US democracy-endowment funds seeded Neoliberal advocacy in the developing world

Evidence

In 1983 neoliberals in the Reagan administration set up the Center for International Private Enterprise, housed within the new National Endowment for Democracy, to support organizations in the developing world advocating neoliberal political programs. CIPE developed a “toolkit” that spelled out the tactics to be used: create an advocacy team, identify key issues relevant to the target audience, research the issues, establish a goal, create a message and an advertising campaign, form grassroots advocates, work with the media, and become part of the governmental process (Center for International Private Enterprise, 2003). The following year CIPE awarded its first grant—to support de Soto’s Institute for Liberty and Democracy. To build popular support for neoliberalism, the ILD identified its political issue not as property rights in general, or as the property rights of mining companies or other corporations, but as the problem of informal housing. — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 1949

Categorization

• XREF: Links Reagan-era democracy promotion to private-cartel-style institution-building studied in diamond-trade readings. — connects to: Neoliberal funders treated policy influence as a vertically integrated production pipeline — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 127; A US-funded network coordinates free-market activism globally like an ideological International — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 417