A specter is haunting Europe: a neoliberal phantasmagoria (original) (raw)
Related papers
Neoliberalism in the European Union
Studies in Political Economy, 2009
Christoph Hermann’s article “Neoliberalism in the European Union” seeks to dispel the view held by many on the Leftin North America and the European Union itself that Europe harbours a socially more progressive state. Whether it isthe Single Market Strategy, European competition policy, or European Economic and Monetary Integration and theEuropean Employment Strategy, policy changes in the EU follow the neoliberal blueprint closely. As is the case in other areas where the neoliberal agenda has been adopted, the consequences are mass unemployment and theredistribution of income and wealth away from labour.
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.
The battle for hegemony: Resistance and neoliberal restructuring in post-crisis Europe
The post-crisis environment has seen a number of poignant developments over the nature of political and economic continuity. As austerity policies have emerged, a wide collection of resistance has grown which has been marked by civil and political demonstration. The result has been the emergence of a number of different positions from both the left and the radical right which have sought to challenge the centrist political management of the crisis. Following earlier work on the nature of such resistance (Worth in Resistance in the age of austerity. Zed Books, London, 2013b), this article argues that its fragmented nature has led to the failure of the left to develop a coherent alternative to austerity. It also highlights how some Eurosceptic positions on the right have emerged in such a way that they either have followed the Tea Party in advocating a far more market centrist neoliberal position (such as UKIP in Britain) or have looked to sideline economic issues with a reactionary pursuit of anti-multicultural issues. By using a Gramscian understanding of hegemony, the article suggests oppo-sitional groups have lacked a form capable of mustering a successful 'war of position' in challenging austerity. As a result, the main principles of neoliberal governance – market generated growth, deregulation, fiscal prudency – which were seen as untenable in 2008, have re-emerged through the guise of austerity and debt management. Indeed, it can be suggested that neoliberalism has actually consolidated its hegemonic position due to greater debates both on the role that state should play in bailouts and on the fact that through austerity, neoliberalism appears able to survive periods of crisis.
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 ...
2012
"There are many key questions concerning the current status of the notion of neoliberalism. What is it? Is it an appropriate concept to describe a political and intellectual movement or form of state? What are its prospects as a framework of public policy after the global financial crisis? The article proposes a way of answering these questions by regarding neoliberalism as a definite ‘thought collective’ and a regime of government of and by the state. It exemplifies these by shifts within neoliberalism regarding the question of monopoly, its relationship to classical liberalism and its approach to crisis management. In regard to the latter, it further proposes an emergent rationality of the government of and by the state concerning the fostering of resilience in the anticipation of catastrophe."
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
Politique Européenne, 2020
Book review of Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian, Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, London-New York, Verso, 2020