authors as the beneficiaries of international economic developments and marketing campaigns or as passive victims of US political propaganda during the Cold War, it would be wiser to acknowledge their ideological and literary agency. Magical realism, as well as other Boom aesthetic choices, including modernist experimentalism, responded to two separate developments. First, independently from a potential influence of CIA-backed political propaganda in Latin America, they were an inevitable outcome of the direct literary influence of US and European masters. Second, magical realism and other modernist formal experimentation used by the Boom authors, rather than being a nod to anti-communist US propaganda during the Cold War era, were a direct and personal reaction precisely against the strict internationalist political dictums coming first from the Soviet Union and then from Cuba. They responded to a self-affirmation of the authors' autonomy and individual/national approach against Soviet and Cuban revolutionary impositions.

What was the contribution of European integration to the economic history of Western Europe? Also on this issue, the EU often claims to have been both important and successful while, in fact, there is surprisingly little research on its economic effects. This chapter argues that the EC did indeed contribute to growing material prosperity in the member states during the Cold War. However, this contribution remained rather modest, at well below half of 1 per cent additional GDP growth per annum. The European Community had greater weight in relative terms during the 1970s and 1980s than during the 1950s and 1960s, even this has been generally overlooked to date. It thus played a greater role once the post-war boom was over, and, without it, the slump would have been even worse. Those aspects aside, the location of the economic within the integration process remained curiously vague during the Cold War. Economic integration was on the one hand an end in itself to promote prosperity; on the other it was always just a means to achieve overarching political objectives.