ABSTRACT
The ‘neoliberal’ development project has had a profound impact on the international state system, raising new questions about sovereignty.1 While states are not disappearing, they are nonetheless being transformed, from within and without.2 Global financial relations and multilateral institutions pressure states to author rules that privatize and/or weaken national capacity and strengthen the reach of global supply chains. Transnational corporations deepen the ‘material integration of social reproduction across borders’ (Rosenberg 2001: 134-5), constructing ‘comparative advantages’ in the world market which generate selective forms of development, fragmenting national economies and conflating public goods and private goals in political discourse. In the shadow of US hegemonic decline, the geo-political landscape has become more fluid and uncertain, evident in the current stalemate and de-legitimization of the WTO. The latter reflects the discrepancy between the rhetoric (‘free trade’) and reality of the neoliberal project, as a device to secure access to resources and markets for consumer states. While attempts to institutionalize neoliberalism represent a rear-guard action by the US ruling class to preserve the fruits of its former global hegemony (Panitch 1996; Harvey 2005), neoliberalism, as a political project, is in crisis. One measure of this is conjunction of a social revolt in Latin America, and the neoconservative mobilization on Iraq, including an extensive illegal privatization of the Iraqi state under US occupation.
