Many commentators have tended to depict the sea change that began in 1979 (with the election of Thatcher and the Volcker shock) as a kind of clear rupture – a “victory for neoliberalism” and defeat for older Keynesian models. That was not how it felt at the time. THREAD:
The 1980s experienced continued contestation over economic models in the Global North, with Reagan practicing “military Keynesianism” at home, with the E. European socialist model creaking but still seemingly permanent, etc. What we now call neoliberalism was heavily contested.
In fact, the place where “neoliberalism” was first deployed in full measure was not in the 1980s Global North, but in the 1980s Global South, where rolling debt crises enabled the imposition of structural adjustment loans that rolled back developmental-welfare states.
(Of course, those debt crises were a second-order effect of the Volcker Shock's shift in inflationary expectations. But the key point here is that the Global South in the 1980s, far from being “backward” was in fact at the vanguard of historical change.)
Only the in 1990s was the neoliberal shift fully consolidated from a political perspective in the North, with the collapse of communism & subsequent ‘shock therapy’ in Eastern Europe, and the elections of Clinton, Blair, Schroeder, etc in the West...
...which signaled that the center-left had resigned itself to (or embraced, if you will) the principles that the center-right had been promoting since the 1970s.
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
