Wealth and the Invisibility of Human Life

http://www.counterpunch.org/2019/04/08/wealth-and-the-invisibility-of-human-life/
Date Written:  2019-04-08
Publisher:  CounterPunch
Year Published:  2019
Resource Type:  Article
Cx Number:  CX23692

Review of the book "Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism" by Quinn Slobodian.

Abstract: 
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Excerpt:

Quinn Slobodian's masterful exegesis, an old term befitting his subject, tells of the Ur group of thinkers who formulated the assumptions and prescriptions of global neoliberalism. He names this group the Geneva School as distinct from the Chicago School. He suggests that their early attentiveness to the global level came from Central Europe's dependence on foreign trade and external markets unlike the United States at that time. The original source material suggests that they were motivated by considerable anxiety following the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire....

The Geneva School solution was double government: global jurisdiction for capital, with the nation state "encasing" capital from encroachment by particular interests. The League of Nations, founded after World War I and located in Geneva, had set about to reorder European states and their former imperial possessions....

Slobodian reviews in detail the involvement of the Geneva School with three institutions: the 1947 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), the European Economic Community (EEC) established by the 1957 Treaty of Rome, and the 1995 World Trade Organization. From the 1944 Bretton Woods meeting came the International Monetary Fund and World Bank but not an institution for overseeing world trade.