European free-market think tank networks grew fourfold after 2000

Evidence

Another new site of attention was Europe. Europe had historically been Atlas’s worst disappointment—Western Europe being “mired in heavy regulation and taxation” and Eastern Europe lacking “a strong rule of law.” Understanding that Europe was not welcoming to the neoliberal “think tank culture,” Atlas leaders decided to enter through academia. Atlas helped the pro-market teaching and research efforts of some European scholars while also encouraging them to establish free market think tanks. From the mid-2000s, Atlas organized regional gatherings in Europe to boost resource sharing and collaboration among the fledgling institutes and isolated academic centers. The hope was also to bridge the East-West divide. The efforts paid off in the new millennium. The European network quadrupled after 2000 (Figure 10.6). Numbers went from a net of nine institutes in 2000 to forty-nine today in Eastern Europe and from thirteen to eighty-one in Western Europe. — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 556

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: A US-funded think tank network spread free-market ideology into Brazil’s protests. — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 417