Neoliberal internationalism : intellectual roots, global manifestations, and South African realities

Abstract

This study seeks to answer two broad questions: how did the long-termist thinking of key neoliberal thinkers help to shape the world we live in today? And to what extent can the neoliberal moral and institutional framework be utilised to facilitate a world outside of the neoliberal hegemony—are human rights (as we know them today) capable of actualising a freedom from the exploitation and violence of the markets, notwithstanding their entanglement with neoliberalism? The study attempts to answer these questions by examining the intellectual musings of a particular group of thinkers (described by Quinn Slobodian as the “Geneva School”) who—against post-colonial demands for economic self-determination—were instrumental to the ideological and institutional ascendance of a particular idea of neoliberal internationalism that emphasised the need to devise legal and institutional mechanisms to constrain post-colonial sovereignty and to protect the international division of labour. It also examines the South African liberation struggle, culminating in the prevailing conditions of present-day South Africa through the lens of the intellectual history of neoliberal internationalism.