Abstract
Reading accounts of neoliberalism’s spread and influence these days frequently leaves me with feelings of ambivalence. On the one hand, I find myself cringing at the often sweeping, cavalier fashion in which the term is bandied about in its various noun, adjectival or verb forms, weighed down with a grab bag of ideas and processes that, in reality, seem to bear little resemblance to the accepted wisdom regarding neoliberalism’s defining characteristics. In the hands of the polemicist, neoliberalism can all too easily appear as a monolithic bête noire and antithesis to decent society – a convenient but not an altogether plausible target. Even in less excitable hands the tendency towards homogenizing, totalizing perspectives on neoliberalism’s pathways into and impacts on societies and economies – as if there was only ever one strain – can lurk. And yet, as more careful analyses have revealed, whilst neoliberalism contains a more or less coherent and solid ideational core, the process of translating its ideas and ideals to actually existing societies, polities and economies, through all scales from the national to the local, is a precarious activity, subject to resistance, partial application and/or outright failure. Hence, the growing literature on neoliberalism’s frequently hybrid and variegated forms.
Yet, on the other hand, in at least two of the fields in which I teach and research – Australian regional development and agricultural and farm policy – the influence of neoliberal thought on policy and strategy is there for all to see in the many and various ‘reforms’ introduced to these sectors since the late 1980s. The abandonment of state-led decentralization strategies for ‘local economic development’ (Fagan, 1987) and local leadership programmes (Herbert-Cheshire, 2000; Pritchard, 2005a) and the removal of virtually all market support mechanisms, including the gradual dissolution of farmer cooperatives in compliance with Hilmer-inspired National Competition Policy reforms (Pritchard, 1999, 2005b)) fit neatly with neoliberal precepts. This is not to say that the previous policy mix always delivered in terms of efficient use of taxpayer funds – decentralization programmes being a key case in point. However, that is a different question. The blind adherence to text book, radical, market-led reforms, in the belief – the term used advisedly here – in the putative long-term benefits to be had by society as a whole, and the discounting of the shorter term economic and social costs borne by particular sectors of society concentrated in particular regions (Quiggin, 1997) underscores the socio-spatial myopia typical of neoliberal policy. From my own positionality as an academic researcher and teacher, I feel an obligation to engage my students critically in understanding neoliberalism as philosophy and policy, together with the subsequent socio-spatial restructuring processes it has helped beget.
Weller and O’Neill (2014) deserve congratulations for their thoroughly researched and generally carefully argued counterfactual essay on neoliberalism and Australia. Their article rightly and wisely counsels on the need for a critical stance to be adopted towards increasingly taken-for-granted ideas that seem to have taken on a life of their own, often through unconscious or careless repetition. Drawing on decades of combined research experience, their studious sifting through the post-1970s, Australian political economy provides a useful reminder of the vital role that we as academics play in making sense of an increasingly complex reality for, among others, our students, the lay public and public policymaking audiences and the need to be on guard against the flippant use of concepts that we employ in the process of communication. Importantly, Weller and O’Neill highlight the value of a geographical perspective to the topic, highlighting the ways in the national space economy, including its particular institutional form and spatial structure, including its unique settlement system, has served to complicate the spread and reach of neoliberal ideas, policies and practices.
In their sceptical examination of Australia’s experience of neoliberalism, Weller and O’Neill recognize the structural reasons for the ‘roll back’ of the Australian Keynesian welfare-state policies and programmes but stop short of labelling any recent ruling regime – their focus is on the Federal Government rather than the more subordinate state governments – as ‘neoliberal’. Rather, Weller and O’Neill see these various initiatives as cases of much needed microeconomic reform with added doses of ‘market competition’, or as ‘shallow neoliberalizations’. At the core of their argument is the distinction between neoliberal and developmental states.
And so back to the feelings of uneasiness. In numerous respects, there is little to quibble over in Weller and O’Neill’s critique. Their understanding of neoliberalism as philosophy, ideology, project and condition is demonstrably well researched, and they well appreciate the logical traps that await simplistic ‘Washington Consensus’ style deterministic accounts. Statements such as the following Problems with the essentialist account of neoliberalism arise when its characters are transposed a priori into particular world contexts as a discrete set of abstractions capable of travelling from place to place, with adoption dependent on the local circumstances encountered (2014, 108)
are sensible. And yet, at the same time, this observation is unremarkable. In the above passage, ‘neoliberalism’ could be replaced with any other ‘ism’ and the general point would still hold. This is the very point that geographers such as Harvey (1984) and Ley (1994) have long made about geography’s inherently radical Weltanschaung: the fact that deep place-to-place differences in, inter alia, culture, polity, economic performance and the like can radically disrupt the neat applicability of laboratory-designed and -tested critical theories, economic models and political manifestos across real geographical space.
What is more, these are points that geographers and others writing on neoliberalism and neoliberalization have been making for some time in Australia and other national contexts (e.g. Gamble, 2006; Larner, 2005; Peck, 2012). In their recent examination of the unfolding economic, financial and socio-spatial crisis that has enveloped Ireland post-2008, Kitchin et al. (2012) insist on viewing the partial neoliberalization of the Irish economy and society as a contingent outcome. Not yet fully realized in practice – nor is it likely to be – neoliberalism’s pathways through Ireland’s cities, towns and regions have been shaped, to a greater or lesser degree, by the institutional frameworks, settings and cultures laid down and fought over in previous eras. For Kitchin et al. (2012), then, the Irish experience of neoliberalism could be said to be path and place dependent (also see Breathnach, 2010), ‘The variants of neoliberalism produced must be seen in the light of…historic specificities, but cannot be reduced to that which is predictable or foreseeable. Ireland’s geography and the “neoliberal” mutate together and amplify each other’ (Kitchin et al., 2012: 1317).
In another former colony, neoliberalism’s purchase over national policy settings is similarly patchy, but bearing notable Australian accents, as Weller and O’Neill demonstrate. Reading over ‘An argument with neoliberalism…’ again, and in spite of the authors’ disdain for the term, I was left with the overall impression of a very particular, Australian-style, neoliberalism. This is not to say that certain administrations were purely neoliberal but that in select economic and social sectors the post-1980s re-regulation experience shares common traits with ideal–typical neo-liberalism in theory and practice, regardless of the structural faults they were introduced to tackle. Weller and O’Neill make this point themselves in numerous places but eschew the ‘n’ word. Ultimately, in my view, the fine distinction between neoliberal states and developmental states seems a rather forced binary and only serves to muddy the conceptual waters. They are right to insist that we ought to approach popular, omnibus-type concepts with a degree of scepticism, but we should also not veer away from labelling ‘reform’ by its proper name. These are choices that are both epistemological and political.