24 - Neoliberalism as a Form of US Power

Summary

This chapter connects neoliberalism, globalization, and US power. From the late 1970s, it argues, the international political economy shifted toward a neoliberal model of globalization. US power exerted significant influence on this remaking, but the United States was not the paramount architect of neoliberal globalization. Rather, the broad recourse to neoliberal solutions from the 1980s resulted from a basic misalignment between political order and economic activity under conditions of advanced globalization. In a world fragmented into a patchwork of territorial sovereignties, the transnational integration of markets will empower economic actors to escape the bonds of political control, loosening the governing capacities of nations. Neoliberal solutions, it follows, arose not from ideological imposition so much as from the structural determinants of the international system.