ABSTRACT
In the 1990s, both Argentina and Russia were significant and closely watched exemplars of the international turn to neoliberal economic policy. The devastating financial crises they eventually suffered rocked international financial markets and appeared to portend further disasters ahead. However, what ensued was rather different: a substantial and surprising restoration of the power and discretion of the national state. Within a space of a very few years, national governments that had been widely derided as too weak to collect taxes and impose “necessary” reforms were able to become vastly more assertive in their dealings with subnational governments, investors, international financial institutions, and foreign powers. After years of constant crisis, a sense that governments were teetering on the edge of an abyss, the long term had returned.
