Three varieties of Authoritarian Neoliberalism: Rule by the experts, the people, the leader

Abstract

Neoliberalism and authoritarianism are intimately connected, as is demonstrated by the existence of a growing body of literature on ‘authoritarian neoliberalism’. This article provides a taxonomy of authoritarian neoliberalism and claims that it appears in three varieties – technocracy, populist nationalism, and traditional authoritarianism. Also, it proposes both an overview of the varieties and an analysis of three states as case studies. States are investigated as actors which strongly contribute to the neoliberal project amidst a more complex process of multilocalized and variegated neoliberalizations, which have to be incorporated into the comparative research. First, Italy is studied as a consolidated Western democracy which has been often governed by technocrats, independent, non-party professionals who have recurrently been in power since the 1990s, and within the frame of an increasingly technocratic European Union. Second, the paper concentrates on Hungary, a semi-peripheral Central European country which has become an epitome of a populist nationalism with increasingly authoritarian traits. Third, the paper focuses on Kazakhstan, a former Soviet Union republic with no significant experience of liberal democracy before independence, and a key example of the ‘traditional authoritarian’ variety. The three varieties, however, are sometimes combined and coexisting, and their evolution will be decisive for the future of capitalism and liberal democracy.

Territorial stigmatization and housing commodification under racial neoliberalism: The case of Denmark's ‘ghettos’

“…In Denmark, I suggest, the emergence of racial neoliberalism can be understood as one of neoliberalism's ‘unhappy marriages’ of seemingly contradictory political projects (Peck et al, 2018: 10), as centrist neoliberalism became inseparable from anti-immigrant right-wing populism in a parliamentarian pragmatism. But this ‘marriage’ had its ‘happy’, less-contradictory moments: right-wing populism, such as that of the Danish People's Party, is, in its defence of the common people against the elite, not incompatible with neoliberalism as ‘the latter's negative effects mostly impact migrants and marginalized, in a kind of “welfare chauvinism”’ (Gallo, 2022: 560). In turn, while Danish People's Party would often deliver a populist justification for the hard-line immigration and integration project to the public, and also take credit for this, most of the policy that actually passed aligned with Fogh Rasmussen's new, centrist project (Schørring and Jannerup, 2018).…”

The rise of anti-establishment and far-right forces in Italy: Neoliberalisation in a new guise?

“…This is the case of Italy, whose political-economic features are seldom portrayed as fitting the Anglo-American neoliberal canon and where neoliberalising tendencies, even when acknowledged, are considered at best as expressions of a ‘statist liberalism’ that ‘violates’ proper neoliberal tenets (Gualmini and Schmidt, 2013: 370). Conventional understandings of neoliberalism as a static and monolithic paradigm would thus be unable to account for the peculiar neoliberalising dynamics arising in contexts such as the Italian one, where, for instance, neoliberalisation was often driven by state technocracies (Gallo, 2021) and occurred in a ‘selective’ manner in order to circumvent and weaken trade union resistance (Ferragina and Arrigoni, 2021). Hence, an understanding of neoliberalism emphasising its geo-historically variegated nature as well as its processual character allows us to capture the distinctness and the non-linearity of the neoliberalisation of the Italian political economy in the recent decade.…”

“…The re-shaping of the institutional architecture of the EU economic governance became functional to foster austerity and neoliberal restructuring through (quasi-)constitutional mechanisms and the ‘construction of a permanent, continent-wide conditionality regime’ sheltering neoliberal policies from popular contestation (Bruff, 2017: 161; see also Bruff and Wöhl, 2016; McBride and Mitrea, 2017; Sandbeck and Schneider, 2014). This was also accompanied by the ‘self-disempowerment of nominally democratic institutions, governments and parliaments’ (Bruff, 2014: 116), as well as by the concomitant empowerment of both national and supranational technocracies as an attempt to de-politicise neoliberal policy choices in the name of ‘economic necessity’ (see Gallo, 2021). Nonetheless, the ‘authoritarian fix’ ended up simultaneously strengthening and weakening neoliberal institutions (Bruff, 2014), exposing them to challenges coming from both the left and the right (Bruff, 2017).…”

Global Authoritarianism

“…This has been the case in South Africa where against increasing brutality, such as the police shooting of 34 striking miners in Marikana on 16 August 2012 and the random killing of protestors and activists, strikes have not abated (Swart and Rodney-Gumede 2019; South African Human Rights Commission [SAHRC] 2015). Authoritarian neoliberalism can be categorized into three varieties that include technocracy, populist nationalism, and traditional authoritarianism (Gallo 2021). Across the globe, and in a transnational manner, technocrats are deployed to use "their scholarly and professional reputation to enact fully fledged neoliberal programmes" (Gallo 2021, 5).…”

“…Appropriated by experts and international donors, the right to the city here straddles a thin line between a right and authoritarianism. In his three varieties of authoritarian neoliberalism, Ernesto Gallo (2021) cites technocracy as the first example. Here, technocrats are characterized as the "organic intellectuals" of neoliberal capital and international agencies penetrating the state from without (Gallo 2021, 5).…”