Neoliberalism—despite fronting as a doctrine for economic policy—is a deeply political undertaking. Multiple scholars define neoliberalism accordingly—as an exercise in the redistribution and transfer of wealth (Harvey, 2007), as a political project of the corporate capitalist class (Harvey, 2016) to restore capitalist class power as a response to socioeconomic crises of the 70s (Van Apeldorn and Overbeek, 2012; cited in Venugopal, 2015), as a new mode of political optimisation (Ong, 2006), and as “a revival of liberalism based on a critical revision of the liberal agenda” (Biebricher, 2014). Distinctions are maintained in the theoretical and practical manifestations of the concept. Theoretical neoliberalism is its pure form, and the practice is its imperfect realisation (Connell and Dados, 2014). Theory that frames neoliberalism as a peaceful path to prosperity is ignorant of the politico-economic displacements that come as corollaries to the tenets of privatisation, liberalisation, etc. Neoliberalism has been observed as a global, discursive, and militarised expansion of capitalism.
This essay discusses the impacts of neoliberalism on state sovereignty, specifically on those within the Global South, arguing that different models of neoliberalisation have impacted sovereign states in different ways. It argues that while state sovereignty can be theorised diversely depending on specific cases, neoliberalism is an assertion of class relations favouring the global—and local—bourgeois which uses the state as an apparatus to aid its enterprise of capital accumulation.
Sovereignty is a salient, albeit polemic, concept within political science, history and, diplomacy studies. Across several iterations, it has come to be described as ‘supreme and absolute authority’ over a polity within a territory. Per Thomas Hobbes (1968), the nation ordains the Leviathan through a contract under which they willingly transfer their rights to the Leviathan to maintain order in society, thus granting the Leviathan sovereignty over its territory (cited in Philpott, 2020). Hobbes’ Leviathan might be read as monarch, the state or any figure whose authority is sovereign. An integral characteristic of sovereignty is its absoluteness. Sovereignty is either present in totality or not at all. A sovereign cannot be sovereign in some domains but not in others (Philpott, 2020).
The Leviathan, while a formidable template of sovereignty, is not its only rendition. Carl Schmitt (1992) describes state sovereignty as ‘situational’ (cited in Philpott, 2020; Ong, 2006; Biebri…The Morals of the Market: Human Rights and the Rise of Neoliberalism. Verso.
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