TheSyllabus

I like Quinn Slobodian’s short definition: it's a theory of state design. There's of course not a commonly agreed upon definition of neoliberalism, but I see it as an ideology, I see it as a set of political practices, and I also buy into the more cultural takes. I don't adhere to a single definition, and I'm not alone in that.

But I do find it useful, especially as a way to make sense of how modern liberalism developed over the 19th and 20th centuries, as the core ideological ordering rationality of modern capitalism and world order. Postwar neoliberalism has served as an important context for me in studying how offshore finance has undercut state sovereignty, for example. So yes, I also see it as a historical epoch, superseding classical liberalism and Keynes’ new liberalism.

I'm not quite sure if it has ended. It's surely mutating; it might even be fracturing, as people like Gary Gerstle argue. If we understand neoliberalism to be based on centrist parties and centrist politics, as well as a multilateral international order, then it is at least on the decline. 

But I also agree with Gerstle when he argues that neoliberal institutions – or what he calls  “vestiges of the neoliberal order” – will be with us for decades to come. If the good news is that neoliberalism is over, the bad news is that we live in a profoundly neoliberalized world – and that is by no means over. We still have to work with it and live in it.

I come from the Netherlands, where all kinds of neoliberal policies continue to be seen. It's the same neoliberal logic determining how public institutions like universities are governed. So, it's important to differentiate between national varieties, even as we recognize that the global conjuncture might be moving on from neoliberalism.

As I'm not sure we can speak so clearly about post-neoliberalism, I’ve instead used neo-illiberalism to suggest that neoliberalism is mutating. It's becoming more sovereignist, nationalist, authoritarian, illiberal; it's explicitly escaping its own premises. Although, of course, liberalism itself has often been unable to deliver on its own premises.

The implementation of neoliberalism has historically been achieved through illiberal means, from the use of military force in Chile under Pinochet to the rise of authoritarian populism across the neoliberal heartlands. So, the present troubling state of affairs is not unfamiliar. If anything, the “progressive” neoliberal moment may have been the outlier to liberal rule, and liberalism's true face is now being exposed. Then again, particularly from a “Western” perspective it is hard to ignore the present illiberalizing moment, defined by attempted coups, the sidestepping of parliaments, the dilution of the rule of law – developments all going against accepted notions of liberalism.

At first, I theorized neo-illiberalism to focus on Trump and his ilk. He claimed he would bring all kinds of changes, but there were in fact many important economic continuities. And it was the political dimension I wanted to emphasize. Processes of political illiberalization were continuing and deepening what neoliberalism had already started – the breaking down of democracy, basically – but more openly, explicitly, and brazen, allegedly in defiance of the neoliberal status quo.

But since then it has become more profound. Leaders like Orbán, for instance, explicitly call themselves illiberal. And political illiberalization is really taking on these core institutions of liberal democracy – the rule of law, checks and balances, the many kinds of rights that seem to be evaporating. I myself may have been a bit too bourgeois in that I wanted to believe in a sort of liberalism that actually meant something.

What we see now in France is a clear example of neo-illiberalism. But it’s arguably accelerating across the globe. Whether we look at India, at Brazil, or even at Saudi Arabia, Russia, and China, the screws are being tightened. From when China gradually and partially opened up under Deng Xiaoping, we have seen the return of a more statist, autocratic China under Xi. So yes, even with the return of the “centrist” Biden, I’d argue that neo-illiberalism is consolidating globally.

With the rise of Trump, I initially thought this rupture was more rhetorical than anything else. Trump was pretending to do things differently, while in reality he was adhering to a lot of neoliberal policies – tax cuts, financial deregulation, even putting Goldman Sachs bankers in his Cabinet. But now I do see Biden delivering on some of that rhetoric. This reflects how in the US, at least, there is a bipartisan project now trying to escape the centrist, multilateral neoliberalism that ruled in the 1990s.

Another conventional view that has to be challenged pits neoliberalism against the far right. Seeing these forces in opposition to each other only serves to strengthen both elements. As Arun Kundnani argues, it is more accurate to view both as closely intertwined. This is very visible in Modi’s India, implementing neoliberal policies alongside an illiberal Hindu-nationalist project. We shouldn’t forget that people like Hayek had to convince others that he wasn’t a conservative, or that Mises praised fascism for saving Europe – neoliberalism always has been a very right-wing reformulation of liberalism.

It’s both. In the new millennium, I think we've entered into a new age of empire, which also has much to do with tech. Under Biden, we see a lot of continuity in this regard. The world economy remains largely open, but we're now seeing a partial closing, especially in the areas considered critical for hegemony – the domain of tech. This suggests a new mode of governance, or at least a new mode of foreign policy. Does that mean neoliberalism is dead from one day to the next? Of course not. It's a very slow process.

But the essential premise of liberalism is individual freedom, and mass surveillance is quite literally the opposite of that. It's very difficult to have an API that makes individual freedom compatible with the logic of platform capitalism, which drives the data-hungry Big Tech companies. On this basis, I believe that the rollout of surveillance capitalism requires the rollback of liberal democracy by design – of checks, balances, rights.

Today, a few dominant Big Tech companies provide the key infrastructure for social interactions, both in professional and personal contexts. This gives them unchecked power that even surpasses that of the state, as shown by the sudden, cynical banishment of Trump from the social media platforms. It might have been a necessary step to counter political violence, but it highlights how deeply these companies are involved in shaping society, including the making, breaking, and remaking of Trump. Mind you, we now have in Elon Musk a far-right tech billionaire heavily invested in generative AI who controls the world’s digital public square. This just doesn’t compute with conventional ideas of liberalism seeking to contain absolute power.  

As far as governing individual behavior, a recent April Fool’s joke from the University of Amsterdam was telling. They announced they would introduce surveillance drones to see if people are smoking on campus. The joke was that they would use facial recognition technology to fine you. Many people bought into it, because it’s entirely believable. The potentialities of all these technologies are profound. I think they are deeply incompatible with liberal conventions in a normative sense. Again, we know that liberalism can often be illiberal, but there is a clear contradiction here.

This question needs to be looked at in geopolitical terms. The competition between the US and China in terms of geo-economics, military power, and technological advancements is set to intensify in the coming decades. There's a broad understanding among the United States and its allies in the West that these digital platforms will form the core infrastructure of 21st-century power and hegemony. They hope that it will secure another American century.

This also explains the closing off of certain parts of the economy. Here in the Netherlands, you have ASML, the chip machine maker, having to go along with this kind of plan. There's a big collective effort to stay ahead of China, although the US is already behind in tech domains like AI and FinTech. I see the macroeconomic being driven by the geopolitical.

At the same time, Big Tech is also making its mark in the realm of international finance. The traditional frameworks for regulating corporate activities in the physical world don't fit with the way these tech giants operate in the global market. The cross-border allocation of tax rights, in particular, has become a contentious issue, as Big Tech firms hide their profits offshore. This is a subject of intense diplomatic debate because it’s also relevant for the fight for hegemony.

The pandemic clearly showed what the state is capable of when it has to respond to an emergency. But there were profound differences in how the pandemic was managed, say between countries in the Asia-Pacific area and countries in the Transatlantic area, in terms of containment versus letting the virus spread in a controlled manner. 

Some would argue that the latter strategies were very liberal – or laissez faire – because they insisted the economy had to keep going. Others, like Will Davies, would say that not guaranteeing public health, which is often a constitutional obligation of states, marked a clear failure of another liberal promise. But all these government strategies – whether to contain Covid, in the extreme case of China, or to let it rip, as in Brazil, but also the UK and the Netherlands – can be plotted on a spectrum that is inherently illiberal. In terms of economic performance and public health, the jury is still out as to what was the best response, since the pandemic is far from over.

But even if the pandemic has already weakened certain aspects of neoliberalism, it was out of necessity, rather than any fundamental shift in ideology. The pandemic did not significantly undermine the immense power and influence of the billionaire class in shaping economic policy. While the lasting legacy is still uncertain, I do believe we are seeing Western variants of authoritarian politics becoming more endemic than the virus itself.

Although the world of FinTech likes to talk about freedom and disruption, the reality is that the internet itself is characterized by digital enclosure. Our argument in that paper is that “traditional” finance might be behaving more like Big Tech – dominating its field of business, or ecosystem, by bringing outside developers and startups into their orbit, so they work for them instead of against them. The Appleization of finance isn’t about the end of financial incumbents, but rather about how they might revitalize their position as cost-cutting intermediaries through platformization. In this sense, we see the logic of capitalism coming back. It always comes back, but it is also always changing its face. 

My co-authors and I have also outlined what we call the fin-tech-state triangle. All these actors are clearly and inherently intertwined. There is no point in talking about finance without talking about the power of the state, which is backing up finance. But now we see finance and the state also merging with tech. We know central banks are very busy trying to roll out their own digital currencies, to take just one example. 

Then we come back to geopolitics. We know that the American empire is based not only on tech, but also on the dollar. If dollar hegemony were to crumble – and there are signs that this might be happening, as Iran and Saudi Arabia talk about settling their oil trading in yuan instead of dollars – it would be the Achilles heel of the American empire. With Dilma Rousseff now in Shanghai as the president of the BRICS Bank, geopolitics are very, very interesting at the moment. It’s not a multipolar world, but it’s looking like a bipolar world is emerging right now.

This political party, the BoerBurgerBeweging (BBB), or the Farmer–Citizen Movement, comes out of a commercial PR bureau. Its big clients include the largest slaughterhouses in the Netherlands, as well as giant companies like Bayer; it's a front for Big Agriculture. BBB mobilizes farmers by arguing that the progressive left is ruining traditional life in the Netherlands, allegedly forcing farmers to make way for migrants and so forth. 

It's very much an astroturfed party, indeed responding to technocratic climate policies, but at the same time very much set to defend the gains of neoliberalism, whatever the cost. It is a very peculiar type that is mobilized by BBB: not peasants, but relatively rich and deeply conservative industrial farmers locked into the orbit of Big Agriculture. They might fume against Brussels, but they are just as dependent on EU funds for their income as Orbán. Interestingly, the Dutch BBB is reminiscent of Brazil’s BBB (beef, bible, bullets) coalition in parliament. Again, the link is Big Agriculture, as Dutch farmers are big importers of Brazilian soy to feed livestock.

It's been very successful because, as elsewhere, the media here don't do what you would expect them to do: scrutinize narratives and serve as a countervailing power. That doesn't really exist anymore; it's just talk shows and grifters. I would say that's what is making them successful. The leader of this party was on every talk show, sometimes on three talk shows in one evening. Then, when they win all these seats in the provincial elections, the same media is like, “How is this possible? What happened? We have to talk more to these people." In the Netherlands, it has been this sort of Groundhog Day for over 20 years, dating back to the rise of Pim Fortuyn.

Of course, but that's also a familiar story: the left has been in decline since the center-left teamed up with the center-right to pursue neoliberal policies. The decline of the left resulted in a void, and there's been no shortage of right-wing alternatives to capture this protest vote. There are some small parties on the left, but they don't enjoy the same kind of media platforms as the populist right, including the extreme right. Today’s mutated neoliberalism embraces the far right while closing the door for left alternatives. It's a very sad story, I'm afraid. This was never a particularly left country to begin with. It pretends to be tolerant and liberal, but it's ultimately a right-wing, conservative country.

We had been researching the ways incumbent banks in Belgium benefitted from the alignment of states and FinTech firms, and how big banks in Amsterdam adopted cloud services over the course of the 2010s. Before the 2008 financial crisis, there was a lot written about the rise of Anglo-American finance in Europe. Now we see European financial institutions migrating their ICT into a US-based cloud: AWS, Azure, Google, what have you. There is very little strategic autonomy here, let alone technological sovereignty.

All of the banks in the Netherlands have done this, with the exception of ING, who are trying to build their own cloud with a consortium of other European banks. (The successful digital payments company Adyen, operating with a full EU and US bank license, is another notable outlier in developing and shielding its own stack.) Although I think the Netherlands specifically is the most loyal supporter of the American empire in the European Union, it's so clear in this conjuncture that the EU – and Old Europe in particular – is just the United States' junior partner. The European firms are mostly concerned with protecting their own market shares. That’s how the mantra of European technological sovereignty is being put to use.

Even if Big Tech is now seen as a potential threat, it’s being used to argue for deregulation and mandatory data sharing to ensure fair competition. As a result, EU data protection policies are being aligned with the commercial interests of European banks, who want to prevent the emergence of a new pan-European digital financial leader.

You're wondering if the EU could be repurposed as a lever for enacting post-neoliberal policies?

I'm not an expert on the ECB, but I'm skeptical about it changing in any meaningful way. And I feel the same way about the EU as a whole. The EU was built in a time of economic opening, of neoliberal integration; now we live in an age of closing, of disintegration. 

Just look at the Netherlands again, which is still a member of the EU and the WHO, but since Covid has been pursuing a profoundly nationalist strategy. This Covid nationalism is premised on denying insights from the WHO, denying insights from the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control – even as it pretends to follow these institutions' lead. It's this strategy of epic gaslighting over years. I've been calling it a silent Nexit of sorts.

The Netherlands is a very interesting place because it's this gateway, this delta, into Europe and beyond. But then it also sees itself as part of the Anglo-American empire, which surrounds the Eurasian landmass. Whatever way the wind is blowing, that's the way it goes. It's sometimes hard to make sense of that.

At present, I don't see the EU being able to effectively grapple with these sorts of trends, whatever someone like Macron might suggest. The EU was always the neoliberal institution par excellence – a very undemocratic, multilateral organization. Globally, that sort of neoliberal arrangement seems to be over. The EU is still trying to make sense of its place and role within this new world, but it will find it difficult to change itself.

If there's another trend to watch within the EU, it's political illiberalization happening not only in places like Hungary and Poland, but also in places like Italy. Meloni is being embraced by many center-right politicians, including here in the Netherlands. The illiberal virus is also visible among the liberals of Renew, from Macron to Rutte, embracing illiberal tactics. If there is some change, it's the same change you see everywhere else. The EU is itself becoming more neo-illiberal.

That's a difficult question. I don't know. I'm trying to think about what it means that, even if the world is becoming more illiberal, it's not necessarily a bad thing, for example if it would result in more redistribution. We've seen these moments before – and what needs to be awakened now is the realization that liberalism doesn't deliver, at least in its neoliberal reformulation. We have to go beyond it. 

Those seeking to fix or ditch liberalism need to find some common ground to collectively fight for a society that doesn’t just serve the interests of the billionaire class. The likes of Corbyn and Sanders have shown that left renewal is possible, and popular, even if the forces set against it are formidable. At minimum, we need to turn neo-illiberalism on its head: more political liberalism in service of people, less economic liberalism in service of capital.

To this end, we have to find new collective ways to escape what Anton Jäger calls hyperpolitics, with these fluid movements that come and go. We have to think of new ways to organize, while also reinventing or repurposing the old ways. Sadly, in many places, it often seems that the left is just not in a good enough shape to come up with these kinds of answers. But at the same time there are many exciting new ideas and initiatives floating around, and some might take root suddenly and quickly when the time is right. We just have to keep going, don’t we.