Neoliberal reforms pushed states toward authoritarian repression to enforce unpopular policies
Evidence
That neoliberalism tends to produce authoritarianism was a lesson learnt in the Global South long before the recent rise of right-wing authoritarianism in Europe and the United States. As the imposition of neoliberal reforms by international financial institutions eroded states’ ‘political capacity to govern’, these same states often relied more heavily on repression in order to implement unpopular economic policies. In the postcolony, the ‘crumbling’ of the independence and sovereignty for which anticolonialists had fought subjected these states to the ‘tutelage of international creditors’, severing the ties between citizenship and rights to public services. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 452
Categorization
- XREF: Connects to the postcolonial dependence literature (Rodney, Fanon) and to current debates on ‘authoritarian liberalism’ in EU governance; also echoes the Kinyanjui/Ngugi critique of creditor tutelage. — connects to: Neoliberalism expands state penal power while professing to shrink government — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 179; Neoliberals needed Chile’s dictatorship to find the means to depoliticize economies. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 301; Italian economists equated strong government with authoritarian repression to protect markets. — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order: How Economists…, 1181 (+10 more)
Broader Connections
- Neoliberalism strengthens repressive state apparatuses rather than shrinking government
#corroborates(0.95) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1748 - Thatcherism fused authoritarian state power with free-market neoliberalism
#exemplifies(0.95) - Neoliberal states redefined their mandate from welfare to securitization and control
#corroborates(0.90) - Neoliberal reforms can proceed without an authoritarian political system
#contradicts(0.85) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 1542 - Dictatorship solved the neoliberal problem of replacing popular sovereignty with market sovereignty
#corroborates(0.85) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 330 - State interventionism itself was deployed to rescue and deepen the neoliberal model
#expands(0.82) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 1605 - Neoliberal crisis response expanded rather than shrank state power
#corroborates(0.80) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 288 - Resistance to neoliberal racial management triggers more invasive state control
#expands(0.78) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1803