The Borders of Liberalism

From Neoliberalism to No Liberalism?

Has Neo Liberalism Failed Mexico?

Neo Liberalism Meets Neo Confucianism

In all of these areas, the TPP and TTIP seem to be about corporate capture, not liberalism.

Liberalism Is a Mental Disorder, Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot, Pinheads and Patriots, Arguing With Idiots.

But in Europe, at least, neoliberalism has a very different meaning. It was coined by Alexander Rüstow, who in 1932 proclaimed the end of old liberalism and called for a new liberalism featuring a strong state that lays down a solid legal framework within which firms operate.

Opting for economic liberalism implies a greater disengagement of the State and in particular a gradual return to true prices.

The globalization of our economies, based on the proclaimed virtues of liberalism, has not yet yielded all that it could.

Clearly, liberalism may be a contributing factor, if and where it is primitively understood to entail for the individual no countervailing obligations before society. Clearly, the belief that liberalism is at fault for declining birth rates and dysfunctional families has gained currency in the West, which now produces popular books like Pat Buchanan s

But right now, in most parts of the Middle East, they do not. More democracy can actually mean less liberalism and more intolerance.

Clearly, liberalism may be a contributing factor, if and where it is primitively understood to entail for the individual no countervailing obligations before society. Clearly, the belief that liberalism is at fault for declining birth rates and dysfunctional families has gained currency in the West, which now produces popular books like Pat Buchanan sThe Death of the West.

But this liberalism was to last only so long as the Government of the Niger considered that it was in its interests to maintain it.

In other words, he proposed neo liberalism, when that is precisely the basic cause of the great evils and tragedies that our peoples are experiencing.

Wall Street has collapsed. The present crisis, the fall of Wall Street, is to neo liberalism what the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 was to communism.

TED Fellow and journalist Evgeny Morozov punctures what he calls iPod liberalism the assumption that tech innovation always promotes freedom, democracy with chilling examples of ways the Internet helps oppressive regimes stifle dissent.

Higher visibility for Islam is the inevitable result of more democracy in Muslim majority countries. How to stop this from killing liberalism is the most important question facing people in the Middle East.

This is the paradox of twenty first century socialism economic liberalism is the foundation for a policy that aspires to replace it. This might also be its greatest limitation as a political project.

Similarly, Latin America, once the playground of myriad juntas and golpes, is now largely anchored in political liberalism. Turkey is ruled by a mildly Islamist party that plays by the rules of democracy.

Morales s success rests largely on the paradox of populism. Although he claims to oppose economic liberalism, he is a product of the political liberties that it promotes and feeds on the benefits generated by the market economy.

Lagging economies have not failed to notice that mercantilism can be their friend. Even in Britain, classical liberalism arrived only in the mid nineteenth century that is, after the country had become the world s dominant industrial power.

Nevertheless, a dispassionate observer might point out that for someone with limited resources and opportunities for policy reform to keep betting double or nothing on neo liberalism is a strategy that has a well deserved name Gambler s Ruin.

The armed forces, however, claim a constitutional mandate to protect the Republic s secular traditions. And Turkey s generals have intervened in politics several times to defend Kemalism Atatürk s secular ideology of modernization that pushed Islamic Turkey towards European style liberalism.

This calls for a kind of liberalism that is now lacking in Russia, one that stands for freedom, reform, and the nation state. Neither the government nor the current opposition possesses it, which means that Russians must look beyond Putin s Russia.

But, you know, even beyond that, if you think about the logic underlying it, is something I call iPod liberalism, where we assume that every single Iranian or Chinese who happens to have and love his iPod will also love liberal democracy.

Various forms of statism have been tried before all have been found lacking. After all, while neoliberalism was criticized as technocratic and elitist, it was nonetheless a form of liberalism, and it was also consistent with the spread of democratic governance worldwide.

And I think the getaway message from that would be that Islam, despite some of the skeptics in the West, has the potential in itself to create its own way to democracy, create its own way to liberalism, create its own way to freedom.

But the truth in these matters counts for less than the emotions. And the emotions in this case betray an element of Schadenfreude look at how even the Dutch, always boasting of their superior tolerance and liberalism, have responded like cowards when their principles are truly tested.

Recent history has witnessed a series of triumphs that humanity can justly take pride in. These have involved the ending of colonialism, the limiting of autocracy, the strengthening of democratic values and institutions, the rise of liberalism and enhanced partnership between Governments and civil society in development.

This has naturally given rise to a great deal of concern and mistrust, since what is mainly offered is security, which, in the modern State drawing its inspiration from eighteenth and nineteenth century liberalism, is exclusively the responsibility of the State and an expression of its sovereignty.

Of course, revulsion for liberal economies and global markets is not confined to Germany. A similar sentiment formed one of the motives for the French and perhaps even the Dutch to reject the European Union s Constitutional Treaty, which some regarded as too Anglo Saxon in its economic liberalism.

It is possible that Chinese Communists who favor more economic liberalism would also be more receptive to a more open society. But the opposite could also be true the wider the disparities in wealth, and the more people protest against economic inequality, the more the regime will crack down on dissidents.

Erhard's vision of a social market economy was a third way, an alternative to both large scale state intervention and the risks of laissez faire liberalism. Germany's historical experience had demonstrated that freedom without order led to chaos, and order without freedom resulted in coercion and the renunciation of democracy.

Computing became decentralized, and the new flexibility produced a sense that control was moving away from big agglomerations of power whether governments or companies. It is not surprising that the triumph of the PC seemed to be accompanied by a revival of the nineteenth century vision of classical liberalism and individualism.

A strong current of liberalism appeared in the late nineteenth century in Ottoman Syria in response to the religious despotism of Sultan Abdulhamid. At the same time, an anti clerical, secular movement on behalf of constitutionalism appeared in Iran a reaction to the absolutist alliance between the Quajar Shahs and the religious establishment.

The relationship between the United Nations and the human rights movement has always been ambiguous. On the one hand, human rights ideology and it is an ideology, every bit as much as Communism was or neo liberalism is today is profoundly legalist, claiming legitimacy from treaties and other international and national instruments.

Now, though, it looks like I may finally be right or at least right to worry, if not to panic. The French rejected the European Union constitution, primarily or so it appears because further European integration, it is feared, must bring in its wake the huge costs and disruptions of neo liberalism.

Thus, despite official speeches intended to support state intervention, Morales s government benefits mainly from the workings of the market. The failure of state plans and projects is overlooked because of the small but expanding internal market, which is invigorated by de facto economic liberalism involving the growth of smuggling and drug traffic.

Each time in the last hundred years that a shift of this magnitude has occurred in beliefs about state market relations, a major political economic upheaval has ensued. For example, World War I marked the end of the nineteenth century s laissez faire liberalism and ushered in a period of state centered economic systems.

Expanding NATO into the Baltic States in 2002 the Alliance s first enlargement into former Soviet territory was a catastrophic mistake, which made it almost impossible for a Russian to be both patriotic and pro Western. By both omission and commission, the West cut the ground from under Russian political liberalism, enabling the ascendancy of Putinism.

For liberals, the question is never whether borders should be completely open or closed a society open to all would have no rights worth protecting, while a society closed to all would have no rights worth emulating. If one is looking for an abstract principle to follow on questions of immigration, liberalism cannot provide it.

Liberalism has been under continuous attack for decades from religious extremists and religious institutions, and liberal organizations were stifled by oppressive rules. If the Mubarak regime had fallen under the banner of political Islam, Muslim fundamentalists would have been in a much better position to advance more exclusivist claims over the revolution and the country.

Or perhaps Putin is just a bit cannier. His followers in Russia are unlikely to see, let alone be influenced by, an art film, and this sliver of Russian free expression might just persuade foreigners that there is still some liberalism left in Putin s authoritarian democracy at least until that, too, ends up as a shattered illusion.

With fanfare and idealism reflected in the slogan Rights Brought Home the Human Rights Act came into effect in 2000. But the high minded liberalism of the then elite had a practical point as well should the government have any soiled linen, it should be laundered in British courts rather than be aired before a panel of international judges.

For all the apparent freshness of Medvedev s recent pronouncements, including his now famous article Go Russia! which sounded a clarion call for modernization and liberalism he is borrowing massively from Putin s vocabulary of 2000. This suggests that the issue of modernization, which lay dormant throughout the fat years of high oil prices, is back on the Kremlin agenda.