Quinn Slobodian
Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018
One of the seminal ideological battles of recent history has been that between internationalism, in one form or another, and nationalism. Countless words have been devoted to dissecting the causes, effects, merits, and drawbacks of the various incarnations of these two basic positions. Neoliberalism has, however, succeeded in becoming the dominant internationalist ideology of the power elite and, because nationalism is its natural antithesis, great effort has been expended across all levels of society towards normalizing neoliberal assumptions about politics and economics and demonizing those of nationalism.[1] [2] This all seems obvious now, almost like second nature to those involved in the conflict, but despite this – or rather because of this – it is necessary to investigate the intellectual history of neoliberalism so as to better understand how it took hold of the imagination of the world’s elites. The recent book by Canadian historian Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism, is an excellent, thought-provoking work on the subject and should be required reading for all White Nationalists. The book can serve as both an introduction to a serious study of neoliberalism and a valuable addition to any scholar’s library.
Slobodian argues that neoliberalism arose at the end of empire “not to liberate markets but to encase them, to inoculate capitalism against the threat of democracy, and to reorder the world after empire as a space of competing states in which borders fulfill a necessary function” (p. 2). Readers might be surprised by his statement about the neoliberal conception of borders. This, after all, differs remarkably from popular understanding, but the key to resolving this seemingly odd position can be found in the “two worlds theory” articulated by Carl Schmitt in 1950. Slobodian writes:
One was the world partitioned into bounded, territorial states where governments ruled over human beings. This he called the world of imperium, using the Roman legal term. The other was the world of property, where in people owned things, money, and land scattered across the earth. This was the world of dominium (p. 10).
As the author points out, for Schmitt this was “something negative, an impingement on the full exercise of national sovereignty” (p. 10), but neoliberals found in it an accurate description of precisely that which they had been trying to preserve and enhance for many years. This is a fundamental point and it underlies much of what is to follow. The neoliberal project is not one of anarchic, borderless economic activity but rather a supranational security apparatus designed to protect capitalism as a system of laws, both formal and informal, based on the ideas of individual consumer sovereignty, mobile capital, the human rights of capitalists and corporations, and an almost religious faith in market forces which take precedence over national interest. The author refers to this as “militant globalism.” Simply put, borders are for people and people are always secondary to capital in the neoliberal order. The nation-state and its borders are tolerated by neoliberalism only to the extent that they can be made useful to global capitalism.
Slobodian begins with the dramatic shift in political and economic conceptions of the world following the First World War. As he observes, the very concept of a “world economy,” along with other related concepts like “world history,” “world literature,” and “world affairs,” entered the English language at this time (p. 28). The relevance of the nineteenth-century classical liberal model was fading as empire faded and both political and economic nationalism arose. As the world “expanded,” so too did the desire for national sovereignty, which, especially in the realm of economics, was seen by neoliberals as a terrible threat to the preservation of the separation of imperium and dominium. A world in which the global economy would be segregated and subjected to the jurisdiction of states and the collective will of their various peoples was antithetical to the neoliberal ideal of free trade and economic internationalism; i.e., the maintenance of a “world economy.”
Many of the economists who were troubled by the rise of nationalism and who were sympathetic towards empire as a quasi-internationalist free trade system were at this time centered in Austria. Slobodian provides a valuable history of their activity, with a focus on Ludwig von Mises, the Jew who laid the groundwork for much of what became neoliberal orthodoxy. Mises was highly anti-democratic, approved of state violence against workers, and supported the use of military power to open overseas markets (p. 33). The author writes that, for Mises, the state “could find its legitimacy only in its defense of the sanctity of private property and the forces of competition” (p. 33). In a 1921 policy paper in which he advocated free trade for Austria, he also suggested “[lifting] prohibitions on imports and ports . . . privatizing pubic enterprises, eliminating food subsidies . . . [and] lifting entry and residence requirements for foreigners ” (p. 43). In 1930, while Mises was an adviser to the Vienna Chamber of Commerce, the organization urged the government to pass an “anti-terror law” to combat worker strikes (p. 46). But much of his efforts and those of his colleagues were directed towards the elimination of tariffs, including international propaganda missions on behalf of this idea through the International Chamber of Commerce, an organization that tried to liberalize the global economy in a fashion similar to what the League of Nations was trying to do in the realm of politics.
The Great Depression made their job harder by further weakening popular faith in the free market. Following its end, a number of important economists, including Friedrich von Hayek, moved to Geneva to escape what were for them unfavorable political conditions in various parts of Europe. It was here that the Geneva school of economists was born and neoliberalism coalesced as an ideology. One of the fundamental shifts that occurred here at this time was a shift away from the heavy reliance on statistics, data, and economic models which had been a feature of the earlier work of neoliberals, but had also grown in importance across the discipline as economists attempted to explain business cycles. Neoliberals now saw this as nascent economic planning and began “to take a step back and contemplate the core enabling conditions of the grander order itself” (p. 84). They began to believe that the world economy was “unknowable,” but that “this was not a dead end but the starting point for designing the order within which the world economy could thrive” (p. 84). They realized that theirs was an ideology that transcended the purely economic, or as the author puts it, ” . . . the defense of the world economy . . . was too important to be left to the discipline of economics” (p. 92).
Supposed libertarians like Mises and Hayek were quite comfortable with international governance, in violation of the ideals those who admire them today claim to hold. Slobodian describes how, during the 1930s, neoliberals had finally realized that the “self-regulating market was a myth,” decolonization was inevitable, and “that the era of the nation was irreversible” (p. 95). Their mission was to exert political pressure to manage this new reality in order to ensure that these developments did not allow for the rise of economic nationalism. Their answer was “loose federations within which the constituent nations would retain control over cultural policy but be bound to maintain free trade and free capital movement between nations” (p. 95).
A world federation or federations could guarantee the separation of imperium and dominium. The nation-state would remain useful as a legal entity to ensure territorial compliance with the federation’s legal structure, which, by design, would be unaccountable to the public and render the nation-states’ sovereignty “ornamental” (p. 112). It is of some interest that these ideas, supported by Mises and Hayek, were also pushed by Wilhelm Röpke (a German economist who fled Germany in opposition to Hitler’s anti-Semitism) as a way to prevent Germany from regaining its economic self-sufficiency following the Second World War (p. 113).
Slobodian next delves into the neoliberal use of rights in their quest for the security of global capitalism. He writes:
Against human rights, they posed the human rights of capital. Against the stateless person, they posed the investor. Against sovereignty and autonomy, they posed the world economy and the international division of labor. Their ‘national’ was both a person and a company (p. 125).
The author calls these “xenos rights,” from the Greek word meaning “guest-friend” (p. 123). As one might expect, for neoliberals the citizen is secondary to the cosmopolitan capitalist in the same way that the nation-state is secondary to the world economy. As such, in their conception of human rights, “the alien investor must actually have more rights than citizens” (p. 137). An example he discusses is the “Capitalist Magna Carta,” Deutsche Bank’s Hermann Josef Abs’ 1957 attempt to enshrine this concept into international law, which was supported in the United States by Emmanuel Celler, the infamous Jew behind the 1965 Hart-Celler Act.
The subject of race gets a chapter in the book as well. With the emergence of the Global South, often acting as a bloc on the world stage and often with political and economic demands quite different from those of the neoliberals, and with the simple reality of biological differences as factors in civilizational progression and any honest analysis thereof, race was bound to be a part of the discussion to some degree. But most neoliberals did not think in terms of race, and when they did, it was to minimize its importance, as in, for example, the case of Hayek, who publicly denounced apartheid in South Africa (p. 151). Worse than “racism,” however, were attempts to breach the separation of imperium and dominium with sanctions and other tools of economic control. “Moral demands,” writes the author, “even those legitimized through international organizations, had no mandate to disrupt the economic constitution of the world” (p. 180). Thus, neoliberals tended to oppose interference in South Africa and Rhodesia despite objecting to their “white supremacy.”[2] [3]
Slobodian discusses at length the race-consciousness of Wilhelm Röpke, one of the few neoliberals who defended white rule in South Africa. He was less concerned with the Soviet threat than the brown threat and envisioned a white alliance spanning the Atlantic Ocean (p. 156). Slobodian quotes him:
The more the non-European great powers emerge . . . and the civilizations of other continents begin to regard us with condescending self-confidence, the more it becomes natural and necessary for the feeling of spiritual and moral homogeneousness among Europeans to increase powerfully . . .the spiritual and political integration of Europe . . . only makes sense as part and parcel of a higher combination and organization of the resistance potential of the entire western world on both sides of the Atlantic (p. 156).
He received a great deal of support among American conservatives like William Buckley and Russell Kirk, who saw in him a sensible attitude towards race as well as an identifiable Christianity lacking in other neoliberals (pp.164-174). A case could be made that in a strange and tragic way, Röpke did far more harm to American conservatism than Hayek or Mises by helping to popularize destructive economic ideas and an (at least partially) foreign ideology in American Rightist discourse by way of simply having sane racial attitudes in insane times.
The relationship between neoliberals and the European Economic Community is the subject of one of the final chapters of the book. In it, the author describes two different strains of neoliberal thought regarding Europe: the universalists (including Röpke), who saw in European integration a large protectionist scheme and in talk of Eurafrica (the incorporation of former colonies into the EEC) an extension of empire, versus the constitutionalists (influenced by Hayek), who believed that “the EEC was an example of how to integrate a market with a legal structure able to enforce competition across borders” (p. 214). Both sides held nearly identical views of the world but, as the author notes, the universalists were purists whose ideas “lacked the mechanism of enforcement” (p. 215). The constitutionalists were willing to work with available tools and make ideological compromises to lay the foundations for a future supranational government. Slobodian argues that their disagreement was fundamentally a matter of perspective: the Euroskeptic universalists thought exclusively in terms of globalism and saw the EEC as a move away from international free trade, while the constitutionalists saw in the EEC “new means of enforcement and oversight that the neoliberal federalists in the 1930s had not dreamed of themselves” (p. 215).
Throughout the 1970s, developing nations accelerated the assertion of their interests. In the United Nations, the G-77 demanded various forms of economic intervention, which to neoliberals was a “misuse of state sovereignty to unsettle world economic order” (p. 222). The nature of the threat was in the unequal economic treatment demanded by these nations and could only be remedied by legal equality. This legal equality was justified by what the author calls “cybernetic legalism,” an approach to law based on Hayek’s study of cybernetics and systems theory. It “saw individual humans as units within a self-regulating system for which the lawmaker had the primary responsibility of transforming the system’s rules into binding legislation” (p. 224). For neoliberals, the market is a fundamentally unknowable domain of nearly infinite transactions, always in motion, always fine-tuning itself, and always guided by a sort of wisdom. The role of a government is to provide a legal framework within which this sacred progression towards equilibrium can continue without interruption. Hayek had begun to think in terms of “self-generating order” and “self-generating structure” (p. 225). As the author notes at the end of the chapter, it was in the 1970s that references to and images of the globe and globalism became prevalent in popular culture (p. 258). Hayek’s cybernetic legalism seems perfectly in tune with the “spiritual but not religious” secular mysticism of globalism, intertwined as it is with faith-based egalitarianism and Whig history.
Though nearly a century old, Mises’ ideas sound contemporary and all too familiar. The neoliberal notions of a world of interdependent and largely interchangeable individuals absorbed into a system of economy with a mysterious yet sacred logic requiring international treaties and opaque supranational organizations to ensure its security from the suspicious or disaffected masses, wars against “terror” with clear economic motives, and various policies designed to benefit capitalists but bejeweled in the language of humanitarianism are so commonplace in contemporary political discourse that most people barely give them a moment’s notice. Neoliberalism is now the baseline of political thought across the mainstream spectrum. The ideas of Mises, the Jew who “conceded somewhat cheerfully that his understanding of the world coincided in many ways with that of Karl Marx” (p. 107), and those which developed from his contingent of capitalist enforcers, have managed to grip the globe. Even Wilhelm Röpke, who had at least a partial understanding of the reality of race, was complicit in the global steamrolling of national sovereignty and the reduction in the quality of life of countless white men and women (and indeed countless non-whites), all forced into a fundamentally unnatural world order beyond their control and without their consent.
Neoliberalism, a term widely misused and an ideology widely misunderstood, has been a threat to nationalist movements worldwide for a century. It is a secretive, unaccountable, supranational world order designed to cripple national autonomy. Neoliberals, of course, know this: remember that a happy byproduct of their model was the prevention of German self-sufficiency in the post-war years. So whenever a neoliberal begins espousing the benefits of his ideology for a specific country, he is simply lying. Neoliberalism is at its core a corrosive imperialism, absorbing all it touches into its global empire with largely unseen violence and without its subjects ever being entirely sure to whom or what they are subjected: It is an imperialism of cowards and bureaucrats, the most ignoble form of an ignoble system. Neoliberalism was born at the end of empire in the traditional sense, but it did not replace it; it merely reconfigured it with new emperors, new armies, and different weapons.
Notes
[1] [4] The author rightly differentiates between “international” and “supranational,” but over time the two concepts have become roughly interchangeable in the popular imagination and so I will defer to common usage – barring a few specific exceptions.
[2] [5] The Jew Milton Friedman managed to be correct in his prediction about black rule in Rhodesia. Slobodian quotes him: “. . . [black rule] would almost surely mean both the eviction or exodus of most whites and also a drastically lower level of living and opportunity for the masses of black Rhodesians” (p. 178).
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Or la conception illibérale de l’État, dont s’est réclamé Orban en 2014, apparaît comme une alternative interne à l’équilibre traditionnel des pouvoirs et , à l’extérieur, comme une révision de la politique étrangère et donc comme la chance d’une « autre gouvernance » de l’Union, dont le pivot serait désormais la nation, seul juge du bien commun.
Or nous intériorisons et reproduisons ces croyances. Les riches se persuadent qu'ils ont acquis leur richesse par le mérite, en ignorant les avantages - tels que l'éducation, l'héritage et la classe d'origine - qui peuvent avoir contribué à son obtention. Les pauvres tendent à se blâmer pour leurs échecs, même quand ils ne peuvent guère changer leur propre situation.
Dans La Route de la servitude, publié en 1944, Hayek a notamment souligné que toute forme de planification par un gouvernement conduisait inexorablement, en écrasant l'individualisme, à un contrôle social de type totalitaire. Tout comme Bureaucratie, le livre de Mises, La Route de la servitude a été énormément lu. Il a notamment attiré l'attention de certains très riches, qui ont vu dans cette philosophie une occasion de se libérer de la réglementation et de l'impôt. Lorsqu'en 1947, Hayek fonde la première organisation de promotion de la doctrine du néolibérale - la Société du Mont Pelerin - il est soutenu financièrement par des millionnaires et par leurs fondations.
Après que Margaret Thatcher et Ronald Reagan eurent pris le pouvoir, le reste suivit : réductions d'impôts massives pour les riches, écrasement des syndicats, déréglementation, privatisations, externalisation, concurrence dans les services publics. Grâce au FMI, à la Banque mondiale, au traité de Maastricht et à l'Organisation mondiale du commerce, les politiques néolibérales ont été imposées - souvent sans le consentement démocratique des populations - dans une grande partie du monde. Le plus remarquable a été leur adoption par les partis qui appartenaient autrefois à la gauche : le Labour et les Démocrates, par exemple. Comme le fait remarquer Stedman Jones, « il est dur d'imaginer aucune autre utopie qui ait été aussi pleinement réalisée ». 
La privatisation ou la marchandisation des services publics tels que l'énergie, l'eau, les trains, la santé, l'éducation, les routes et les prisons a permis aux entreprises de mettre en place des péages, des loyers ou des dépôts de garantie, payables par les usagers et par les gouvernements. 
L'anonymat du néolibéralisme est jalousement protégé. Ceux qui sont influencés par Hayek, Mises et Friedman ont tendance à rejeter le terme, clamant - non sans justesse - qu'il n'est aujourd'hui utilisé que de façon péjorative. Mais ils ne nous proposent aucun terme substitutif. Certains se décrivent comme libéraux ou libertaires classiques, mais ces descriptions sont à la fois trompeuses et curieusement dissimulatrices, comme si elles suggéraient qu'il n'y a rien de nouveau depuis la La Route de la servitude, Bureaucratie ou le travail classique de Friedman Capitalisme et liberté.
![PUCCI_MAIN_IMAGE_04[2].jpg](http://euro-synergies.hautetfort.com/media/01/01/412595558.jpg)
Selon le professeur en sciences politiques Michael Kenny, « les Britanniques ont pris la difficile décision, au moment de la disparition de l’Empire, d’entrer dans l’UE pour continuer de jouer leur rôle au plan international » (18). Il est de fait intéressant de rapprocher l’actuelle séquence historique de la période des empires coloniaux. Il était alors question de « mission civilisatrice » issue de l’humanisme des Lumières ou du positivisme. De projections de populations hors du continent européen, révolutions industrielles et première mondialisation (1880-1914) (19). Aujourd’hui comme hier, les motivations économiques sont parmi d’autres de s’emparer des richesses d’un pays et assurer l’approvisionnement en matières premières, garantir des débouchés à l’industrie nationale en cas de surproduction, forcer l’ouverture et contrôler les routes commerciales. Le contrôle de la traite négrière est devenu celui des flux d’émigration volontaire. « Gigantesque mouvement de migration des cerveaux européens vers l’Amérique qui, dans le sillage de la guerre, changea la face du monde » (20). Fuite des cerveaux et immigration plus ou moins choisie. La conquête d’espaces de peuplement (Etats-Unis, Australie…) par des sociétés encore très agricoles renvoie, pour nos sociétés de services, à l’installation de populations jeunes et fécondes dans des pays riches et vieillissants (21). Apport de carburant humain pour les économies locales, devenues creusets de l’Homme Nouveau. L’immigration est présentée comme une chance car la démographie européenne est en baisse, et bien sûr on ne peut pas obliger les Européens à faire des enfants, nous répète-t-on à l’envie. D’ici à 2050, le secrétaire d’Etat italien Sandro Gozi estime ainsi qu’il pourrait manquer 40 millions de travailleurs dans tout le continent (22)... Notre époque est celle d’un néo-colonialisme universaliste, expurgé de tout discours raciste mais toujours inégalitaire, qui vise, par la pratique du néolibéralisme politique et économique, le dépassement de toutes les civilisations. Les Soviétiques misaient en leur temps sur le communisme pour atteindre le même objectif. Quand le colonisateur universaliste est lui-même colonisé, il prête moins le flanc à la critique morale et politique (23). Agent à part entière ou supplétif d’un impérialisme par nature intégrateur et expansionniste, misant plus sur la communication que sur les armes. C’est l’épuisement de son récit qui mena l’Union Soviétique à sa perte, la fin de la guerre froide menaçant elle-même de déstabiliser le vainqueur (24).
Pour François Perroux : « Dans un ensemble humain, les coûts de l’homme se répartissent opérationnellement en trois groupes. Ce sont : 1°Ceux qui empêchent les êtres humains de mourir (lutte contre la mortalité dans le travail professionnel et hors des limites de ce travail); 2°Ceux qui permettent à tous les êtres humains une vie physique et mentale minima (activités de préventions hygiéniques, de soins médicaux, de secours invalidité, vieillesse, chômage) ; 3°Ceux qui permettent à tous les êtres humains une vie spécifiquement humaine, c’est-à-dire caractérisée par un minimum de connaissances et un minimum de loisirs (essentiellement : coûts d’instruction élémentaire, coût de loisir minimum)9 ». Selon Perroux, les coûts humains constituent un minimum à couvrir avant tout autre besoin. Dans le cadre de la mondialisation néolibérale, si l’on excepte une petite minorité, la couverture des coûts humains n’est pas assurée pour une large part de la population et se réduit, comme peau de chagrin, pour le restant.
With privatization comes a kind of collective amnesia about the potential democratic role of government, the importance of the social contract, and the importance of public values. For instance, war, intelligence operations, prisons, schools, transportation systems, and a range of other operations once considered public have been outsourced or simply handed over to private contractors who are removed from any sense of civic and political accountability. The social contract and the institutions that give it meaning have been transformed into entitlements administered and colonized by largely the corporate interests and the financial elite. Policy is no longer being written by politicians accountable to the American public. Instead, policies concerning the defense budget, deregulation, health care, public transportation, job training programs, and a host of other crucial areas are now largely written by lobbyists who represent mega corporations. How else to explain the weak deregulation policies following the economic crisis of 2007 or the lack of a public option in Obama’s health care policies? Or, for that matter, the more serious retreat from any viable notion of the political imagination that “requires long-term organizing—e.g., single-payer health care, universally free public higher education and public transportation, federal guarantees of housing and income security.”
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