Conditionalities without End: Hegemony, Neo-Liberalism and the Demise of Sovereignty in the South

Abstract

Probably everyone would agree that the world in the early 1990s looks different than it did a decade before, yet there are differences of opinion about which trends are worthy of note. We have chosen to focus on five trends … as the core of the new international context of development. These include: the end of the cold war; shifting relations among the capitalist powers; changing patterns of trade and production; declining availability of development finance; and new ideological currents. (Stallings 1993:2)

The end of bipolarity and of its correlate — nonalignment — exposes the fragility of any lingering Third-World claims to sovereignty, however defined. Such illusions were largely shattered by the dominance of neoliberal reforms through the 1980s. Initially, Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) were essentially ‘economic’ and involved some element of contractual understanding: policy reforms and debt (re)payments in exchange for assistance and; ostensibly, investment flows. Yet by the end of the 1980s, the range of such ‘interventions’ expanded to include ‘political’ and even social and ecological conditionalities: political liberalizations, social dimensions and sustainable development. Thus, by the mid-1990s, given the New International Division of Power (NIDP) at the end of the Cold War as well as the already established ‘New’ International Division of Labour (NIDL), any vestigial claims to sovereignty in the South appeared to be highly fanciful.