Cemal Burak Tansel, ed, States of Discipline: Authoritarian Neoliberalism and the Contested Reproduction of Capitalist Order, Rowman & Littlefield, 2017; pbk £22.00.
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The inspiration for this collection is Ian Bruff's 2014 article on the rise of 'authoritarian neoliberalism' (Bruff 2014). Bruff argued that authoritarianism can be observed 'in the reconfiguring of state and institutional power in an attempt to insulate certain policies and institutional practices from social and political dissent', and identified three principal strands to authoritarian neoliberalism (AL): '(1) the more immediate appeal to material circumstances as a reason for the state being unable, despite “the best will in the world,” to reverse processes such as greater socioeconomic inequality and dislocation; (2) the deeper and longer-term recalibration of the kinds of activity that are feasible and appropriate for nonmarket institutions to engage in, diminishing expectations in the process; and (3) the reconceptualization of the state as increasingly nondemocratic through its subordination to constitutional and legal rules that are deemed necessary for prosperity to be achieved' (Bruff, 2014: 115-6). AL did not represent a wholesale break with pre-2007 neoliberal practice, but was 'qualitatively distinct' because of 'the shift toward constitutional and legal mechanisms and the move away from seeking consent for hegemonic projects' (116), a shift, he added, that was 'the result of sustained political activism that built upon precrisis trends' (120). So 'under authoritarian neoliberalism dominant social groups are less interested in neutralizing resistance and dissent via concessions and forms of compromise that maintain their hegemony, favouring instead the explicit exclusion and marginalization of subordinate social groups through the constitutionally and legally engineered self-disempowerment of nominally democratic institutions, governments, and parliaments' (116). Bruff drew primarily on the work of Stuart Hall and Nicos Poulantzas, and was concerned with Thatcherism in particular and the shift from social democracy in Europe in general, though he gestured towards the wider applicability of the concept; and among examples given of the 'qualitative shift' were the British Office for Budget Responsibility created in 2010, the 'debt brake' constitutional amendment adopted in Germany in 2009, and the generalisation of such measures across the EU thereafter. Such measures, he argued, 'are ... increasingly preemptive, locking in neoliberal governance mechanisms in the name of necessity, whatever the actual state of play'; and the same trend was exemplified, at EU level, by the Fiscal Compact, the Euro Plus Pact, and the Outright Monetary Transactions initiative, with its thrust towards 'the creation of a permanent, continent-wide conditionality regime aimed at all governments' (123-4). Bruff viewed these initiatives as 'a response both to a wider crisis of capitalism and more specific legitimation crises of capitalist states' (124), but concluded that 'a state’s own crisis intensifies at the same time as its strategies of displacement (for example, the aforementioned constitutional and quasi-constitutional changes) seek to stabilize the contradictions and dislocations emanating from socioeconomic restructuring without granting material concessions to subordinate social groups', and that therefore that 'the attempted “authoritarian fix” is potentially more of a sticking plaster than anything more epochal' (125). This led him to talk up the prospects for a renewal of social democracy on the basis of a turn to non-traditional antistatist politics as reflected in the Occupy, Indignados and related movements.
Building on this, Tansel's introduction to this collection initially poses two questions: '(1) What makes neoliberalism such a resilient mode of economic and political governance? (2) What are the mechanisms and processes with which the core components of neoliberalism effectively reproduce themselves in the face of popular opposition?' (2). Reasserting 'the exigency of understanding neoliberalism as a regime of capital accumulation and of recognising the key role that states play in its protection and reproduction' (ibid), he follows Bruff in suggesting that AL involves a 'set of state strategies with which the variegated pressures of neoliberalism are maintained and shielded from popular pressure', as 'contemporary neoliberalism reinforces and increasingly relies upon (1) coercive state practices that discipline, marginalise and criminalise oppositional social forces, and (2) the judicial and administrative state apparatuses which limit the avenues in which neoliberal policies can be challenged' (2, emphasis mine); authoritarian liberalisms entail a 'transformation of the "normal" operation of the capitalist state' and a 'qualitative shift from the intrinsic "illiberal" propensities of neoliberalism', operating through a preemptive discipline which simultaneously insulates neoliberal policies through a set of administrative, legal and coercive mechanisms and limits the spaces of popular resistance against neoliberalism', and are 'marked by a significant escalation in the state's propensity to employ coercion and extra-legal intimidation, which is complemented by [quoting Poulantzas, 1978: 203-4] "intensified state control over every sphere of social life ... (and) draconian and multiform curtailment of so-called 'formal' liberties"' (3). AL 'subjects individuals, collectives and populations to economic, financial and corporeal discipline', and its strategies, again, 'are marked by an explicit predisposition to insulate policymaking from popular dissent through coercive, administrative and legal deployment of state power', with 'a particular disciplinary effect'; and the 'panoply of neoliberal policies enacted in different spatial and scalar contexts ... are increasingly geared towards protecting the pillars of neoliberal accumulation (4, emphasis mine). At the same time, Tansel takes a cue from Bruff's initial account to stretch the concept from its original focus on Western Europe to cover capitalist states more generally and particularly those in the global South, arguing that the adoption of neoliberal reforms in such states should be seen as 'a strategy adopted by state managers to tackle extant or budding economic and/or political crises' (9), and at the same time that 'state responses to the economic and political crises of capitalism can - and increasingly do - assume similar forms both in formal democracies and in traditionally defined authoritarian regimes' (11).
More was wrong with Bruff's article than I have the space to detail here, but briefly the presentation of constitutional and legal rules intended to insulate governance from dissent as an authoritarian deviation rather than as constitutive of representative liberal democracy (never mind neoliberal governance) reflected a strikingly uncritical view of the latter - Ayers and Saad Filho (2015: 601), in an article cited by Tansel (p. 3, with reference to the 2014 online first version), suggest that 'during periods of relatively stable accumulation the greater legitimacy of democratic regimes, due to their inclusive political rights and attachment to constitutional rules, allows them to impose exclusionary economic policies and insulate elite interests from mass pressures more efficiently than most dictatorships. Nevertheless, in times of crisis or when the established order is thought to be threatened, naked force will be deployed': this is surely both the consensus critical view, and correct. As regards timing, the various measures to enforce budget discipline Bruff highlighted in the European Union followed the same disciplinary logic of the introduction of the euro itself a decade earlier, and were preceded not only by a slew of comparable EU and related legislation, but also by the adoption of fiscal responsibility laws in New Zealand (1994) and a host of other countries thereafter, all with the active involvement of the OECD, the IMF, or both (Gordon, 2016), and broader conditionality dated back much further elsewhere in the world. So despite his best efforts, Bruff's authoritarian neoliberalism turned out to be virtually indistinguishable from Gill's 'new constitutionalism'/'disciplinary neoliberalism' (just as his appeal to non-traditional antistatist movements directly echoed Gill's 'post modern prince')' and its close resemblance to an approach set out a quarter of a century ago (Gill, 1992) casts serious doubt on the thesis that AL is new, as of course does the identification of the same logic by Poulantzas in the 1970s. In addition, there was a fundamental contradiction between the idea of a qualitative shift in neoliberal governance and that of a fragile and temporary "authoritarian fix"; and that in turn was the result of the counter-posing of 'the explicit exclusion and marginalization of subordinate social groups through the constitutionally and legally engineered self-disempowerment' on the one hand and 'neutralizing resistance and dissent via concessions and forms of compromise that maintain their hegemony' on the other. This arose from the error of treating the regime of accumulation and the mode of governance as if they were one and the same, and informed by the same logic. Despite the fact that he drew explicit attention to Hall's analysis of Thatcher's 'authoritarian populism', Bruff underestimated the potential for hegemonic appeals fused with the logic of discipline/exclusion (remember 'TINA' - 'There Is No Alternative'), and even for apparent material concessions - such as the rising minimum wage in the UK, which is an attempt to force capital to become more productive, but still lends itself to a rhetoric of inclusion. He was mistaken too to suggest that a politics of exclusion and insulation of core areas of policy from popular challenge could not be combined with the kinds of appeals he associates with the radical right. In fact, all kinds of combinations are possible - in the Netherlands, as Bruff notes (126), neoliberals ally with the 'radical right'; in the UK, May steals their clothes and swallows them whole; in France, Macron stands on the ground of global neoliberalism, highlighting the fact that there is an alternative, but insisting that it is nasty, divisive, and dangerous. So Bruff's core claim, in regard to the potential for progressive politics, that AL weakens the state at the same time that it strengthens it because of its iron logic of exclusion, is over-simplistic.
With this starting point, then, Tansel has dealt himself a tricky hand to play. And indeed he draws further attention to a fundamental weakness of the AL thesis, referring (4) to Marx's depiction (from July 1844) of the English system on pauperism as one that 'no longer sets out to eliminate it, but which strives instead to discipline and perpetuate it (Marx, 1975: 409) - suggesting that the core strategies of AL preceded the introduction of liberal democracy itself, as indeed they do. The enduring imperative to subject workers to the discipline of capital, and to oblige them to sell their labour power to the capitalist by eliminating alternatives, is constitutive of the 'bourgeois mode of production'. With the extension of the world market over the last three decades, Western Europe has been subjected to competitive pressures from which it was relatively immune before, with the result that conditionality, once restricted to the 'developing world', has become universal. And to his credit, Tansel acknowledges the weaknesses of the concept of AL even as he seeks to employ and develop it. He is emphatic at the outset that his argument 'should not be read to the effect that the deployment of coercive state apparatuses for the protection of the circuits of capital accumulation is a new phenomenon, nor should it lead to the assumption that the pre-crisis trajectories of neoliberalization have been exclusively consensual. In advancing the analytical utility of authoritarian neoliberalism, we are not asserting that the violent, disciplinary and anti-democratic means with which capitalist states remove the barriers to accumulation should be understood as an innovation of neoliberalism' (2); his account of the lineages of AL is prefaced by the statement that this introductory chapter 'conceptually and empirically maps the emergent patterns of authoritarian neoliberalism and the signal continuities they represent vis-à-vis the structural and intersecting inequalities inherent in capitalist societies' (5, emphasis mine); he remarks in a footnote that the focus on criminalisation and marginalisation 'should not be read to the effect that neoliberalization simply results in the dismissal of progressive causes or marginalised groups and communities', as 'emancipatory goals shared and advanced by progressive movements continue to be adopted and subsequently neutralised by powerful transnational organisations as well as nation states and companies' (ft. 15, p. 21); and he closes the chapter with the final thought that 'notwithstanding our focus on the constitutive role of authoritarian state power and the utilisation of state apparatuses in maintaining capital accumulation, consent-making activities and efforts by the states, policymakers and transnational organisations to (re)constitute neoliberal "common sense" should still be seen as integral components of the hegemonic status neoliberalism continues to enjoy' (19). All these points are very well made.
And in fact, States of Discipline turns out to be well worth reading, though not quite for the reasons you might expect. Admittedly, it fails in its aspiration to be 'an initial step towards formulating a new research agenda underpinned by "authoritarian neoliberalism" as a conceptual prism through which the institutionalization and employment of a number of state practices that invalidate or circumscribe public input and silence popular resistance can be illuminated ... as part of a broader strategy inherently linked to the reproduction of capitalist order and of its logics of exclusion and exploitation operating at the intersections of class, gender, race and ethnicity' (3). Only a handful of contributions refer to the introduction at all, and none addresses its agenda directly; and, crucially, there is no conclusion to draw the collection as a whole together and move the agenda forward. In short, there is no sense of a group of scholars interactively engaged on a common project. At the same time, only five authors refer to Bruff's essay (one being Bruff himself). Clua-Losada and Ribera-Almandoz (Chapter Two) take from Bruff the idea that the removal of key decisions from democratic control 'is not a new process but rather the continuation of a key characteristic of neoliberal governance' (29), then move straight into a detailed analysis of the impact of two recent Royal Decree Laws that are the culmination of three decades of reforms to the labour market, and a case study of the 1999 privatization of Telefónica (now Movistar), and resistance to 'reform' in its hived-off subcontractors. Sébastien Rioux (Chapter Five) picks up too on the use of constitutional and legal changes to reshape the purpose of the state, in a study of the restructuring of public welfare and food assistance programmes in the United States in the shift from welfare to workfare, and offers it as an example of the way that measures to stabilize contradictions and dislocations without granting material concessions intensify the crisis of the state (88, 102). Annalena Di Giovanni (Chapter Six) invokes Bruff's emphasis on 'the role of the state in the protection and reproduction of capital accumulation' and the constant resort to anti-democratic constitutional changes (111) in her analysis of the transformation of Istanbul between 2003 and 2013, and presents the 'crazing' of Istanbul (that is, its transformation through megaprojects designated as 'crazy' by their political promotors) as 'a city-branding exercise contingent to an authoritarian neoliberal political economy', in which public input is marginalized (114, 123). And Brecht de Smet and Koenraad Bogaert (Chapter Eleven) preface their account of passive revolutions attempted in Egypt (ending in failure) and Morocco (a relative success) with a single opening sentence recalling Bruff's associating AL with a loss of hegemony and a shift towards extraordinary modes of governance (211).
These are solid and interesting individual case studies. Clua-Losada and Ribera-Almandoz highlight the limited extent of prior democratization in Spain, the prevalence of low productivity and high unemployment, and the huge transfer of wealth from the public to the private sector arising from the privatization of 'large and profitable companies' in the context of EU convergence criteria established by the 1992 Maastricht treaty (36), and describe the struggles of out-sourced, sub-contracted and 'self-employed' workers in a context in which trade unions and established left-wing parties as much as corporations and the 'neoliberal' state are the enemies of resistance. Rioux documents the 'discovery' of chronic hunger and malnutrition on a massive scale in the US in the 1960s, the response in terms of food assistance programmes, and their subsequent evolution in the war on welfare under Reagan and Clinton among others, concluding with a wealth of evidence that the 'neoliberal assault on the social safety net has restored the conditions of capital profitability, which produces an army of working poor for whom food and economic insecurity have become the norm' (102). Di Giovanni describes a combination of city branding through megaprojects and such initiatives as the successful 2010 European Capital of Culture bid, and large-scale housing projects managed by the Housing Development Association (TOKİ), detailing the increasing scope given to executive orders and the like. And De Smet and Bogaert outline contrasting trajectories, hinged on the relative political capacity of Morocco's royal family on the one hand and Egypt's secular developmentalist regime on the other, and leading to the restoration of hegemony in the first case, and its collapse in the other.
It is principally through these chapters that the merits of the collection emerge, and its value turns out to lie not in its development of AL, but in the critique that it offers to the attentive reader. The weaknesses of Bruff's argument I noted above and the cautions expressed by Tansel are reinforced throughout, with the result that little is left of AL as originally formulated. The case studies identify what may be termed at most 'authoritarian moments' related to the governance of capitalist social formations, but the antecedents, content, connections and outcomes differ from case to case. In Spain, the episodes described, arising from a perceived need to impose labour reform in order to facilitate/force labour flexibility and competitiveness, reflected the inability of the Spanish state to overcome the compromises made in the transition to democracy, and particularly 'to subdue and discipline labour' (43). Conflicts over this dated back to Spanish entry to the EU, and there is a constant history of to-and-fro between attempts at social dialogue and its breakdown or abandonment. The PSOE under Zapatero (2008-2011), which made extensive use of royal decrees, itself introduced the 2010 Decree law on Urgent Measures for Reforming the Labour Market, while continuing to seek agreement through concessions and dialogue, as did Rajoy's successor PP government. So attempts to secure hegemony were never abandoned, but have rather alternated with authoritarian moments in a dialectical process that is as old as the governance of capitalism under representative liberal democracy itself, and older. Rioux's account of food assistance programmes certainly documents the disciplining of labour through hunger, but also reports the rise in the combined cost of the programmes considered from US$4.1 billion to US$21.7 billion between 1980 and 2011-12 (101). This is not an authoritarian fix at all, but a 'welfare fix', and the pressures upon it (the imperative to maintain incentives to work, the size of the welfare bill, and the delegitimating extent of desperate need) are not at all illuminated by the AL approach. Di Giovanni's account highlights the rigidity and one-sidedness of Bruff's account, describing a strategy that both attempted a positive hegemonic strategy premised on the offer of ownership of a 'modern' home, and targeted marginal groups - Roma, and casual migrant workers - for forcible displacement (itself another hegemony-building strategy, of course). De Bret and Bogaert produce the most comprehensive critique, suggesting first of all that although 'contemporary neoliberal politics indeed appear as an extraordinary, authoritarian deviation' from the perspective of the Western post-war period, 'the history of capitalist development since the nineteenth century suggests that revolutions both in the global North and the global South have always shown the limits of bourgeois democracy and a tendency towards more authoritarian forms of state power' (211). The polite suggestion is that the model can indeed be applied beyond post-war Western Europe, but that it will collapse as a consequence. This hints at an optical foreshortening which is widely shared, and which mars many otherwise excellent essays in critical political economy: 'Instead of the norm, the post-Second World War class compromise, democratisation and welfare state were the unique outcomes of 'extraordinary' economic and (geo)political conditions', bookended on either side, and more so in the earlier period, in which Gramsci, as they remind us, 'understood the rise of Fascism and authoritarianism in the 1920s and 1930s as the "normal" political forms of that capitalist epoch' (ibid). Second, they draw on Thomas (2009: 162-5) to make the important argument that a 'shift towards more authoritarian policies does not necessarily entail a hegemonic crisis' if 'force is grounded in popular consent' (212). This disposes of the argument that authoritarian moves necessarily make the state more fragile. Third, as noted above, they contrast a relatively successful attempt to maintain hegemony through limited liberal reform in Morocco with its failure in Egypt. The extended case studies underline the impossibility of abstracting an iron logic of the kind represented by AL from 'quite different national trajectories of political and economic struggle and transformation, respectively provoking and blocking revolutionary outcomes' (214). As elsewhere, Moroccan rule has oscillated between repression and conciliation, and the current royal démarche, which faltered after the 2016 elections, is still by no means guaranteed to succeed. But the conclusion is inescapable - it is a methodological error to impose a general model on specific cases, when the logic governing the general model abstracts away from the specific internal logics of all the possible cases concerned.
Against this background, Bruff's own contribution, on the hardening of 'soft' EU law and its implications for the 'social model', exhibits some misconceptions that may have shaped the AL thesis in the first place. His suggestion that the Open Method of Coordination (OMC) adopted in 2000 was 'initially concerned with the relatively voluntary and dialogical sharing of different examples of 'best practice' from across the EU on social themes such as unemployment and welfare policy', whereas since there has been 'a steady "hardening" of these mechanisms towards more punitive and centralized processes based on the assumption that there is in fact a singular (neoliberal) best practice to be applied across the EU at the behest of the European Commission' (149) is mistaken. The Lisbon Council that gave rise to the Lisbon agenda redefined social protection as a 'productive factor'; the OMC was an integral part of it, and as such 'a key element in a hierarchy of policy modes, at the same time subordinate and complementary to the ‘harder’ modes of the Community Method and binding regulation in monetary and fiscal areas' (Cammack, 2007: 3, and Box 1, p. 5). From the start it was not only an instrument to promote convergence around desired pro-competitiveness policy orientations, but also a specifically hegemony-building instrument, and designed as such, and Bruff himself provides direct evidence of this from the European Council (158). The idea of an atmosphere of open policy debate around genuine alternatives giving way to a harder neoliberal line is therefore a puzzling misrepresentation - guidelines, surveillance, benchmarking, mutual learning and peer review were linked and graduated processes intended to complement 'harder' treaty-based mechanisms, against the background of the single market and the introduction of the euro. And indeed Bruff documents the contested reconceptualisation of the 'European Social Model' from the early 1990s as the commitment to 'welfare, social partnership and the mixed economy' (153) came under pressure, identifies the 1994 European Employment Strategy (1994) an an important trigger (157), and goes on to detail an integrated and contested 'long-term project to secure competitiveness through multi-scalar meta-governance' (Nunn and Beeckmans, 2015: 930-31) which is entirely at odds with the notion of a later shift from a pluralist and consensual approach to a narrowly neoliberal and disciplinary one, and with the AL thesis as a whole. In sum, this is an excellent case study (despite the baffling focus on 'facet methodology'), but it reiterates what others have said already, and undermines some of the key claims of the AL approach. In the end, Bruff is reduced to arguing that the two outcomes compatible with the AL thesis, the fracturing of the system by way of its instabilities or its repudiation, are 'currently unlikely' (165).
The remaining case studies focus on Cambodia, China, Greece, and Turkey, the commodification of internal security, gender issues in academic research, and the management of international migration. All are clear, sensible, informative and well-researched contributions that can be read with profit, and if a couple of them draw substantially on previous published work, they still read as coherent essays in their own right. But for the most part they do not add much to reflection on or development of the concept of AL. Simon Springer (Chapter Twelve) on Cambodia stays firmly within his own problematic and reprises his familiar argument that patronage plays an important part in shaping neoliberal politics there, but does not bother to address the implications for AL - a pity, as patronage, if managed successfully, provides political support, strengthens elite control over the majority, and marginalises potentially disruptive groups - and therefore constitutes a powerful force for retaining and building hegemony (Cammack, 1982). Kean Fan Lim (Chapter Thirteen), in a good essay on China which contains an insightful analysis of the hukou system, dutifully inserts a paragraph linking back to Tansel's introduction into a section of otherwise unamended text carried over from an earlier publication, but leaves it largely to the reader to tease out the implications of hegemony-building strategies around 'neoliberalization' in an explicitly authoritarian regime. The key here is the point that 'the Chinese case demonstrates how neoliberal logics were selectively integrated within and subsequently reinforced authoritarian capacities that were already an integral part of the Chinese party-state' (258). Panagiotis Sotiris contributes a fine account of the disciplining of Greece by the EU-led troika, confirming in the process that there is considerable mileage in the idea of an authoritarian turn specifically within the EU, and that Bruff would have been better advised to stick to that rather than abstract away from it - here the key point is that 'European integration represents a form of neoliberal constitutionalism without democracy' (181). Bariş Alp Özden, İsmet Akça and Ahmet Bekmen (Chapter Ten) provide a good empirical and analytical account of the rise of the Turkish AKP (Justice and Development Party), opening up a perspective on the 'shifts, cracks and conflicts emerging during the integration of peripheral or semi-peripheral countries into globalisation' (189) which might have been a cue for further consideration, involving Cambodia, China, Egypt and Morocco too, in the conclusion that is not provided. It also provides a window onto some excellent work on Turkey. The remaining chapters Three, Four and Seven), by Kendra Briken and Volcker Eich, Wendy Harcourt, and Luca Manunza respectively, all have merits as independent essays, but they cry out for better integration into the themes of the volume, on the parts of the editor, and the authors themselves.
All in all, then, the major casualty of the volume is the concept of authoritarian neoliberalism itself. It turns out, as a theoretical proposal, to exemplify perfectly a fault highlighted by Marx in the Grundrisse: bringing things that are organically related (in specific ways in particular social formations in this case) into an accidental relation and a merely reflective connection (Marx, 1973: 88). The strictures expressed there apply.
References and further reading
Ayers, Alison, and Saad-Filho, Alfredo (2015), 'Democracy against neoliberalism: Paradoxes, limitations, transcendence', Critical Sociology, 41, 4/5, 597-618.
Bruff, Ian (2014), 'The rise of authoritarian neoliberalism', Rethinking Marxism, 26, 1, 113-129.
Çavuşoğlu, Erbatur and Julia Strutz (2014), 'Producing force and consent: Urban transformation and corporatism in Turkey, City, 18, 2, 134-148.
Cammack, Paul (1982), 'Clientelism and military government in Brazil', in Christopher Clapham, ed, Private Patronage and Public Power: Political Clientelism in the Modern State (Frances Pinter), pp. 53-75.
Cammack, Paul (2007), 'Competitiveness and Convergence: the Open Method of Co-ordination in Latin America', Papers in the Politics of Global Competitiveness, No. 5, Institute for Global Studies, Manchester Metropolitan University, e-space Open Access Repository, March.
Collier, David and James E. Mahon, Jr (1993), 'Conceptual "stretching" revisited: Adapting categories in comparative analysis', American Political Science Review, 87, 4, 845-855.
Gill, Stephen (1992) 'The emerging world order and European change: the political economy of the European Union', Socialist Register 1992, 157-196.
Gordon, Jorge P. (2016) 'Federalism and the politics of fiscal responsibility laws: Argentina and Brazil in comparative perspective', Policy Studies, 37, 3, 236-253.
Marx, Karl (1973), Grundrisse (Pelican).
Marx, Karl (1975), 'Critical Notes on the Article The King of Prussia and Social Reform, by a Prussian', in Lucio Coletti, ed, Karl Marx: Early Writings (Penguin/New Left Review), pp. 401-420.
Nunn, Alex and Paul Beeckmans (2015), 'The Political Economy of Competitiveness and Continuous Adjustment in EU Meta-Governance', International Journal of Public Administration, 38, 4, 926-939.
Sartori, Giovanni (1970), 'Concept Misinformation in Comparative Politics', American Political Science Review, 64, 1033-1053.
Sartori, Giovanni (1991), 'Comparing and Miscomparing', Journal of Theoretical Politics, 3, 3, 243-257.
Thomas, Peter (2009), The Gramscian Moment: Philosophy, Hegemony, and Marxism (Brill).
Building on this, Tansel's introduction to this collection initially poses two questions: '(1) What makes neoliberalism such a resilient mode of economic and political governance? (2) What are the mechanisms and processes with which the core components of neoliberalism effectively reproduce themselves in the face of popular opposition?' (2). Reasserting 'the exigency of understanding neoliberalism as a regime of capital accumulation and of recognising the key role that states play in its protection and reproduction' (ibid), he follows Bruff in suggesting that AL involves a 'set of state strategies with which the variegated pressures of neoliberalism are maintained and shielded from popular pressure', as 'contemporary neoliberalism reinforces and increasingly relies upon (1) coercive state practices that discipline, marginalise and criminalise oppositional social forces, and (2) the judicial and administrative state apparatuses which limit the avenues in which neoliberal policies can be challenged' (2, emphasis mine); authoritarian liberalisms entail a 'transformation of the "normal" operation of the capitalist state' and a 'qualitative shift from the intrinsic "illiberal" propensities of neoliberalism', operating through a preemptive discipline which simultaneously insulates neoliberal policies through a set of administrative, legal and coercive mechanisms and limits the spaces of popular resistance against neoliberalism', and are 'marked by a significant escalation in the state's propensity to employ coercion and extra-legal intimidation, which is complemented by [quoting Poulantzas, 1978: 203-4] "intensified state control over every sphere of social life ... (and) draconian and multiform curtailment of so-called 'formal' liberties"' (3). AL 'subjects individuals, collectives and populations to economic, financial and corporeal discipline', and its strategies, again, 'are marked by an explicit predisposition to insulate policymaking from popular dissent through coercive, administrative and legal deployment of state power', with 'a particular disciplinary effect'; and the 'panoply of neoliberal policies enacted in different spatial and scalar contexts ... are increasingly geared towards protecting the pillars of neoliberal accumulation (4, emphasis mine). At the same time, Tansel takes a cue from Bruff's initial account to stretch the concept from its original focus on Western Europe to cover capitalist states more generally and particularly those in the global South, arguing that the adoption of neoliberal reforms in such states should be seen as 'a strategy adopted by state managers to tackle extant or budding economic and/or political crises' (9), and at the same time that 'state responses to the economic and political crises of capitalism can - and increasingly do - assume similar forms both in formal democracies and in traditionally defined authoritarian regimes' (11).
More was wrong with Bruff's article than I have the space to detail here, but briefly the presentation of constitutional and legal rules intended to insulate governance from dissent as an authoritarian deviation rather than as constitutive of representative liberal democracy (never mind neoliberal governance) reflected a strikingly uncritical view of the latter - Ayers and Saad Filho (2015: 601), in an article cited by Tansel (p. 3, with reference to the 2014 online first version), suggest that 'during periods of relatively stable accumulation the greater legitimacy of democratic regimes, due to their inclusive political rights and attachment to constitutional rules, allows them to impose exclusionary economic policies and insulate elite interests from mass pressures more efficiently than most dictatorships. Nevertheless, in times of crisis or when the established order is thought to be threatened, naked force will be deployed': this is surely both the consensus critical view, and correct. As regards timing, the various measures to enforce budget discipline Bruff highlighted in the European Union followed the same disciplinary logic of the introduction of the euro itself a decade earlier, and were preceded not only by a slew of comparable EU and related legislation, but also by the adoption of fiscal responsibility laws in New Zealand (1994) and a host of other countries thereafter, all with the active involvement of the OECD, the IMF, or both (Gordon, 2016), and broader conditionality dated back much further elsewhere in the world. So despite his best efforts, Bruff's authoritarian neoliberalism turned out to be virtually indistinguishable from Gill's 'new constitutionalism'/'disciplinary neoliberalism' (just as his appeal to non-traditional antistatist movements directly echoed Gill's 'post modern prince')' and its close resemblance to an approach set out a quarter of a century ago (Gill, 1992) casts serious doubt on the thesis that AL is new, as of course does the identification of the same logic by Poulantzas in the 1970s. In addition, there was a fundamental contradiction between the idea of a qualitative shift in neoliberal governance and that of a fragile and temporary "authoritarian fix"; and that in turn was the result of the counter-posing of 'the explicit exclusion and marginalization of subordinate social groups through the constitutionally and legally engineered self-disempowerment' on the one hand and 'neutralizing resistance and dissent via concessions and forms of compromise that maintain their hegemony' on the other. This arose from the error of treating the regime of accumulation and the mode of governance as if they were one and the same, and informed by the same logic. Despite the fact that he drew explicit attention to Hall's analysis of Thatcher's 'authoritarian populism', Bruff underestimated the potential for hegemonic appeals fused with the logic of discipline/exclusion (remember 'TINA' - 'There Is No Alternative'), and even for apparent material concessions - such as the rising minimum wage in the UK, which is an attempt to force capital to become more productive, but still lends itself to a rhetoric of inclusion. He was mistaken too to suggest that a politics of exclusion and insulation of core areas of policy from popular challenge could not be combined with the kinds of appeals he associates with the radical right. In fact, all kinds of combinations are possible - in the Netherlands, as Bruff notes (126), neoliberals ally with the 'radical right'; in the UK, May steals their clothes and swallows them whole; in France, Macron stands on the ground of global neoliberalism, highlighting the fact that there is an alternative, but insisting that it is nasty, divisive, and dangerous. So Bruff's core claim, in regard to the potential for progressive politics, that AL weakens the state at the same time that it strengthens it because of its iron logic of exclusion, is over-simplistic.
With this starting point, then, Tansel has dealt himself a tricky hand to play. And indeed he draws further attention to a fundamental weakness of the AL thesis, referring (4) to Marx's depiction (from July 1844) of the English system on pauperism as one that 'no longer sets out to eliminate it, but which strives instead to discipline and perpetuate it (Marx, 1975: 409) - suggesting that the core strategies of AL preceded the introduction of liberal democracy itself, as indeed they do. The enduring imperative to subject workers to the discipline of capital, and to oblige them to sell their labour power to the capitalist by eliminating alternatives, is constitutive of the 'bourgeois mode of production'. With the extension of the world market over the last three decades, Western Europe has been subjected to competitive pressures from which it was relatively immune before, with the result that conditionality, once restricted to the 'developing world', has become universal. And to his credit, Tansel acknowledges the weaknesses of the concept of AL even as he seeks to employ and develop it. He is emphatic at the outset that his argument 'should not be read to the effect that the deployment of coercive state apparatuses for the protection of the circuits of capital accumulation is a new phenomenon, nor should it lead to the assumption that the pre-crisis trajectories of neoliberalization have been exclusively consensual. In advancing the analytical utility of authoritarian neoliberalism, we are not asserting that the violent, disciplinary and anti-democratic means with which capitalist states remove the barriers to accumulation should be understood as an innovation of neoliberalism' (2); his account of the lineages of AL is prefaced by the statement that this introductory chapter 'conceptually and empirically maps the emergent patterns of authoritarian neoliberalism and the signal continuities they represent vis-à-vis the structural and intersecting inequalities inherent in capitalist societies' (5, emphasis mine); he remarks in a footnote that the focus on criminalisation and marginalisation 'should not be read to the effect that neoliberalization simply results in the dismissal of progressive causes or marginalised groups and communities', as 'emancipatory goals shared and advanced by progressive movements continue to be adopted and subsequently neutralised by powerful transnational organisations as well as nation states and companies' (ft. 15, p. 21); and he closes the chapter with the final thought that 'notwithstanding our focus on the constitutive role of authoritarian state power and the utilisation of state apparatuses in maintaining capital accumulation, consent-making activities and efforts by the states, policymakers and transnational organisations to (re)constitute neoliberal "common sense" should still be seen as integral components of the hegemonic status neoliberalism continues to enjoy' (19). All these points are very well made.
And in fact, States of Discipline turns out to be well worth reading, though not quite for the reasons you might expect. Admittedly, it fails in its aspiration to be 'an initial step towards formulating a new research agenda underpinned by "authoritarian neoliberalism" as a conceptual prism through which the institutionalization and employment of a number of state practices that invalidate or circumscribe public input and silence popular resistance can be illuminated ... as part of a broader strategy inherently linked to the reproduction of capitalist order and of its logics of exclusion and exploitation operating at the intersections of class, gender, race and ethnicity' (3). Only a handful of contributions refer to the introduction at all, and none addresses its agenda directly; and, crucially, there is no conclusion to draw the collection as a whole together and move the agenda forward. In short, there is no sense of a group of scholars interactively engaged on a common project. At the same time, only five authors refer to Bruff's essay (one being Bruff himself). Clua-Losada and Ribera-Almandoz (Chapter Two) take from Bruff the idea that the removal of key decisions from democratic control 'is not a new process but rather the continuation of a key characteristic of neoliberal governance' (29), then move straight into a detailed analysis of the impact of two recent Royal Decree Laws that are the culmination of three decades of reforms to the labour market, and a case study of the 1999 privatization of Telefónica (now Movistar), and resistance to 'reform' in its hived-off subcontractors. Sébastien Rioux (Chapter Five) picks up too on the use of constitutional and legal changes to reshape the purpose of the state, in a study of the restructuring of public welfare and food assistance programmes in the United States in the shift from welfare to workfare, and offers it as an example of the way that measures to stabilize contradictions and dislocations without granting material concessions intensify the crisis of the state (88, 102). Annalena Di Giovanni (Chapter Six) invokes Bruff's emphasis on 'the role of the state in the protection and reproduction of capital accumulation' and the constant resort to anti-democratic constitutional changes (111) in her analysis of the transformation of Istanbul between 2003 and 2013, and presents the 'crazing' of Istanbul (that is, its transformation through megaprojects designated as 'crazy' by their political promotors) as 'a city-branding exercise contingent to an authoritarian neoliberal political economy', in which public input is marginalized (114, 123). And Brecht de Smet and Koenraad Bogaert (Chapter Eleven) preface their account of passive revolutions attempted in Egypt (ending in failure) and Morocco (a relative success) with a single opening sentence recalling Bruff's associating AL with a loss of hegemony and a shift towards extraordinary modes of governance (211).
These are solid and interesting individual case studies. Clua-Losada and Ribera-Almandoz highlight the limited extent of prior democratization in Spain, the prevalence of low productivity and high unemployment, and the huge transfer of wealth from the public to the private sector arising from the privatization of 'large and profitable companies' in the context of EU convergence criteria established by the 1992 Maastricht treaty (36), and describe the struggles of out-sourced, sub-contracted and 'self-employed' workers in a context in which trade unions and established left-wing parties as much as corporations and the 'neoliberal' state are the enemies of resistance. Rioux documents the 'discovery' of chronic hunger and malnutrition on a massive scale in the US in the 1960s, the response in terms of food assistance programmes, and their subsequent evolution in the war on welfare under Reagan and Clinton among others, concluding with a wealth of evidence that the 'neoliberal assault on the social safety net has restored the conditions of capital profitability, which produces an army of working poor for whom food and economic insecurity have become the norm' (102). Di Giovanni describes a combination of city branding through megaprojects and such initiatives as the successful 2010 European Capital of Culture bid, and large-scale housing projects managed by the Housing Development Association (TOKİ), detailing the increasing scope given to executive orders and the like. And De Smet and Bogaert outline contrasting trajectories, hinged on the relative political capacity of Morocco's royal family on the one hand and Egypt's secular developmentalist regime on the other, and leading to the restoration of hegemony in the first case, and its collapse in the other.
It is principally through these chapters that the merits of the collection emerge, and its value turns out to lie not in its development of AL, but in the critique that it offers to the attentive reader. The weaknesses of Bruff's argument I noted above and the cautions expressed by Tansel are reinforced throughout, with the result that little is left of AL as originally formulated. The case studies identify what may be termed at most 'authoritarian moments' related to the governance of capitalist social formations, but the antecedents, content, connections and outcomes differ from case to case. In Spain, the episodes described, arising from a perceived need to impose labour reform in order to facilitate/force labour flexibility and competitiveness, reflected the inability of the Spanish state to overcome the compromises made in the transition to democracy, and particularly 'to subdue and discipline labour' (43). Conflicts over this dated back to Spanish entry to the EU, and there is a constant history of to-and-fro between attempts at social dialogue and its breakdown or abandonment. The PSOE under Zapatero (2008-2011), which made extensive use of royal decrees, itself introduced the 2010 Decree law on Urgent Measures for Reforming the Labour Market, while continuing to seek agreement through concessions and dialogue, as did Rajoy's successor PP government. So attempts to secure hegemony were never abandoned, but have rather alternated with authoritarian moments in a dialectical process that is as old as the governance of capitalism under representative liberal democracy itself, and older. Rioux's account of food assistance programmes certainly documents the disciplining of labour through hunger, but also reports the rise in the combined cost of the programmes considered from US$4.1 billion to US$21.7 billion between 1980 and 2011-12 (101). This is not an authoritarian fix at all, but a 'welfare fix', and the pressures upon it (the imperative to maintain incentives to work, the size of the welfare bill, and the delegitimating extent of desperate need) are not at all illuminated by the AL approach. Di Giovanni's account highlights the rigidity and one-sidedness of Bruff's account, describing a strategy that both attempted a positive hegemonic strategy premised on the offer of ownership of a 'modern' home, and targeted marginal groups - Roma, and casual migrant workers - for forcible displacement (itself another hegemony-building strategy, of course). De Bret and Bogaert produce the most comprehensive critique, suggesting first of all that although 'contemporary neoliberal politics indeed appear as an extraordinary, authoritarian deviation' from the perspective of the Western post-war period, 'the history of capitalist development since the nineteenth century suggests that revolutions both in the global North and the global South have always shown the limits of bourgeois democracy and a tendency towards more authoritarian forms of state power' (211). The polite suggestion is that the model can indeed be applied beyond post-war Western Europe, but that it will collapse as a consequence. This hints at an optical foreshortening which is widely shared, and which mars many otherwise excellent essays in critical political economy: 'Instead of the norm, the post-Second World War class compromise, democratisation and welfare state were the unique outcomes of 'extraordinary' economic and (geo)political conditions', bookended on either side, and more so in the earlier period, in which Gramsci, as they remind us, 'understood the rise of Fascism and authoritarianism in the 1920s and 1930s as the "normal" political forms of that capitalist epoch' (ibid). Second, they draw on Thomas (2009: 162-5) to make the important argument that a 'shift towards more authoritarian policies does not necessarily entail a hegemonic crisis' if 'force is grounded in popular consent' (212). This disposes of the argument that authoritarian moves necessarily make the state more fragile. Third, as noted above, they contrast a relatively successful attempt to maintain hegemony through limited liberal reform in Morocco with its failure in Egypt. The extended case studies underline the impossibility of abstracting an iron logic of the kind represented by AL from 'quite different national trajectories of political and economic struggle and transformation, respectively provoking and blocking revolutionary outcomes' (214). As elsewhere, Moroccan rule has oscillated between repression and conciliation, and the current royal démarche, which faltered after the 2016 elections, is still by no means guaranteed to succeed. But the conclusion is inescapable - it is a methodological error to impose a general model on specific cases, when the logic governing the general model abstracts away from the specific internal logics of all the possible cases concerned.
Against this background, Bruff's own contribution, on the hardening of 'soft' EU law and its implications for the 'social model', exhibits some misconceptions that may have shaped the AL thesis in the first place. His suggestion that the Open Method of Coordination (OMC) adopted in 2000 was 'initially concerned with the relatively voluntary and dialogical sharing of different examples of 'best practice' from across the EU on social themes such as unemployment and welfare policy', whereas since there has been 'a steady "hardening" of these mechanisms towards more punitive and centralized processes based on the assumption that there is in fact a singular (neoliberal) best practice to be applied across the EU at the behest of the European Commission' (149) is mistaken. The Lisbon Council that gave rise to the Lisbon agenda redefined social protection as a 'productive factor'; the OMC was an integral part of it, and as such 'a key element in a hierarchy of policy modes, at the same time subordinate and complementary to the ‘harder’ modes of the Community Method and binding regulation in monetary and fiscal areas' (Cammack, 2007: 3, and Box 1, p. 5). From the start it was not only an instrument to promote convergence around desired pro-competitiveness policy orientations, but also a specifically hegemony-building instrument, and designed as such, and Bruff himself provides direct evidence of this from the European Council (158). The idea of an atmosphere of open policy debate around genuine alternatives giving way to a harder neoliberal line is therefore a puzzling misrepresentation - guidelines, surveillance, benchmarking, mutual learning and peer review were linked and graduated processes intended to complement 'harder' treaty-based mechanisms, against the background of the single market and the introduction of the euro. And indeed Bruff documents the contested reconceptualisation of the 'European Social Model' from the early 1990s as the commitment to 'welfare, social partnership and the mixed economy' (153) came under pressure, identifies the 1994 European Employment Strategy (1994) an an important trigger (157), and goes on to detail an integrated and contested 'long-term project to secure competitiveness through multi-scalar meta-governance' (Nunn and Beeckmans, 2015: 930-31) which is entirely at odds with the notion of a later shift from a pluralist and consensual approach to a narrowly neoliberal and disciplinary one, and with the AL thesis as a whole. In sum, this is an excellent case study (despite the baffling focus on 'facet methodology'), but it reiterates what others have said already, and undermines some of the key claims of the AL approach. In the end, Bruff is reduced to arguing that the two outcomes compatible with the AL thesis, the fracturing of the system by way of its instabilities or its repudiation, are 'currently unlikely' (165).
The remaining case studies focus on Cambodia, China, Greece, and Turkey, the commodification of internal security, gender issues in academic research, and the management of international migration. All are clear, sensible, informative and well-researched contributions that can be read with profit, and if a couple of them draw substantially on previous published work, they still read as coherent essays in their own right. But for the most part they do not add much to reflection on or development of the concept of AL. Simon Springer (Chapter Twelve) on Cambodia stays firmly within his own problematic and reprises his familiar argument that patronage plays an important part in shaping neoliberal politics there, but does not bother to address the implications for AL - a pity, as patronage, if managed successfully, provides political support, strengthens elite control over the majority, and marginalises potentially disruptive groups - and therefore constitutes a powerful force for retaining and building hegemony (Cammack, 1982). Kean Fan Lim (Chapter Thirteen), in a good essay on China which contains an insightful analysis of the hukou system, dutifully inserts a paragraph linking back to Tansel's introduction into a section of otherwise unamended text carried over from an earlier publication, but leaves it largely to the reader to tease out the implications of hegemony-building strategies around 'neoliberalization' in an explicitly authoritarian regime. The key here is the point that 'the Chinese case demonstrates how neoliberal logics were selectively integrated within and subsequently reinforced authoritarian capacities that were already an integral part of the Chinese party-state' (258). Panagiotis Sotiris contributes a fine account of the disciplining of Greece by the EU-led troika, confirming in the process that there is considerable mileage in the idea of an authoritarian turn specifically within the EU, and that Bruff would have been better advised to stick to that rather than abstract away from it - here the key point is that 'European integration represents a form of neoliberal constitutionalism without democracy' (181). Bariş Alp Özden, İsmet Akça and Ahmet Bekmen (Chapter Ten) provide a good empirical and analytical account of the rise of the Turkish AKP (Justice and Development Party), opening up a perspective on the 'shifts, cracks and conflicts emerging during the integration of peripheral or semi-peripheral countries into globalisation' (189) which might have been a cue for further consideration, involving Cambodia, China, Egypt and Morocco too, in the conclusion that is not provided. It also provides a window onto some excellent work on Turkey. The remaining chapters Three, Four and Seven), by Kendra Briken and Volcker Eich, Wendy Harcourt, and Luca Manunza respectively, all have merits as independent essays, but they cry out for better integration into the themes of the volume, on the parts of the editor, and the authors themselves.
All in all, then, the major casualty of the volume is the concept of authoritarian neoliberalism itself. It turns out, as a theoretical proposal, to exemplify perfectly a fault highlighted by Marx in the Grundrisse: bringing things that are organically related (in specific ways in particular social formations in this case) into an accidental relation and a merely reflective connection (Marx, 1973: 88). The strictures expressed there apply.
References and further reading
Ayers, Alison, and Saad-Filho, Alfredo (2015), 'Democracy against neoliberalism: Paradoxes, limitations, transcendence', Critical Sociology, 41, 4/5, 597-618.
Bruff, Ian (2014), 'The rise of authoritarian neoliberalism', Rethinking Marxism, 26, 1, 113-129.
Çavuşoğlu, Erbatur and Julia Strutz (2014), 'Producing force and consent: Urban transformation and corporatism in Turkey, City, 18, 2, 134-148.
Cammack, Paul (1982), 'Clientelism and military government in Brazil', in Christopher Clapham, ed, Private Patronage and Public Power: Political Clientelism in the Modern State (Frances Pinter), pp. 53-75.
Cammack, Paul (2007), 'Competitiveness and Convergence: the Open Method of Co-ordination in Latin America', Papers in the Politics of Global Competitiveness, No. 5, Institute for Global Studies, Manchester Metropolitan University, e-space Open Access Repository, March.
Collier, David and James E. Mahon, Jr (1993), 'Conceptual "stretching" revisited: Adapting categories in comparative analysis', American Political Science Review, 87, 4, 845-855.
Gill, Stephen (1992) 'The emerging world order and European change: the political economy of the European Union', Socialist Register 1992, 157-196.
Gordon, Jorge P. (2016) 'Federalism and the politics of fiscal responsibility laws: Argentina and Brazil in comparative perspective', Policy Studies, 37, 3, 236-253.
Marx, Karl (1973), Grundrisse (Pelican).
Marx, Karl (1975), 'Critical Notes on the Article The King of Prussia and Social Reform, by a Prussian', in Lucio Coletti, ed, Karl Marx: Early Writings (Penguin/New Left Review), pp. 401-420.
Nunn, Alex and Paul Beeckmans (2015), 'The Political Economy of Competitiveness and Continuous Adjustment in EU Meta-Governance', International Journal of Public Administration, 38, 4, 926-939.
Sartori, Giovanni (1970), 'Concept Misinformation in Comparative Politics', American Political Science Review, 64, 1033-1053.
Sartori, Giovanni (1991), 'Comparing and Miscomparing', Journal of Theoretical Politics, 3, 3, 243-257.
Thomas, Peter (2009), The Gramscian Moment: Philosophy, Hegemony, and Marxism (Brill).