In thinking about how we've arrived at this moment of reaction across Europe and the US, I can't help but return to the longer cycles of history and the way in which rather than solve world historical problems, we have often simply recreated them in alternate forms.
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When anti-colonial liberation movements made colonialism no longer tenable, the response was not to fundamentally alter the relations between the colonial powers and the newly independent states, but to recreate them via neo-colonialism.
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When neo-colonial extractivism à l'outrance became unsustainable, the response was not to fundamentally alter developmental models, but to cloak them in neoliberal globalization.
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As a result, rather than a just, equitable and sustainable global order, we have a highly imbalanced and volatile one, in which lack of opportunity in the Global South drives migration that fuels nativism in the Global North, even as nostalgia for colonial grandeur fuels resentment of decline.
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The failure was not so much one of imagination, because there was no shortage of voices calling for new approaches and theorizing the new cultural imaginaries needed to embrace them.
It was more a failure of courage, and a failure to see the dignity that is always owed the "other."
/Ends
Largely agree with the first half, but wonder about the imagination bit: obviously the Thatcherites were pulling one over on the rest of us with the "There is no alternative" strategy, I do get the sense that in the past (and present...) there's been more calls for new approaches than new approaches
if you want to build a tax haven there's not just someone who can imagine that but thousands of tax lawyers, accountants, finreg technocrats, and mafiosos ready to "imagine" the corresponding practical details alongside your vision. did e.g. the NIEO ever command similar organizational know how?
(actual question that I don't know the answer to - there was obviously a very serious program of economists around those ideas, and related academics in a couple other disciplines, even some regulators in Latin America and West Africa for a sec, but dunno how far the network extended beyond these)
I don't know the answer to that either, and the general point is a good one. I'm not a very practical person, so I tend to think of the big picture vision as "imagination" and coming up with the nitty gritty details of how to get it done as "courage."
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It's not lack of imagination or courage or theory.
They are unwilling.
Like you keep lacking all kinds of things when an annoying colleague invites you for drinks.
He presses you hard enough, you'll blow back.
Western society sees a colony as an annoying needy colleague.
An imbalance of power cannot be fixed with imagination or courage.
When the power shifts, the rest comes next day. Plenty examples.
Many of the regimes who cemented/ushered in neoliberal bureaucratic models were left wing: Clinton/Gore with Reinventing Govt…and Pierre Rosanvallon helping to theorise New Public Management. These were unwittingly neoliberal projects.
