Suchergebnisse

In this continuation of the exchange on the European Union, the United Kingdom, and the left, Andy Storey engages with Costas Lapavitsas's arguments in The Left Case Against the EU.

Europe has seen increasing steps taken to try to insulate economic decision-making from democratic influence. However, this trend, while in line with the foundation charters of ordoliberalism, is by no means confined to Europe or to ordoliberalism. Significant and ongoing attempts to preclude the population from influencing economic policy are global in nature and are characteristic of all forms of neoliberalism and of capitalist governance more generally. Structural adjustment in the Global South in the 1980s and 1990s provides a more helpful model for how the crisis has been responded to in Europe than the often Eurocentric conceptions of (and specious claims made for) ordoliberalism.

While there are emergent signs of anti-neoliberal resistance to EU policies and practices, this resistance remains ambiguous and fractured, often unable or unwilling to confront neoliberal European governance at the level of Europe itself. This is partly due to the very substantive barriers to counter-hegemonic projects that the EU has put in place; but it also reflects a failure on the part of much of the resistance to adequately identify, and engage with, all of the terrain on which the battle against neoliberalism must be fought.

The Rwandan genocide of 1994 has been partly attributed by some commentators to state weakness or collapse, and the weakness or collapse has in turn been partly attributed to the policies of the World Bank and the IMF. Neither argument is valid, and to advance them is to misunderstand the extent to which state power is a persistent and potent force in Africa and elsewhere, and also the extent to which the World Bank and IMF buttress that power (despite their own rhetoric of 'rolling back' the state). The first section of this article outlines the centrality of state power to an analysis of Rwanda in general and of the preparations for genocide in particular, while the following section demonstrates how the World Bank lent material and discursive support to a repressive and ultimately genocidal state apparatus. The concluding section offers some explanation of why the World Bank adopts such policies.