Why are neoliberal ideas so resilient in Europe’s political economy? (original) (raw)
Neo-liberalism - A Theory of the Free Economy and a Strong State
2011
In this paper I will critically discuss whether it is true or not that Neoliberalism is signified by a strong state in combination with a free economy. First of all I will give a short illustration of the evolution from the classical liberal approach of Adam Smith to modern Neoliberalism á la Hayek or Friedman and further continue with a distinction between the strong (liberal) state which has the sole power to coerce and the weak (democratic) state which is said to be guided by ‘imprudent’ majority rule rather than law and order. Subsequently, I will argue that the liberal state is mainly dominated by bourgeois interests in setting up ‘equal’ property rights and by undermining democratic processes. Thus, governments function more as an obedient enforcer of the ‘free’ market which finally becomes the playing field of pure efficiency, civil repression and competition instead of being a politically legitimized society/market-balancing institution.
Neo-liberal Challanges and the Demise of Keynesian-Weberian State
Bilgi Sosyal Bilimler Dergisi, 2021
Following the II. World War, there was huge devastation, and without state intervention, it was not probable to reconstruct infrastructure and rejuvenate the industry. Under these conditions to reinvigorate the economy and overcome the destruction of the war, state intervention was welcomed by large parts of society. Accordingly, the state became a vital actor in the economic sphere, and Keynesian-Weberian structures were associated with development. However, after the mid-1970s, centrally planned economic policies were pointed out as the source of operational inefficiency, poor performance, and financial deficit. The proposals to rehabilitate the illnesses of the interventionist state were based upon neo-liberal principles and called New Public Management which became vogue in Europe and suggested limiting the boundary of state activities. One of its concrete outcomes is huge transfers of state-owned assets and public services to the private sector and limited the state's regulatory power. This article aims to contribute to understanding the nature and arguments of Keynesian interventionist and deregulatory neo-liberal approaches upon the state's role inthe economic domain.
Neo-liberalism: Policy, ideology, governmentality
2000
Abstract The term''neo-liberalism''denotes new forms of political-economic governance premised on the extension of market relationships. In critical social science literatures, the term has usurped labels referring to specific political projects (Thatcherism, Regeanomics, Rogernomics), and is more widely
The Euro crisis and contradictions of Neoliberalism in Europe
2013
Neoliberalism has not given rise to a sustained profit-led growth process, but to a finance-dominated accumulation regime in which growth relies either on financial bubbles and rising household debt (‘debt-driven growth’) or on net exports (‘export-driven growth’). The financial crisis that began in the market for derivatives on the US subprime mortgage market has translated into the worst recession since the 1930s. In Europe the crisis has been amplified by an economic policy architecture (the Stability and Growth Pact) that aimed at restricting the role of fiscal policy and insulating monetary policy and central banks from national governments. The crisis has thus led to a sharp economic divergence between core and peripheral countries. Contrary to the situation in the (export-driven) Germanic core of Europe, the crisis is escalating in the (debt-driven) southern countries of Europe. The paper interprets the policy regime as the outcome of national elites’ attempt to use European ...
Neo-liberal principles have come to constitute the background ideas of European political economies, as the unquestioned beliefs or core philosophy that have exercised a seemingly incontrovertible hold since the 1980s in Europe. Using a discursive institutionalist framework, this article defines background ideas, describes their different forms, levels, and types, theorizes about the nature of continuity and change in such ideas, and considers the agents and discursive processes through which such ideas are constructed and disseminated. It illustrates throughout with examples of neo-liberalism, from the philosophical origins through its many different permutations in different institutional contexts over time. The article concludes that although “background ideas” as a concept remains somewhat elusive, it is nonetheless useful as a way of understanding how neo-liberalism has managed to infuse people’s deepest assumptions about the possible and thereby to set the limits of the imaginable with regard to political economic action.
Neoliberalism and patterns of economic performance: 1980 to 2000
Mpra Paper, 2006
Neoliberal discourse often produces the impression that the world has undergone a wholesale shift towards laissez-faire, and that this shift has produced economic prosperity. This chapter examines national economic data to discern the degree to which (1) governments have in fact retreated from the market, and (2) countries have enjoyed increasing economic prosperity over a period in which they have supposedly been liberalizing. The evidence is mixed on both counts. Although international interconnectedness appears to have grown over the past two decades, there is little evidence of a substantial scaling back of governments. Over the same period, countries have not experienced any appreciable improvement in growth, cross-national equality, employment or national debt loads, although there is some evidence of improved price stability near the end of the 1990s.
Neoliberalism Since the Crisis
Among critical social scientists and progressive activists alike, analysis of neoliberalism has become inseparable from the examination of the crisis that has engulfed the global economy since 2007. When the crisis began, it was interpreted by many, not least the mainstream media and even some of the staunchest advocates of neoliberalism, as a crisis of the model of capitalism that had dominated global economic policy for the previous two-and-a-half decades. Moreover, neoliberal policies promoting financialization were widely held to be responsible for the onset of crisis. As states responded to the crisis with (what appeared to be) new restrictions on finance capital and the nationalization of some of the world's largest banks and financial corporations, many thought it reasonable to conclude that the neoliberal era was coming to an end. Yet, as the global economic crisis continues, so does the rollout of recognizably neoliberal policies of austerity, privatization, deregulation and more and more features of the welfare states built in the postwar era. They have been used as tools of crisis management, even as states have experimented with new forms of economic regulation, such as quantitative easing. Particularly in those countries worst hit by recession, such tools have deepened and (provisionally) channelled abroad the economic crisis, instead of resolving it, while contributing to the stagnation of demand and miring ordinary people in perpetual austerity. It is perhaps unsurprising then that contestation over post-crisis neoliberalism is evident in many of the recent seismic political developments across the globe. Most obviously, the rise of radical left-wing parties in Greece, Spain, Portugal and elsewhere, and the popularity of leaders such as British Labour's Jeremy Corbyn, or Bernie Sanders in the USA, are direct reactions to the devastating effects of enforced neoliberal austerity. These follow earlier political movements against some of the harshest forms of neoliberalism in the Global South – such as the so-called 'Pink Tide' that carried a series of (more-or-less radical) left-wing parties to government across Latin America. But the echoes of dissent against neoliberalism, however distorted, can also be heard in the successful 'leave' campaign in the British referendum on its EU membership, in some of Donald Trump's economic policies (even as he is so obviously one of the world's leading beneficiaries of neoliberalization), and in the rise of the National Front, in France, alongside the mobilization of racial prejudices and national imaginaries in many countries. The premise of this special issue of Critical Sociology is that an understanding of neoliberalism since the crisis is crucial for comprehending the contradictions, conflicts and social forces reshaping the contemporary global political economy. Despite scholarship on, about and around neoliberalism having burgeoned since the onset of the global crisis, a settled definition of neoliberalism remains
Outline the arguments of neoliberal thinkers, e.g. Hayek, Friedman, in their critiques of state intervention in the economy and in relation to the welfare state? What arguments would you advance in response to these views?