Over at Boston Review, I have a review of Quinn Slobodian’s Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism. You can read it there, then comment here if you like.
8 thoughts on “Review of Globalists”
Comments are closed.
Over at Boston Review, I have a review of Quinn Slobodian’s Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism. You can read it there, then comment here if you like.
Comments are closed.
Reading it, I was overcome with a sense of what a scam libertarianism a la Reason magazine – or glibertarianism as I call it – has been. They must ignore a lot of inconvenient historical facts.
Their liberty isn’t for the average citizen, but for the property holder and capitalist.
But politics has moved in a libertarian way in a sense. Tax cuts for the rich, gay marriage, legalized recreational marijuana. Libertarians have written about the abuses of the criminal justice system but not faced the deeper issues of Black Lives Matter and the Me Too movement. Little to say about Syria or Yemen.
But now Trump has taken over the Republican Party and place tariffs on allies. The neoliberals’ failure to deliver broad-based prosperity has created a nationalist backlash.
I remember the Battle in Seattle very well. There was a sense that corporations were creating their own global rules without much democratic input. I was glad to see the anarchists smash windows and the protesters’ civil disobedience.
I think, based on your review, that the book has a tendency to project our current views on the past.
Currently we live in a world where there is still some “welfare state”, but this welfare state loses ground day by day.
This process is what we usually call “neoliberalism”, and globalisation and various forms of trade pacts played a big role in it, so it’s natural to see “globalism” as a part of neoliberalism, and as a direct opposition to new deal economics.
But it wasn’t allways so:
In the early 20th century and I think until quite recently it was common to say that WW1 and subsequently WW2 were caused by a clash between colonialist powers in Europe, and colonialism and imperialism are strongly connected to protectionism.
This theory was common between liberals (european sense) but also between lefties.
The Smoot–Hawley Tariff Act, for example, is often cited as something that reinforced the Great Depression, and therefore pushed toward WW2; In my view, I find it difficult to think that a country can employ protectionist policies without reducing internal consumption, so I tend to agree with that view.
So I think it’s a danger to imply (as the reviewed book seems to) that globalism is allways an attempt to reduce democratic control on policies: many of the current rightwing populist movements, for example, are strongly anti-immigrant and actively try to remove rights from immigrants, that isn’t a “democratic” policy in the sense used in the review, but apparently more an attempt to have “gated cities” on a global scale (many of the current right leaning populist apparently feel threatened by the rise of at least part of the South).
So I think it’s a danger to imply (as the reviewed book seems to) that globalism is allways an attempt to reduce democratic control on policies
The book certainly doesn’t say that – it’s a failure of my review if it suggests that it does.
It’s a history of a specific intellectual-political project, over a specific period – the WWI era to the 1990s. It does not make any claims (nor would I) about the political valence of “globalism” in general.
What does seem to be true is that during the mid-20th century, deeper international economic integration was seen by a number of influential figures as being the most promising (but not exclusive) vehicle for limiting a national sovereignty that was in danger of being captured by programs for egalitarianism and conscious planning. This doesn’t mean that this configuration existed in all times and palces, and it doesn’t mean that any kind of global system would have sevred that purpose.
In retrospect I wish I’d stressed this point more in my review. Slobodian’s neoliberals definitely did not see international competition for export markets, empire, territory, etc. as desirable — in fact they saw that as the most important breeding ground for central planning and mass politics. They supported only a particular model of integration based on a transnational body of law and regulations.
I don’t think Slobodian would disagree with what you’re saying here at all.
“Pick up the Financial Times or The Economist today and you’ll find free trade and capital mobility defended with appeals to the benefits of specialization and the international division of labor. But as Globalists makes clear, these anodyne terms have a deeply political significance. They are rejections of development as a goal, in favor of a world where the majority of humanity remain hewers of wood and drawers of water. As Slobodian says, acceptance of the logic of free trade and financial openness—and of the international agreements that embody and enforce them—is testimony to the “long-term defeat of the global South.””
I don’t know about this. The neoliberal order of free trade and mobile capital seems quite compatible with industrial development. It facilitates foreign investment in poor countries and opens up rich-country markets to manufacturing exports from poor countries, which generates foreign exchange to finance more development. The obvious case is China, but it’s happening in many countries like Brazil, Chile, Turkey, Malaysia….
Maybe the Mont Pelerin crowd did think that neoliberalism would keep the global South forever relegated to hewing wood and drawing water. If they did, they were wrong.
Maybe the Mont Pelerin crowd did think that neoliberalism would keep the global South forever relegated to hewing wood and drawing water. If they did, they were wrong.
The rise of China and the other newly industrialized countries of Asia, is definitely something that was neither expected nor desired by the people in this book.
I wonder if “globalism” is synonymous with slavery and how capitalism may have prospered and progressed had there not been 500 years of manifest and then more laterly effective slavery. (I know “laterly” is not a word but it sounds better than “lately”. 🙂 )
Henry Rech.
“As the German-Swiss economist Wilhelm Röpke, one of the book’s central figures, put it, “If we desire a free market, the framework of conditions, rules and institutions must be all the stronger and more inflexible. Laissez-faire yes, but within a framework laid down by a permanent and clear-sighted market police.””
This sounds more like an ordoliberal rather than a neoliberal prescription.
Henry Rech
This sounds more like an ordoliberal rather than a neoliberal prescription.
The central argument of the book is that neoliberalism in general (or at least in its Europe-centered incarnation) better fits what we think of as ordoliberalism, rather than the pure market fundmentalism that sometimes gets called neoliberal.