Scales of Neoliberalism

This symposium focuses on the tensions that manifest at different scales of government (international, national and subnational) as a result of neoliberal policies that privilege capital and the private sector over broader social interests and the public sector. The set of articles shows how increasing pressures from global neoliberalism create disruptions and challenges at multiple scales of government. By neoliberal we refer to the range of market-oriented policies that finds its ideological roots in Hayek (1944), economic justification in Friedman (1962), and political practice of Thatcher and Reagan (Feigenbaum and Henig, 1994), that assumes the market triumphalism of Fukuyama (1992). We focus not on globalization as a general phenomenon but instead on the economic policies that international institutions like the World Bank and IMF (Williamson, 1993; Stiglitz, 2002), states and international treaties put into practice on a range of scales (Brenner and Theodore, 2002). While varied, these neoliberal policies tend to increase the tension between the contradictory needs of the state to maintain legitimacy on the one hand and to secure conditions for the accumulation of capital on the other (O'Connor, 1973). As a result, social opposition Ð the Polanyian countermovement described by many Ð takes place as citizens voice their discontent in the streets, which provide the only arenas available. While citizen opposition is of importance, it is not the focus of this set of articles that sees citizen opposition as a manifestation of structural problems, not as the object of study. We focus instead on the challenges to state and local governments in an environment constrained by neoliberal policies. Our articles show the difficulties for national and subnational governments in maintaining such a complex system. Taken together, the cases suggest that the challenges are so important as to question the benefits and stability of privatization as a political project regardless of scale. Warner and Gerbasi focus on the international level through an examination of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) that created a new set of rules to determine the relationship between foreign firms and states. Kohl looks at the national level using the case of an innovative partial privatization program in Bolivia that turned the largest sectors of the economy over to international investors. Miraftab turns her eye to the local level, analyzing the outsourcing of municipal services in Cape Town whereby the cost recovery principles of neoliberalism bound the municipal government to rely on casual labor hired through short-term contracts at minimum wages and the unpaid labor of volunteer women in disadvantaged townships. These cases show how neoliberalism works at different levels to enhance the overarching logic of the market at the expense of governance for the broader social good. Volume 28.4 December 2004 855±57 International Journal of Urban and Regional Research