Thread by @battleforeurope

“The Globalists” by @zeithistoriker, an account of the evolution of neoliberal globalism, one of the dominant (albeit less known) ideologies of the 20th/21st century, is a hugely important book. Here are some of the book’s key takeaways (long thread; citations are in quotes):

Neoliberalism is not founded on a belief in laissez-faire, self-regulating markets, etc. Neoliberals, in fact, were not opposed to the state at all. They were well aware “that markets are not natural but are products of the political construction of institutions to encase them”.

“The real focus of neoliberal proposals is not on the market per se but on redesigning states, laws, and other institutions to protect the market”.

The neoliberals “called for the ‘actual depoliticization of the economic’. Needless to say, this form of ‘depoliticization’ was very political, and entailed a dramatic application of executive power”.

The neoliberals did not want to eliminate the state; they wanted “to take the state back from the masses”.

More specifically, the neoliberals were profoundly aware that the state was necessary to safeguard capitalism from democracy and popular sovereignty – their real enemies.

The neoliberals were thinkers “who did not see capitalism and democracy as mutually reinforcing but who instead faced democracy as a problem”. They “were key articulators of what Jan-Werner Müller calls ‘constrained democracy’”.

In this sense, “is it is wrong to see neo-liberals as critics of the state per se but correct to see them as perennial skeptics of the nation-state” – that is, of the state as the locus of collective decision-making by a demos.

Disempowering the nation-state – a project which, paradoxically, required the state – was a way of disempowering the only subject capable of undertaking a collective economic plan: a relatively fixed, territorially defined community.

Indeed, most neoliberals “had no qualms about using government military power to open and secure overseas markets” or to crush labour unions – in other words, about using the state against the people.

“The neoliberal project focused on designing institutions – not to liberate markets but to encase them, to inoculate capitalism against the threat of democracy”. To separate the economic realm from the democratic one.

This was a national as well as international project: “The core of twentieth-century neoliberal theorizing involves what they called the meta-economic or extra-economic conditions for safeguarding capitalism at the scale of the entire world”. This is globalism in a nutshell.

“This was not a minimalist but an activist vision of statecraft mobilized to push back against the incipient power of democratically enabled masses”.

“The neoliberals offered a blueprint for globalism based on institutions of multitiered governance that are insulated from democratic decision making”. This was “a project in which states play an indispensable role”.

What they proposed was, in effect, a double government, “by which administration of economic issues would be separated from cultural issues and the economy would be depoliticized through a supranational state form”.

This was achieved, most notably, through the creation of institutions such as the IMF and World Bank, governance structures like the EU (left: take note), trade treaties like NAFTA and the WTO, and the expansion of international investment law.

These should be seen as “apparatuses of juridical power to encase markets beyond democratic accountability”.

The neoliberals sought “not a partial but a complete protection of private capital rights, and the ability of supranational judiciary bodies like the ECJ and the WTO to override national legislation that might disrupt the global rights of capital”.

Clearly the neoliberal globalist project has been largely achieved, to the great benefit of capital and to the great disadvantage of workers worldwide. However, Slobodian notes, it is today increasingly in crisis.

The neoliberals’ ultimate aim “was to ‘undo the demos’, [but] the demos – for better or for worse – is not undone yet”. END OF THREAD