Introduction: Neoliberalism and Developmental Politics in Perspective

Abstract

This book is a result of interdisciplinary reflection on the conditions, processes and outcomes of neoliberal-era developmental politics. Its aim is to probe collectively and debate the developmental conditions of the world as enmeshed with neoliberal ideas, interests and powers. While national development was for decades a focal subject of research in political science, sociology, political economy as well as development economics, the global neoliberal hegemony since the 1980s – often summarised in terms of “the Washington Consensus” – has critically dampened the ideology, politics and scholarship of national development. In the neoliberal era, macro-prudential economic measures have been prioritised as the most imperative task of each state, global financial flows have been liberalised behind corresponding regulatory pressure on individual countries and, not least importantly, many developing (and even developed) countries have been institutionally and politically incapacitated in their mercantilist developmental efforts. With the birth of the twenty-first century, the disastrous outcomes of national and global neoliberal transitions have engulfed virtually every nation in the form of regional or global (financial) crises. In the latest manifestation of the destructive force of neoliberalism, its hegemonic centre in the Euro-American economies has become the main source of recurrent global financial crises. Paradoxically, the emergency remedies for the Euro-American crises –involving Keynesian, developmental and even “socialist” elements – have been bluntly different from what had been recommended for or imposed upon developing countries under similar situations.