Abstract
The collective enterprise States of Discipline. Authoritarian Neoliberalism and the Contested Reproduction of Capitalist Order, edited by Cemal Burak Tansel and composed of 12 essays, is a timely book on the variegated, increasingly coercive and intrinsically contradictory forms of neoliberal governance, whose main goal is to disrupt the instrumental image of the liberal and democratic Global North versus the authoritarian/illiberal and backward Global South, developing thus a dynamic and theoretical-cum-empirical analysis of neoliberalism as a political project and as a set of disciplinary practices.
The volume starts by acknowledging that while many expected the end of neoliberal governance after the 2007–2008 crisis, the institutional and political patterns of neoliberalism intensified, in turn increasing social inequalities, a more coercive enforcement of market rule and the crisis of representative democratic institutions. From this consideration, the volume raises several questions: why has neoliberalism, despite the irreversible crisis of legitimation which skyrocketed after the global crisis of 2008, proved to be so resilient? And, through which – institutional, legal, extra/legal – mechanisms has it secured and even increased capital accumulation in the face of the economic, political and social crises?
Therefore, the book is an effort to unveil the current modes of neoliberal governance across a number of themes and cases around the globe. The theoretical dimension draws upon the key concept of authoritarian neoliberalism as outlined in particular by Ian Bruff (2014), and proposes an explicit political reading of neoliberalism. Through the concept of authoritarian neoliberalism, Bruff frames the ‘reconfiguration of the state into a less open and democratic entity’ (Bruff, 2014: 116). This reconfiguration is not a political–economic and institutional rupture with the pre-2008 phase, but, as complemented by Tansel, ‘a historically specific set of capitalist accumulation strategies that both exacerbate the existing, structural trends in the political organization of capitalism and embodies distinct forms of practices geared towards unshackling accumulation at the expenses of democratic politics and popular participation’ (p.6).
Along with the attention given to the practices of neoliberalism, the volume aims also at challenging how neoliberalism is understood in the mainstream political economy literature. In other words, those who see neoliberalism as a successful outcome of the economic ideas spread over by a transnational ‘epistemic community’ largely fail (1) to explain how concretely and differently neoliberalism catches on outside North America and western Europe, and how neoliberal ideas are practically translated into policies (see also Brenner et al. 2010) and (2) to recognize the political nature of neoliberalism as based on class interests, state force and the refusal to establish compromises with other social groups.
To overcome these shortfalls, the book pushes forward a dynamic understanding of neoliberalism ‘as the response of state officials to the intrinsic contradictions, and crisis, of capitalism’ (pp. 7–8), with the aim of covering the variegated, context-determined, increasingly coercive, hierarchical and anti-democratic practices of ‘real existing neoliberalism’.
The state is the lynchpin of the book’s common reflections. Beyond the ‘less state’ rhetoric, the reality of neoliberal governance relies heavily on state power for the imposition of market-rule, with the contextual erosion of representative democratic institutions (Bruff, 2014, 2016; Poulantzas, 1978; Obendorfer, 2015). Thus, if neoliberalism can be generally conceived as a regime of capital accumulation, authoritarian neoliberalism stresses the increased propensity of the state to resort to a number of preemptive and coercive administrative, legal, extra-legal strategies to impose finance-led patterns of capital accumulation despite its growing contradictions (p. 3).
The volume, moreover, can be conceived of as an initial research agenda to tackle the materiality-cum-variegation of neoliberal processes. Generally, the 12 essays are organized into two broad sections: the first tackles several thematic fields of authoritarian neoliberal practices and the second zooms in on the EU and state experiences across different regions of the world.
In the first part, Monica Clua-Losada and Olatz Ribera-Almandoz kick off by analysing the Spanish state strategies in disciplining labour through the abuse of coercive legal mechanism (e.g. the constitutionalization of Fiscal Pact and the use of royal decrees) to insulate neoliberal policies, and by exploring the wave of workers’ resistance (often in connection with the 15M movement, better known as the indignados) against the abuse of precarious contracts by the company Telefònica/Movistar. Kendra Briken’s and Volker Eick’s essay takes into account processes of commodification of security under authoritarian neoliberalism, skilfully targeting the growth of private corporate security management for policing activity and control of spaces and individuals (e.g. they report on cases of immigrants’ detention in private facilities in the United Kingdom and the United States and the outsourcing of deportation operations in Austria). Wendy Harcourt, from a feminist perspective, stresses that authoritarian neoliberalism is also a strategy of normative body disciplining, which gives rise to forms of challenge and resistance to hetero-normative order. Hunger and food insecurity are core themes of Sébastien Rioux’s essay, which remarks that ‘the disciplining effects of hunger and food insecurity has been, and remains, key to the imposition of neoliberal labour market restructuring in the United State’ (p. 88). Annalena di Giovanni enquires into processes of urban transformation under neoliberalism, analysing the intersection between capital accumulation in the real estate industry, coercive forms of centralization of decision-making and the repression of popular oppositions in Istanbul (e.g. as in the case of Gezi Park, June 2013). The essay of Luca Manunza closes this section. Manunza explores the management, by Italian authorities, of migrant arrivals on the southern coasts (part of the common EU strategy of securitization of migration). Under a framework of permanent authoritarian emergency handcrafted by the Italian state, Manunza analyses what he terms the ‘business of hospitality’, namely the creation of ‘immigrant centres’ through public funding which benefitted, in political nepotistic and clientele-based ways, a plethora of NGOs and associations and provided poor or no assistance at all to migrants and refugees.
The second part of the book focuses on state experiences and the EU. Ian Bruff analyses the contradictions of the European Social Model, largely committed to a neoliberal economy, and the increasing hardening of ‘soft law’ via the establishment of the European Semester, an institutional framework that constrains member states to permanent austerity. The next case, analysed by Panagiotis Sotiris, concerns Greece. The author aptly stresses, on one hand, the reduction of national sovereignty, and on the other, the constant use of extraordinary parliamentary procedures to comply with the austerity policies dictated by the ‘Trojka’, in a context that he defines as ‘permanent economic emergency’. Baris Özden, Izmet Akça and Ahmet Bekmen take into account the Turkish case. The authors’ focus is on the Justice and Development Party (AKP) policies, which they conceive as a response to neoliberal globalization and an exacerbation of neoliberal governance. Interestingly, they place in the early 1980s the processes of authoritarian neoliberalization via the strengthening of the executive, the ‘technocratization’ of economic issues and the centralization of decision-making, aptly stressing also how these processes resolved – or, rather, seemed to resolve – the crisis of the 1970s in favour of capital and dominant classes. They also brilliantly reconstruct the financialization in Turkey in the 1990s, the rising hegemony of the AKP to date and the disarticulation of working-class power.
A comparative analysis of Egypt and Morocco is offered by Brecht De Smert and Koenraad Bogaert. They analyse, drawing on the Gramscian concept of passive revolution, the different trajectories of the two states within processes of neoliberal rearticulation of authoritarianism. The last two essays concern Cambodia and China. The first is analysed by Simon Springer, who coined the word nepoliberalism to denote the Cambodian way to neoliberalism, a sort of mix between corruption, authoritarian statism and insertion in the global market. Eventually, Kean Fan Lim overviews the Chinese neoliberalization processes, analysing how Chinese authorities sought to use financial and commodity flows to promote, contradictorily, socialist egalitarian process within the already authoritarian framework of the Chinese party-state.
In conclusion, this heterogeneous collection of essays is, on one hand, coherent with the broader ‘authoritarian neoliberalism approach’, which ontologically relies on context-based dynamics. On the other, it suffers from an empirical overstretching of this conceptual framework, in some cases gathering essays that could be valid in their own rights and/or loosely related within one single comparative perspective. Nevertheless, what remains of this book is the courageous effort, in which it largely succeeds, to politicize neoliberalism and unveil forms of authoritarian governance beyond the ideological division between the ‘liberal-enlightened’ Global North and the ‘authoritarian-corrupted’ Global South.
This research agenda is promising with respect to a line of enquiry well equipped to unmask the increasingly authoritarian character of current forms of neoliberal governance, and to challenge, on theoretical and empirical grounds, the dominant ideology and ‘common sense’ which posits Western liberal capitalism as the global standard towards which the world has to move – regardless of the increasingly unbearable weight of its structural contradictions.