Neoliberals captured global financial institutions to discipline nation-states

Evidence

Neoliberals begin with a presumption that capital has a natural right to flow freely across national boundaries. (The free flow of labor enjoys no similar right.) Since that entails persistent balance-of-payments problems in a nonautarkic world, neoliberals took the lead in inventing all manner of transnational devices for the economic and political discipline of nation-states. They began by attempting to reintroduce pure market discipline (through flexible exchange rates, dismantling capital controls), but over the longer term learned to appreciate that suitably staffed international institutions like the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, and the IMF are better situated to impose neoliberal policies on recalcitrant nation-states. Initially strident neoliberal demands to abolish global financial institutions were tempered once the neoliberals used them primarily to influence staffing and policy decisions at those institutions, and thus to displace other internationalist agendas. Thus, it is substantially correct to observe an organic connection between such phenomena as the Washington Consensus and the spread of neoliberal hegemony (see Plehwe in the Introduction to this volume). — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 2131

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the ‘Washington Consensus’ literature and work on how intellectual networks seeded international institutions (staffing of IMF, World Bank). — connects to: Neoliberals repurposed international institutions to lock in prior policy wins — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 170; Neoliberals pushed floating exchange rates and open capital flows that disciplined welfare spending. — Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the…, 792; Some neoliberals explicitly embraced empire as a model for global economic order. — Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the…, 858 (+7 more)
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: the specific mechanism by which initial anti-institution demands were ‘tempered’ into staff-capture strategies — who made that pivot inside the MPS?

Broader Connections

• Capture theory frames neoliberalism as the political power of economic power #corroborates (0.78) — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 203
• Neoliberalism means capital seizes biopolitical governance from the state #expands (0.75) — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 263
• Neoliberals conditioned self-government on accepting market discipline #qualifies (0.72) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 297
• Neoliberal market discipline was adopted to pacify unruly democratic publics #expands (0.72) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 122