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2017 | OriginalPaper | Buchkapitel

2. Historical and Economic Roots of Neoliberalism

verfasst von : William Allan

Erschienen in: The Last Empires

Verlag: Springer International Publishing

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Abstract

This chapter applies a Foucauldian-influenced analysis of the historical and socio-economic developments that led to the dominance of neoliberalism at the beginning of the twenty-first century and the necessity for government at all levels to look beyond commerce and tackle the formidable threats now facing society. These threats are due not just to potential economic slowdown and instability but are driven by growing biopolitical imbalances. The chapter reviews the growth of commerce and allied establishment of fiscal-military states and imperial expansion that dominated world development in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It draws on major historical studies of the period and links these developments to the emergence of neoliberalism and the more recent rise of populism. These ideological trends pose great dangers to an already fragile world order. The chapter focuses mainly on three areas that appear critical to ensure continuing global security and integration: first, the ambitious but faltering integration of Europe; second, the changed environment and opportunity for balancing hegemonic competition; and, third, remedying the marginalization of developing countries.

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Vorheriges Kapitel Foucault’s Biopolitics and Its Relevance to Modern Social Science

Nächstes Kapitel From Neoliberalism to Social Accountability

Both The Economist and The Atlantic charts based on Maddison’s work are worth viewing, but the task of graphically illustrating these data over the sweep of two millennia proved very challenging as described in http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2012/06/mis-charting-economic-history and https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/06/the-economic-history-of-the-last-2000-years-part-ii/258762/. Reference to TEDTalk by Hans Rosling in The Economist 2012 article is also of interest in terms of a graphic illustration of the power of demography using Maddison’s data.

Morris (2010, Kindle Locations 9120–9121). Consistent with Foucault’s structuralist criticisms, I would say, “Biology and sociology [aim to] provide universal laws….”

See Morris (2010) Table 2.1, Kindle Locations 2290.

Darwin (2006, p. 6) writes: “His empire was the last real attempt to challenge the partition of Eurasia between the states of the Far West, Islamic Middle Eurasia and Confucian East Asia. Secondly, his political experiments and ultimate failure revealed that power had begun to shift back decisively from the nomad empires to the settled states. Thirdly, the collateral damage that Tamerlane inflicted on Middle Eurasia, and the disproportionate influence that tribal societies continued to wield there, helped (if only gradually) to tilt the Old World’s balance in favour of the Far East and Far West, at the expense of the centre. Lastly, his passing coincided with the first signs of a change in the existing pattern of long-distance trade, the East–West route that he had fought to control.”

See Brewer (1989), Chap. 4, particularly pp. 91–5 and 138–9. The Commissions of Public Account established after 1691 played a significant role in establishing basic oversight and rules of public accountability—despite the reputation of that decade for financial scandal (pp. 150–2). McPhee (2016) adds more detail on the failings of French fiscal administration in the years leading up to the French Revolution in 1789 and its aftermath (see his opening chapter, Patchworks of Power and Privilege: France in the 1780s, pp. 1–22).

On this theme, Darwin (2006, p. 165) made the following points: “The expansion of trade thus contributed directly to war-making power, and financial resources became the ultimate arbiter of military fortune. ‘A financial system… constantly improved, can change a government’s position,’ remarked Frederick the Great, who knew a thing or two about both. ‘From being originally poor it can make a government so rich that it can throw its grain into the scales of the balance between the great European powers.’ By 1815, governments in London had ten times the revenue enjoyed by their predecessors a hundred years earlier. The ‘fiscal-military state’ did not by itself create conflicts and crises. But, by changing the rules that governed success, it opened the way for a new pattern of power.”

He writes: “‘Empire’ is a grand word. But behind its façade (in every place and time) stood a mass of individuals, a network of lobbies, a mountain of hopes: for careers, fortunes, religious salvation or just physical safety. Empires were not made by faceless committees making grand calculations, nor by the ‘irresistible’ pressures of economics or ideology. They had to be made by men (and women) whose actions were shaped by motives and morals no less confused and demanding than those that govern us now.” (p. xi)

On civilizational aspects of colonialization, he says: “[C]olonial peoples and their leaders were rarely without some friends and supporters in Britain to encourage their hopes of eventual release into a free ‘British world’. And far from imposing a common culture on their colonies, the British could neither agree on what it should be, nor on whether to risk the political fall-out that might follow any attempt to enforce it” (p. 279), emphasizing the internal conflicts within the civilizational responsibilities of Empire. Darwin (2012), p. 279. Penguin UK. Kindle Edition.

Lieber and Press (2009) argue that preserving the American deterrent will be far more difficult than it has been in the past, but the US, which has the responsibility of protecting its global network of allies, may find itself “embroiled in conventional wars with nuclear-armed adversaries.” And “Unless the United States maintains potent counterforce capabilities, US adversaries may conclude—perhaps correctly—that the United States’ strategic position abroad rests largely on a bluff.”

A term coined by President Dwight Eisenhower in his 1961 farewell address, in which he said: “This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence—economic, political, even spiritual—is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.” See http://coursesa.matrix.msu.edu/~hst306/documents/indust.html

Ideological labelling becomes particularly confusing in the US, where the term ‘liberal’ has become synonymous with ‘left-wing’ or even ‘communist’. Paul Krugman (2007) traces the evolution of ‘market fundamentalism’ in the Republican Party from initial opposition to Roosevelt’s New Deal, to bipartisanship in the Eisenhower era, to the new conservative policies, articulated by William F. Buckley and his National Review, through to the emergence of Ronald Reagan and eventually, the 2001–2008 Bush–Cheney administration. While labelled ‘neoconservative’ and broadly sympathetic to a conservative nationalist and militaristic agenda, its policies wholly endorsed goals that are elsewhere labelled as neoliberal to minimize the role of government and give as much freedom from regulation as possible to private enterprise. According to Kaletsky (2010) ideology was central to economic policy; market-fundamentalist overreach in the eight Bush–Greenspan years prior to the GFC—and indeed, even prior to that under Clinton—gave close-to unbridled powers to market and financial risk-taking in the US and globally.

John Lanchester (2016), writing in the New Yorker of October 2016, provides a good, broader overview of the politics of the foundation and trajectory of the EU, based on work of Joseph Stiglitz, Markus Brunnermeier, Harold James and Jean-Pierre Landau. He emphasizes the driving role of Jean Monnet (the ‘fixer’), the continuing dominance of France and Germany, particularly the latter’s ‘ordoliberal’ traditions and economic and political strength. He agrees with the Stiglitz (and general) view of the damaging effect of the introduction of the Euro, but suggests “[t]he lack of pragmatism, the willingness to go on doing something that visibly doesn’t work, would have appalled that old fixer Jean Monnet” (p. 76).

See Hayek (1944), Chap. 15, pp. 225–244.

See, for instance, http://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/STUD/2016/556938/IPOL_STU(2016)556938_EN.pdf, which describes negotiations with the UK on sovereignty issues just prior to the Brexit vote. It cites, among other things, the UK preference for a “Europe of States” rather than an “ever closer union” (pp. 5–6). The institutions and legal framework of the EU are overviewed critically by Penelope Corfield in her blog (http://www.penelopejcorfield.com/whats-wrong-with-the-european-unions-hybrid-constitution/ and well summarized in Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institutions_of_the_European_Union).

As described and somewhat redressed in Ashendon and Owen (1999).

Mazower (2009, Kindle Locations 196–197).

“Its relaxed criteria for entry were designed to encourage universality of membership precisely in order to avoid the creation of international factions and rival alliances outside the world body. Thus the sole criterion for membership was deliberately established as an external one—the fact of a state’s “peace-loving nature” (Kindle Locations 1785–1787).

See Mazower (2012) Chap. 10, Development as World-Making, 1949–73.

In both cases the US has a huge influence on policies; as the major shareholder, and by convention that still continues, the World Bank President has been nominated by the US, and the IMF Managing Director by Europe, but always with a US-nominated First Deputy Managing Director.

See Mazower (2012), p. 315 and Tinbergen (1966).

As Stephen Kotkin (2016) observes, “Russia has almost always been a relatively weak great power,” citing the major losses in terms of military and influence from the Crimean War through to the Cold War. “But the impetus behind Russian grand strategy had not changed. And over the last decade, Russian President Vladimir Putin has returned to the trend of relying on the state to manage the gulf between Russia and the more powerful West.” (pp. 2–3) The possibility of a sustained improvement between the US under President Trump and Putin’s Russia on the basis of commercial and geopolitical deals seems wildly improbable, and, if successful, at great cost to the poor and vulnerable.

See Gordon Smith (2011) Asia’s representation in the new global grouping was expanded from Japan, as the sole representative of the G7/8, to six countries from the region (Japan, China, and South Korea–East Asia; Indonesia–Southeast Asia; India–South Asia; and Australia–Oceania). He emphasizes that to be sustainable it must be both effective and demonstrably more representative than the G8, but concludes that it remains the best option for working through such complex challenges. Since that time, the G8 has become the G7 and it is fair to say that the G20 role is still to be fully defined.

See https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/01/full-text-of-xi-jinping-keynote-at-the-world-economic-forum

Ashendon, Samantha, and David Owen. 1999. Foucault Contra Habermas. London/California/New Delhi: Sage Publications.

Bhojani, Fatima. 2016. How ISIS Makes IEDs: The Supply Chain of Terrorism. Foreign Affairs, Web March 2.

Blackwill, Robert D., and Jennifer M. Harris. 2016. The Lost Art of Economic Statecraft: Restoring an Economic Tradition. Foreign Affairs 95 (2): 99–110.

Brewer, John. 1989. The Sinews of Power: War Money and the English State. New York: Alfred A Knopf.CrossRef

Darwin, John. 2006. After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire. New York: Bloomsbury Press.

———. 2012. Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain. Kindle ed, xiv. London: Penguin.

Fukuyama, Francis. 2014a. America in Decay: The Sources of Political Dysfunction. Foreign Affairs 93 (5): 5–26.

———. 2014b. Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy. New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux.

Garton Ash, Timothy. 2012. The Crisis of Europe: How the Union Came Together and Why It’s Falling Apart. Foreign Affairs 91 (5): 2–15.

Grygiel, Jakub. 2016. The Return of Europe’s Nation States: The Upside to the EU’s Crisis. Foreign Affairs 95 (5): 94–101.

Habermas, Jürgen. 2012. The Crisis of the European Union: A Response. Trans. Ciaran Cronin. Cambridge : Polity Press.

Hacker, Jacob S., and Paul Pierson. 2016. Making America Great Again: The Case for the Mixed Economy. Foreign Affairs 95 (3): 69–90.

Hayek, Friedrich August. 1944. The Road to Serfdom. London/New York: Routledge.

Kaletsky, Anatole. 2010. Capitalism 4.0: The Birth of a New Economy. London/New York/Berlin/Sydney: Bloomsbury.

Kausikan, Bilahari. 2017. Asia in the Trump Era: From Pivot to Peril? Foreign Affairs, Review Essay, May/June (online version).

Kotkin, Stephen. 2016. Russia’s Perpetual Geopolitics: Putin Returns to the Historical Pattern. Foreign Affairs 95 (3): 2–9.

Krugman, Paul. 2007. The Conscience of a Liberal: Reclaiming America from the Right. London: Allen Lane/Penguin.

Lanchester, John. 2016. Money Trap: Can Europe Survive the Euro. The New Yorker, October 24, pp. 73–76.

Lieber, Keir E., and Daryl G. Press. 2009. The Nukes We Need. Foreign Affairs 88 (6): 39–51.

Mazower, Mark. 2009. No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations. Kindle ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

———. 2012. Governing the World: the History of an Idea. London/New York/Melbourne: Allen Lane/Penguin.

McPhee, Peter. 2016. Liberty or Death: The French Revolution. New Haven/London: Yale University Press.

Morris, Ian. 2010. Why the West Rules – For Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future. Kindle ed. London: Profile Books.

Nathan, Andrew J., and Andrew Scobell. 2012. How China Sees America. Foreign Affairs 91 (5): 32–47.

Parkinson, Martin. 2016. Economics of Power: Stepping Towards a New Global Order. Griffith Review 51: 59–173, South Bank Campus, Griffith University, Queensland.

Smith, Gordon S. 2011. G7 to G8 to G20: Evolution in Global Governance, Centre for International Government Innovation (CIGI) G20 Papers, No 6, May.

Tampke, Jürgen. 2017. A Perfidious Distortion of History: The Versailles Peace Treaty and the Success of the Nazis. Melbourne/London: Scribe.

Tinbergen, Jan. 1966. International Economic Planning. Daedalus 95 (2), Conditions of World Order (Spring): 530–557 (http://www.jstor.org/stable/20026983).

Titel: Historical and Economic Roots of Neoliberalism
verfasst von: William Allan
Verlag: Springer International Publishing
Buch: The Last Empires
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-59959-5

Electronic ISBN: 978-3-319-59960-1

Copyright-Jahr: 2017
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-59960-1_2

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