The Triumph of Broken Promises: The End of the Cold War and the Rise of Neoliberalism
HTML-код
- Опубликовано: 19 сен 2022
- Why did the Cold War come to a peaceful end? And why did neoliberal economics sweep across the world in the late twentieth century? In The Triumph of Broken Promises, Fritz Bartel argues that the answer to these questions is one and the same. The Cold War began as a competition between capitalist and communist governments to expand their social contracts as they raced to deliver their people a better life. But the economic shocks of the 1970s made promises of better living untenable on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Energy and financial markets placed immense pressure on governments to discipline their social contracts. Rather than make promises, political leaders were forced to break them. This pressure to impose discipline, Bartel argues, produced the momentous events that comprise the end of the Cold War and the rise of neoliberal global capitalism.
Fritz Bartel is an Assistant Professor of International Affairs at the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University, where he is also a member of the Albritton Center for Grand Strategy. As a dissertation, his book, The Triumph of Broken Promises: The End of the Cold War and the Rise of Neoliberalism (Harvard University Press, 2022), won the Oxford University Press USA Dissertation Prize in International History from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR). Along with Nuno P. Monteiro, he co-edited Before and After the Fall: World Politics and the End of the Cold War (Cambridge University Press, 2021). His research has been published in Enterprise & Society and Diplomatic History.
The Washington History Seminar is co-chaired by Eric Arnesen (George Washington University and the National History Center) and Christian Ostermann (Woodrow Wilson Center) and is organized jointly by the National History Center of the American Historical Association and the Woodrow Wilson Center's History and Public Policy Program. It meets weekly during the academic year. The seminar thanks its anonymous individual donors and institutional partners (the George Washington University History Department and the Lepage Center for History in the Public Interest) for their continued support.
The central planners aren't in the government. The rentier oligarchy at the top of wall street (the deep state) does central planning for their private benefit, and they are the employers of politicians. The job of the politician is to deliver voters to the oligarchy by campaigning on whatever gets them elected with oligarchy funding, then do whatever the oligarchy wants, and they are taken care of whether they are reelected or not.
"Reagan’s election marked the ascension of deep political forces to a position of sovereignty. Practically speaking, what emerged was an exceptionist tripartite state comprised of (1) a feckless public state, (2) a sprawling security state, and (3) the anti-democratic deep state to which they are subordinated. This consolidation and institutionalization of top-down power was such that US governance could thereafter be described as a deep state system."
Good, Aaron. American Exception: Empire and the Deep State (p. 260).
If the US had majority rule, i.e., a democratic form of government, we would have a decent minimum wage, Medicare for all, free education, parental and sick leave, legal marijuana, workers on corporate boards, lower credit card interest, not allowing politicians to own stock or immediately graduate to becoming lobbyists, public funding of drug research for public drug patents, and some kind of green new deal, just at first glance at the polls. We have institutionalized opposition at best, not representation at all.
The refugees at the southern border are fleeing rule by the same rentier oligarchy at the top of wall street that employs both political parties and is cannibalizing the homeland into debt peonage.
Whew! He needs to go back to prior to the great depression, the New Deal and then the opposition to the New Deal in the 1930s with the formalization of anti-New Deal ideology by the Mont Pelerin in the mid-1940s. Then he needs to go into how different economic players implemented neoliberal ideology in the 1970s focusing on the blueprint laid out in the Powell Memo.
Thank you for sharing this very interesting discussion.
Even though i am from the west, 'one system surviving' i still do not see as the same as 'winning over the other'. Seeing how neoliberalism took away power from civilians and state, i would even argue we partly gave up or even lost aspects of ourselves that were identifying us to some extant at least here in germany with the socalled "sozialen Marktwirtschaft" which was the third way till privatizations with pressure from the US had created areas that now are prone to the whims of corporations and hopefully could be undone someday again. Seeing also how turbo capitalism on a global scale, consumption as a way of life, enviornmental polution and formost now climate change are directly linked to neoliberalism and the greed of the often pointed out 1% and the therefor dipicted devide between rich and poor. I therefor see even less our societies as victors, rather victims of our own strive for supramacy no matter the cost.
To the authors credit he addresses this in his own words (1:04:00).
1:18:00 "It could have easily failed" and as said before they weren't aware and therefor didn't and could know what effect their policies would have. They may have wished for them creating the circumstance for the end of the UDSSR, that but was rather a shot into the blue or a sideeffect. Which was one of the reasons why i always thought it a touch too much sanctimonious pride how Bush senior talked about a new world order would emerge with dreamy eyes ^^.
Should China or the USA currently challange each other or vice versa, how would the huge debt China has from the US effect such confrontation or would that be used as a pressure point even before it comes to a confrontation as a last ressort?
As an American, I find that periods in which the federal government of my country worked for the benefit of ordinary citizens rather than a wealthy minority have been limited to just one, the New Deal. Otherwise, the character of my country has been that which is now called "neoliberalism". The name is new, but the practice is old and persistent.
The Volker period was not one in which the banks of western Europe "rewarded" the US by buying US Treasuries; rather they had no alternative but to do that. They had nothing else they could do with the huge deposits of US dollars from their merchants-depositors.
Neoliberal Propaganda?
Yes.