The history of neoliberalism is a messy attempt to turn theory into practice. Neoliberals struggled with their plans to implement flagship policies of monetarism, fiscal prudence, and public sector privatisation. Yet, inflation was still cut, welfare slashed, and the public sector ‘marketised’. Existing literature often interprets this as neoliberalism ‘failing-forward’, achieving policy goals by whatever means necessary and at great social cost. Often overlooked in this narrative is how far actually existing neoliberalism strayed from the original designs of public choice theorists and neoliberal ideologues. By examining the history of the Thatcher government's public sector reforms, we demonstrate how neoliberal plans for marketisation ran aground, forcing neoliberal governments to turn to an approach of Managed Competition that owed more to practices of postwar planning born in Cold War US than neoliberal theory. Rather than impose a market-like transformation of the public sector, Managed Competition systematically empowered top managers and turned governance into a managerial process; two developments that ran directly against core precepts of neoliberalism. The history of these early failures and adjustments provides vital insights into the politics of managerial governance in the neoliberal era.
This article analyses the EU’s Stability and Growth Pact (SGP) to challenge interpretations of neoliberalism as an international project. The fiscal rules of the SGP are a paradigmatic example of how neoliberalism uses constitutional techniques to put limits on national democracy. These rules, however, have never worked as intended with adherence having been the exception rather than the norm. Although scholars readily admit neoliberal rules misfire in practice, conceptualisations of neoliberalism have remained largely unscathed. In contrast, this article argues that techniques of budgetary planning have had a more crucial impact on neoliberal fiscal governance than legal rules. In the case of the SGP, supranational actors have been empowered not by their capacity to put constitutional limits on public expenditure, but by analysing and intervening in the purposes and uses of public finance through managerial techniques of budgetary planning. In making this argument, I argue that neoliberal rules matter to international fiscal governance only through their failure. Instead, supranational institutions have been empowered in the neoliberal era through a managerial reformatting of governance.
This article examines the history of indicative planning in France to challenge conceptions of Eurozone governance. French planning is seen as a road not taken in Europe. Instead, the Eurozone is conceptualised through planning's antagonist – German ordoliberalism. Key features of this are rules‐based austerity and price stability pursued by an independent central bank. Scholars have, however, recognised that Eurozone governance exceeds ordoliberalism through a logic of integration oriented towards coordination rather than convergence and a governance rationality of performance management rather than legal enforcement. I analyse the historiography of indicative planning to argue that it provides a useful conceptual vantage point to understand these features of Eurozone governance. Highlighting the legacy of planning provides an alternative perspective on Eurozone politics. It shifts attention from the German‐led legal constraints imposed on national governments to how techniques of planning have suited French state desires for international coordination without supranational domination.
State responses to the global financial and European sovereign debt crisis have been dominated by a paradigm of austerity. This paradigm has called for the reduction of public expenditure on the basis that recent economic crises were caused by excessive public spending and debt. In contrast to explanations of austerity's persistence that focus on the role of powerful actors or institutions, this article will highlight the role of discourse and argumentation. To do so, the article presents a political claims analysis of public debates on austerity in the mass media in the United Kingdom and Republic of Ireland between 2010-2013. In doing so, the article contributes to broader discussions on the resilience of neoliberalism since the global financial and European sovereign debt crises by calling for a greater appreciation of the variegated nature of austerity's application in different national contexts.
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